Mick Hartley

Simon Fanshawe, co-founder of Stonewall and now an outspoken apostate from the church of trans ideology, had problems speaking last week at Cambridge, with noisy demonstrators trying to drown him out and disrupt the meeting with the usual "transphobe" cries. 

Here he is in today's Sunday Times:

Attempts to disrupt intellectual exchange are commonplace now in higher education, as Professor Kathleen Stock is discovering with the “Stop Stock” campaign in relation to her imminent appearance at the Oxford Union. According to the junior common room at Christ Church she is a “notorious transphobe”. A hater of trans people? No. She just disagrees with the activists and maintains that sex is binary and immutable.

How has this come about? Not just with students but also in the flaccid leadership of universities? When I asked the master of Gonville & Caius to ensure our safety and ability to speak, she sent me the “college statement on freedom of speech”. But she left it to the porters to handle security, saying that any statement by her risked “exaggerating the divisions caused by this event”. What divisions? Apart from of opinion?

But this is not just about universities or gender ideology. It is a symptom of something wider in society. On too many issues, a vehement minority both refuse to hear opposing views and also insist on operating their heckler’s veto over what anyone else can discuss.

There is a narcissism to this lack of debate. At Cambridge, despite the topic being about academic freedom and creating spaces that are safe for discussion — not from it — the transactivists managed to make it about them. Many conversations about discrimination and the experiences of black people are now transformed into discussions about white people and how guilty they feel about racism and about their “privilege”. Tackling the epidemic of violence against women has become a boo-hoo fest for men who say “but it’s not every man”.

We are caught in an age of political egocentricity, of hyperindividualism, where who I am matters more than who we are. People begin sentences with the phrase “As a . . .” — as a woman, or as a gay man — to justify what they are about to say on the basis of who they are, not what they think. They characterise their views as being so central to their identity that disagreement is “debating my existence”, as the transactivists would have it….

The aim of activists now is not to find the right solutions for the greater good but to point the demonising finger and bask in the sunshine of feeling correct. Accusations are enough. They define the crime, find the accused guilty and mete out social sanction in one sentence — without the need to prove or even argue their case.

Social progress has become a question of personal fulfilment, individual wellbeing has replaced the wider common good and the 1970s dictum has been reversed: the political has now become personal. Shaped by the Enlightenment, failed by traditional politics, inveigled by therapy and captured by the market of individual choice, today’s individualist politics of identity is exacerbated by the divisive megaphone of social media. The left thinks it is always right and the right never admits it is wrong….

University leaders need to say and go on saying publicly that their No 1 value is that “we disagree well”. They need to create conditions for the exploration and exchange of ideas to demonstrate that this lies at the heart of education. Unless they do, the public may begin to wonder why we are lending students £9,000 a year to put their fingers in their ears and shout down others.

Identity politics breeds narcissism. Who'd have thought…