Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce at The Critic:

You’d have to be living under a rock not to have noticed that many of the charities that used to fight real and urgent injustices now spend their time on counterproductive hectoring instead.

Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and our very own Stonewall have abandoned practical policies to help the downtrodden in favour of totalising theories of free-floating oppression and claims of harm, hate and genocide.

So extreme has this reinvention been that they now resemble the priestly caste of a joyless, godless neo-religion that preaches against whiteness, cisness and heteronormativity — original sins for which there is no absolution, only eternal self-flagellation. In the title of a recent book by the comedian and author Andrew Doyle, these people are “The New Puritans”.

Despite the backlash against Stonewall, and the number of organisations that have left their diversity scheme, the effect lingers on like a bad smell:

Take the BBC, which left the diversity champions scheme in 2021, admitting in a statement that its participation had “led some to question whether the BBC can be impartial when reporting on public policy debates where Stonewall is taking an active role”. Debates such as whether gender self-ID should become law, whether to use experimental drugs to halt puberty in gender-confused children and whether to allow men who identify as women into women’s sports, presumably — on all of which the BBC’s reporting has indeed been terrible.

One disgruntled BBC staffer told me in confidence about proposing a news item touching on trans issues and suggesting me as an interviewee. A colleague described me as a Nazi and made such a fuss that I was dropped. Another BBC staffer who included a brief reference to LGB Alliance in a news broadcast was told to remove the reference — and reported to HR for refusing to do so. The charity represents same-sex oriented people, you see, not people who profess attraction to self-declared gender identities, as Stonewall now does. That makes it “transphobic”.

None of this should come as any surprise in a media organisation that has written gender identity into its workplace policies. Those policies signal to journalists that gender identity is real and important, sex isn’t and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot. Of course that is bound to influence the editorial line.

A result of all this enforced gender-speak…a deadening conformity 0f "radical" opinion.

As for knowledge production and dissemination, academics tend to leap on the latest fads from ideology entrepreneurs like Judith Butler (biological sex is a social construct) and Robin DiAngelo (all white people, everywhere, are complicit in racism).

Undergraduates get good grades by saying what they know their teachers want to hear; PhD applicants write theses that flatter the biases of journals; applicants for lectureships say what they think will get them hired and go on to publish papers they think will get published — and by the time they are full professors, it’s too late to learn intellectual independence. The result is that universities are full of adults who resemble teenagers: all non-conformist in the same way.

And all protected by university authorities.