Mick Hartley

Good stuff from Richard Dawkins in the Spectator. Will there be any apologies from those who grovelled before the gender gods?

So let us not name and shame. I shall call out no specific names in accusation. But I think apologies are called for, and there may be some out there who are big enough, gracious enough, to come forward.

Were you one of those students who mercilessly hounded Kathleen Stock out of the University of Sussex? Now would be a good time to say sorry. Were you one of those who threatened the life of JK Rowling? Or who threatened someone less able to look after herself than that redoubtable hero of our times? Were you one of those actors who owe your moment of fame entirely to her writing, who turned on her in your sheep-like devotion to a passing fad? Or were you one of those Hollywood airheads who bent to the prevailing political wind? Well, it isn’t prevailing any more, but mightn’t it have been a good idea to think the matter through in the first place, before joining the Gadarene stampede? In any case, a gracious apology wouldn’t come amiss.

Newspaper editors who printed reports of a “woman” committing rape “with her penis” should now apologise for their cowardly debauching of language. So should senior publishers who bowed to pressure to suppress books deemed “transphobic” by callow junior colleagues. By the way, if ever you are puzzled when an otherwise sensible friend starts spouting uncharacteristic nonsense on the subject of “gender”, your first recourse should be, “Cherchez les enfants”.

Well yes, either those who've deferred to their children's loud clamour on the trans debate in the mistaken belief that this was the new "progressive" position or, more seriously, those who've actually presided over the transing of their children. 

Those men of mediocre athletic ability who have waltzed into women’s events and effortlessly carried off their medals and plaudits, can be absolved of cheating only if they plead inability to understand the unfairness of their advantage. Those sports-body officials who enabled them should apologise to the women deprived of rightful medals, medals which should now be stripped from the men who unfairly gained them. Rather than respecting the subjective “gender” of the usurper, we should instead sympathise with the women overpowered by “her” objective sex, “her” upper body strength, long boxing reach, or sheer domineering height.

Are you one of those doctors who abetted angst-beset children, prescribing hormones whose unnatural and irreversible effects warrant the label “poison”? Or worse, are you a surgeon who violated the first Hippocratic principle by cutting off the breasts of a girl (or the testes of a boy) too young to be entrusted with drastic, irrevocably life-changing decisions? Admittedly, a public apology from you could lay you open to a well-deserved malpractice suit, but may you in any case be long pursued by remorse.

An especially magnanimous feat of forgiveness is required for those on the political left who betrayed their enlightenment heritage.

Which, to be honest, appears to have been the vast majority.

The tragedy is that such obvious truths ever needed spelling out, or proclaiming in a high court of law. The biggest apology of all should come from those people of influence who fomented, or cravenly kowtowed to, the preposterous doctrine that something so fundamentally biological as the sexual binary is vulnerable to mere personal whim or legal documentation.