Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd wonders if, at last, we're seeing the end of genderism:

Sometimes, I wonder how I will know when the reign of genderism is definitively over. As philosophers say, I like to consider various possible worlds. Will it be when a national inquiry is held into child transition? Or when a whole month goes by without a drag queen story on the BBC website? Or when the head of MI6 finally takes the pronouns out of his X bio? “Gradually, then suddenly” is how Hemingway described going bankrupt. One hopes this applies to the morally bankrupt too.

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling, some parts of the UK seem more stuck in transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalisingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.

[See here for that excoriating takedown.]

Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.

The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.

It's perhaps not so much the bright young philosophers themselves as the gullible idiots, but more the people who enabled them. Chancers are chancers.

It just so happens that the arrival of gender ideology, coming out of Queer Theory, coming out of post-modernism as an American take on the French deconstructionists like Derrida, Foucault etc., provided the perfect opportunity for the rise of obscurantism in the service of ambitious young would-be intellectuals to make their mark with their intoxicating blend of impenetrable jargon and "progressive" arrogance. But with gender theory this advanced level of intellectual posing suddenly had real world consequences, as men started playing in women's sport, women could be rapists, lesbians were transphobic for not wanting to have sex with men, and so – endlessly – on. And then people outside of the philosophical academic bubble noticed that this was, in fact, complete nonsense. We were being conned. Or gaslighted, as we say now. And the arrogant young philosophers were left, suddenly, exposed as charlatans. As buffoons.

And all the people who quietly or not so quietly went along with this are now being revealed as the gullible idiots.