Mick Hartley

Stella O’Malley at Spiked:

The reckoning is finally arriving, echoing the dilemma in Eugene Genovese’s powerful essay, ‘The Question’. Writing in 1994, Genovese confessed that he and many others had remained loyal to the Soviet Union long after they knew about the mass killings and the gulags. ‘For many years’, he admitted, ‘I have lived in dread of having to answer The Question… “What did you know, and when did you know it?”’ Eventually, he acknowledged the uncomfortable truth: ‘We knew everything essential and knew it from the beginning.’ Many mainstream journalists will soon find themselves confronting the same question.

A dramatic start. Well, fair enough. Staying quiet in the face of the gender cult spread may not be quite at the “ignoring mass killings and the gulags” level, but it’s the same cowardice – people turning a blind eye for the sake of their careers, or simply for the sake of not being thought of as a bad person by their friends and colleagues.

The tide, it seems, is now beginning to turn. Many of us cheered when, in June, BBC newsreader Martine Croxall raised her eyebrows and exasperatedly corrected ‘pregnant people’ to ‘women’ in a live broadcast. Yet most of the comfortable professional class, particularly journalists, still can’t bring themselves to get involved.

This is the true disgrace. They know vulnerable children will be irreversibly damaged by experimental medical treatment. They know vulnerable women are sharing prison cells with male sex offenders. They know violent rapists are living in domestic-abuse shelters among the most vulnerable women and children. They also know honest and ethical professionals – like myself – are being mercilessly cancelled for shining a light on these issues.…

These weren’t a few mistakes. This was a sustained abdication of responsibility that justified the sterilisation of children, the positioning of men in women’s spaces and sports and the erasure of what it means to be lesbian or gay. Lives continue to be destroyed. Parents have been devastated, and detransitioners still cannot access appropriate care. We need a reckoning, not amnesia or post-hoc excuses.

Those of us who have been treated badly are furious. I’m a psychotherapist, a wife and a mother of two living in rural Ireland. I had no wish to become consumed by a medical scandal that the media refused to confront. All I needed was for journalists to do their job and the truth would have surfaced. They didn’t.

If academics, doctors and clinicians had done theirs, we wouldn’t have needed journalists to expose the scandal. But they didn’t meet their responsibilities and, above all, the journalists failed to report what was happening.…

A trans-Glasnost is dawning. The curtain of denial and intimidation is lifting. And Genovese’s question hangs in the air: what did you know, and when did you know it?

She’s quite right to be angry, of course.