Stella O’Malley at Spiked – “The spread of gender ideology has exposed the rot in just about every institution that our civilisation depends on”. Medicine and health care, of course – and education:
Like healthcare, universities increasingly resemble consumer-driven businesses, anxious to keep their customers happy. I had always imagined universities as places whose purpose was to move us from darkness into light through the pursuit of truth. The poor quality of much research on gender medicine exposed just how vulnerable academia has become to ideology.
Well yes – now amply confirmed by the Jason Arday farce.
Until you study the literature yourself, it’s difficult to appreciate just how shoddy the majority of trans research is, with tiny qualitative studies featuring self-selected participants reporting satisfaction, extraordinarily high rates of participants lost before they can be followed up, and remarkably little emphasis on objective outcomes such as employment, educational attainment, psychiatric admissions, hospitalisations, physical health or suicide.
The low quality of transgender research also led me to realise that many other disciplines – including vast sections of feminism, queer studies and postmodernism – rest on similarly fragile foundations.
It’s not only universities, though. Until quite recently, many schools across the Western world were shaped, however imperfectly, by Judeo-Christian values. As religion receded from education, the vacuum has been increasingly filled by postmodern ideas about identity, power and truth, often with remarkably little public debate about the consequences. Ironically, the resulting dogmatic culture within schools today reminds me very much of my own Catholic education.
The startling speed with which transgender ideology became embedded in education systems across the Western world exposed just how easily a new orthodoxy can become accepted, taught and defended by entire institutions. The trans issue has also led me to realise how schools today are increasingly viewed by policymakers not as places of learning but as opportunities for social engineering. As education appears to be less about transmitting knowledge and more about shaping young minds, fundamental questions about its direction become unavoidable.
And, perhaps most significantly, the extraordinary embrace of gender woo by the left.
The decision of the left to swap class politics for identity politics has been both maddening and fascinating to watch through my splayed fingers. The unanticipated – and, let’s face it, largely unfathomable – swerve of large sections of the contemporary left towards advocating for the lifelong medicalisation of children who will one day become infertile and sexually impaired has yet to be fully analysed. Nobody yet knows why this movement that once championed the downtrodden, the importance of fair economics and equal rights now embraces self-reported identity, subjective truth and moral certainty, but it is important to reflect on it.
And the arts:
This has probably been my greatest disappointment (with some honourable exceptions, of course). Where are the protest songs? Where are the novels exposing the madness of contemporary society? Writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists have historically challenged orthodoxies and taken risks. Instead, the trans issue has revealed vomit-inducing pretence, sanctimony and cowardice in the arts. Art should be unsettling and thought-provoking, not sanctimonious and self-serving, yet here we are.
And there’s more. An excellent article.
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