by Lynda Goetz
Photo of transgender symbol: Unsplash
Tidying my study is something of a mammoth job. Apart from my failure to file stuff as it comes in, there is the added problem of my inability to throw out old magazines and my tendency to hang on to ancient theatre programmes, pamphlets from museums, birthday cards and other bits of useless memorabilia. Then, of course, there is the fact that the reasons I kept those magazines in the first place were either that I had always intended to finish reading them at some future date, or that there was a particularly interesting article I wanted to refer to or show to someone. The end result is that instead of just picking them up and throwing them out I spend hours reading them!
As the endless and relentless rain, to which we in Britain have been subjected for most of the last few months, has meant a delay in getting on with the usual Spring gardening tasks, I decided last week to tackle the study; a long overdue job, which should have been dealt with ages ago. Of course I got side-tracked reading or re-reading some Covid-era issues of The Spectator and The Economist (not to mention three- year-old issues of the RHS Garden magazine and The English Garden in an attempt to remind myself what a Spring garden not covered in mud, weeds and overgrown wet grass should actually look like). What struck me about several of these was just how little we have moved on from some of the worst aspects of social media-influenced fads, cultures and hysterias, in spite of a few supposed turning-points.
In October 2021, Kathleen Stock resigned from her post as philosophy professor at Sussex University after three years of “bullying and harassment” for her views on sex and gender. She had had the temerity to make such ‘controversial’ statements as “there are only two sexes” or “it’s wrong to put male rapists in female prisons”. At the time it seemed to many of us shocking that remarks, which for the overwhelming majority of the population and for most of human history were perfectly straightforward and accepted, should have resulted in her ‘cancellation’. In December 2019, J.K. Rowling had made similar controversial statements about the transgender community. These comments were made calmly, rationally and with the careful consideration of someone who had made her living, not to say her fortune, with words. She too suffered a torrent of online and media abuse, as have people like feminist journalist Julie Bindel, academic researcher Maya Forstater, Labour Member of Parliament Rosie Duffield, and former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore. Thankfully, she has neither apologised for nor recanted her opinions; a fact for which we should all be truly grateful.
Common sense sometimes seems to be in short supply these days. Last week, following the implementation (on April Fools Day!) of the Scottish National Party’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, Rowling challenged the Scottish police to arrest her for ‘misgendering’ a number of high-profile trans women on X (formerly Twitter). They declined to do so, although a number of SNP politicians and trans supporters spoke out against her. Lionel Shriver, author of the 2005 Orange Prize-winning novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, praised Rowling for her role in opposing the “consuming social mania for transgenderism” in an interview to promote her new book, actually called Mania.
As Shriver pointed out, Rowling is “so important” because she has the money, power and position to stand her ground. For many others such a stance is impossible. It can result not only in being sacked, but failing ever to get a job again. The right to hold opinions appears to be nullified if those opinions do not accord with contemporary ethics and current received wisdom – even where that wisdom has almost no basis in evidence. Indeed, evidence in hate crimes is based on little other than the ‘perception’ of the victim or in the case of the new Scottish law, pretty much anyone who declares themselves “offended”.
As for the whole trans debate, the recently-published review of gender identity services for children by Dr Hilary Cass makes it clear that this is a subject about which we know very little. On a practical and medical level we are meddling with young lives based on an ideology and insufficient real evidence of long-term outcomes.
The percentage of people declaring themselves to be trans (i.e not identifying with the gender they were registered at birth) was stated in the 2021 census report to be approximately 0.5% . This figure was questioned last autumn because of the unexpectedly high number of people declaring themselves to be trans in areas where English was a second language. However, an investigation by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) concluded that although measuring gender identity was “undoubtedly challenging” and that the small size of the trans population “creates challenges for data collection”, they were “confident” in the figures. Whether the percentage is in fact slightly higher, or slightly lower, it remains a tiny minority of the general population; yet the influence it has been able to hold over the rest of the us is staggering.
Lionel Shriver’s book, Mania, was published this week. I have not read it, but a reviewer in The i called it “an extended rant”. The novel portrays a parallel dystopian America in 2011. Shriver paints a picture of a society in which the "Mental Parity" movement is gaining ascension and no-one is allowed to be clever, and no-one can be called stupid. All forms of moral superiority have been banned and university lecturers have to attend classes in “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”. Grading papers is a sackable offence. Ms Shriver herself has described the alt-reality depicted in Mania as “essentially one millimetre away from where we are now”. Mia Levitkin in her review in The Financial Times concludes that in this, Shriver’s seventeenth novel, “sadly, she has too much fun pillorying stupidity to offer herself, or her readers” one of her self-proclaimed pleasures of writing books: the chance to “approach a subject with more complexity and with more appreciation for other viewpoints” than that provided by her opinion pieces written in The Spectator and elsewhere. The New York Times critic described the novel as “ham-fisted parody”.
In spite of what appears to be universal dismissal by critics of Ms Shriver’s latest novel, it is interesting that she sets it in 2010-11, the time she regards as being “when things started really going to s---". The cult film Idiocracy, a social satire produced in 2005, which imagines a dystopian America five hundred years hence, has been suggested by many reviewers to have been several hundred years out in its timing, with a number commenting that in so many ways we are almost already there. Certainly, when considering things like hate-crime laws and transgender issues amongst many aspects of modern ideology, it is hard not to wonder how we got here so fast and where on earth it might lead.
The Scottish Hate Crime Act resulted in the police force being inundated with over 7,000 complaints by the public, only 240 (≤ 4%) of which were deemed to be crimes under the legislation. All however had to be logged and checked, completely overwhelming the police and resulting in hours of overtime at taxpayers’ expense. Meanwhile assaults, burglaries, thefts and other crimes are neglected. You do not have to have read George Orwell’s 1984 to know that this focus on subjective crimes heralds an authoritarian state, as well as an unbelievable waste of police resources. Although there is no single piece of legislation in England and Wales criminalising hate crime, the definition adopted by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service is:
“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”
You do not have to be a lawyer to understand that to have a criminal offence based on the ‘perception’ of the victim is straying into the realms of fantasy. To go further, as the legislation has in Scotland, and add a new offence of “threatening or abusive behaviour intended to stir up hatred” based on a list of characteristics which does not include sex but does include gender and sexual orientation, and then encourage the public to come forward anonymously to report crimes, must surely have been foreseen to have resulted in problems. Apparently not, and in spite of criticisms from such eminent lawyers as Lord Hope of Craighead, SNP ministers are still defending the passing of this Orwellian piece of legislation.
As for the Cass Review, this too shows modern society in a very unflattering light. In what sort of dystopian world do adults “affirm” the social media-induced delusions of children who “may have mental health issues”? In what sort of world do they then encourage such children to take hormone-blockers and hormones, the long-term effects of which remain unknown, and then facilitate their surgical mutilation? The fact that the adults, including teachers as well as the doctors advocating this approach, seem to have acquired the ability to gainsay the views of loving parents is even more terrifying. In another sinister twist to this story it transpires that the medical records of those who went through these procedures were not released to Cass by the institutions acting for them as adults, on the grounds of data protection. As many politicians, journalists and commentators have pointed out, this information is vital to informing the debate as to whether for the vast majority of such children outcomes have been favourable or unfavourable. As the original whistle-blower at the Tavistock Clinic explained, most of the children presenting at the clinic had “a variety of other issues”. Has their treatment solved or alleviated these problems or rather exacerbated their disturbed state of mind? All we do know at present is that it can work for some, but that others profoundly regret the fact that the adults who had responsibility for them allowed them to go down a route from which there can be no return.
Mania and Idiocracy may well both be works of fiction and unsubtle satire, but many feel that the world we currently inhabit is already coming uncomfortably close to dystopian parody. Perhaps I shouldn’t be throwing out those old magazines and newspapers after all. In a few years’ time all those ‘op-eds’, as the Americans call commentary articles, will be interesting as quaintly old-fashioned comments on a world which has disappeared completely. As for those old museum guides, they will pre-date the decolonisation movement and thus be of historical interest. On the other hand, perhaps I should be very careful – owning them at all could well have become a crime.