Expert DISMANTLES Woke Gender Ideology

The Oxford kids are alright (by Kathleen Stock)

 

Students aren't the source of the culture wars — they're the solution

Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and being asked to leave.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day. (Hilariously for our mutual friends, one of the presumed bodyguards is in fact my fellow philosopher friend Rob.)

Hustled by the Union’s reassuringly military-sounding bursar into a secret upstairs room in the building, I check Twitter. Rishi Sunak has tagged me in a supportive tweet. This will be the least weird thing to happen to me all day.

The morning had not started brilliantly — two consecutive trains cancelled, and I’d had to scramble around to find a local taxi driver who didn’t mind a four-hour round trip to London at short notice. By the time I made it, fairly late, to the driver taking me to Oxford, I had already aged several years.

Looking back, the younger version of me didn’t like the Union much, and I hardly ever went there. An institution completely independent of the wider university, it is mostly devoted to having debates. Back then, I thought it was an intimidating and archaic place, full of strident, cocky types who all wanted to be Prime Minister. I didn’t feel it was really for the likes of shy, awkward, comprehensive-schooled me. I certainly didn’t imagine that I’d one day be interviewed by its president about my views on gender.

I switch up my Kendall-Roy look to business-casual in a tiny bathroom, and then chat to committee members and Union staff. They seem excited but tense; occasionally, one wheels away to talk urgently on the phone. At one point, there is a muttered conversation about the welfare rooms being manned and ready to receive visitors. I wonder if that might be a slightly problematic verb to use.

For a while, as we wait, there is dead silence outside in the street, and I start to suspect that the whole thing is going to be rather anticlimactic. Eventually I hear the familiar sound of chanting outside and feel oddly relieved. At least I know this script — and not only from my former workplace.

Last November, I participated in a debate at the Oxford Union’s fellow institution, the Cambridge Union. There was a protest, and an attempt at disinvitation there too. So it seems I’m now a veteran of Oxbridge’s least athletic student Varsity match — and though it pains me to do so, I’m afraid I am going to have to declare the Light Blues the winner.

The motion we debated at The Other Place was not about sex and gender at all, but about whether there is a right to offend. Spoiler alert: I was on the side that argued that there is. The atmosphere as I entered that chamber was sombre and tense. Throughout the event, various young people bobbed up and down to denounce me, mostly for things I hadn’t ever said or written and didn’t believe.

Some appeared to think I was arguing that offence was a positive duty rather than a right (I wasn’t). Others didn’t care what I was saying, or indeed what I had ever said, but just wanted to feel the thrill of the pointed finger. In an update to the traditional mediaeval scenario, one organised chap read out his prepared denunciation from an iPad.

Protestors outside could be heard banging drums loudly, providing an unsettling percussive accompaniment to the speeches inside. The volume of drumming and yelling would increase each time I spoke, as coordinating messages flew between audience members and protestors.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called Kass cunningly disguised as a six-foot-plus man in a tuxedo. The results of Kass’s intervention upon my emotional equilibrium can be seen in the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars, which coincidentally aired on the same day as the Oxford event.

Under false pretences, Kass had auditioned to speak for my side of the motion, arriving at the Union in full male-associated attire and dining convivially with me first, before sensationally dropping the act in order to denounce me as “disgusting” to everyone in the chamber. And things only went downhill from there. I was the only female speaker in the debate. Standing at full height next to me during their speech, Kass described to the audience how frightening it was to walk about the streets of Cambridge at night thanks to women like me.

In comparison to all this, the Oxford audience this week barely made any effort to make me feel awful. In fact, they offered enthusiastic applause as I entered the room. And in an unprecedented turn of events, many of my main objectors seemed actually to have read my book.

Even the four protestors who tried to create a rumpus inside the building were relatively meek. One stood up and shouted something, then left. Two others also shouted slogans rather apologetically, unfurled a flag, and threw some leaflets before hastily exiting too. The most intrepid of the four, dramatically unveiling a “No More Dead Trans Kids” T-shirt, used superglue to stick one hand to the floor right in front of me, but still complied docilely when five police officers — armed with blue plastic gloves and solvent, a lot of forms to fill in, and some very patient smiles — eventually arrived to sort it all out. The careful act of glueing itself seemed a bit Blue Peter.

After a nervous build-up, I started to enjoy myself, and it appeared to me that others in the chamber did too. There was a full and frank exchange of views, including some robust criticism of my position. Intellectual blows were landed on both sides. The Union President cornered me on an academic study that I didn’t know much about, while I managed to confuse him about which sense of “gender” he meant exactly (though, given the infinite flexibility of the term, who can blame him?). Various students queued up to quiz me on what they perceived to be errors in my reasoning, evidence base or attitude. I answered as best I could.

It seemed to me that the four protestors were not representative. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that many in the chamber were pushing back against the sort of tired and hyperbolic cliches usually wielded to shut them up. Certainly, there was little apparent sympathy in the room for the superglued superhero, eventually escorted out to the sound of good-natured cheers and some booing. At times, the atmosphere bordered on riotous rather than rioting.

I found all of this quite promising. And even during the earlier Cambridge event, there had been another hopeful sign, not featured in the documentary. When it came to the moment for those in the packed room to file out and vote, the majority voted for our side of the motion, and the existence of a right to offend.

At both Cambridge and Oxford, I also had several enriching encounters with staunch defenders of my right to speak. A lot of these were with young gender-critical feminists, fired up by noticing the obvious inconsistencies and injustices in a supposedly “kind” worldview that tells women to put their own needs last. Some wanted me to sign their copies of my book. Others were keen to tell me their own stories of horrible social shunning for their beliefs.

One first year Cambridge student told me that, after writing a mildly gender-critical blog in defence of me, she had been ostracised and shamed by all the other women in her college year group, as well as by her own tutor. Another story I heard on Tuesday was about a young lesbian who had read my book and watched my talks, decided to defend my free speech publicly, and been kicked out of the Oxford LGBTQ+ student society as a result.

Other supportive students in Oxford, neither feminist nor anti-feminist, just seemed fed up with being emotionally blackmailed into stifled silence by a small group of childish and histrionic narcissists — among which they doubtless would include the occasional lecturer. And from within each Union, the committee members responsible for inviting me were totally impressive, standing resolute against pressure and showing exemplary resilience in the face of harsh criticism from some peers.

And I’m afraid I have even more disappointing news for those with unhealthy emotional attachments to the present culture wars. There were — indeed, undoubtedly still are — plenty of students who feel like this at my former workplace. I know they are there, either because they told me outright at the time, or because they demonstrated it to me via the open, inquisitive way they conducted themselves in the classroom.

I am sure that such students exist in every single UK university at the moment; I suspect there are thousands of them out there right now, muttering inwardly while listening to ever more dramatic tales of self-centring woe from fellow students, or eye-rolling inwardly as their lecturers give them pious homilies.

These students are a largely untapped asset to the project of detoxifying the current discourse around identity politics. Thanks to their relative youth, they tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other. Many have sufficiently rebellious or anarchic instincts to shrink from blatant attempts to manipulate and guilt-trip them. They are sick of being imprisoned in other people’s shame, guilt and paranoia. All we have to do is set them free.

This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?

In looking at some of the media coverage of my Oxford trip, it’s striking to me that certain journalists’ idea of balanced reporting is to interview, on one hand, Stock the supposedly offensive speaker, and on the other, students who say they feel threatened and frightened by my terrifying words. (The rough format goes as follows. Student: “I just feel exhausted constantly having to justify my existence every day!”. Interviewer: “What do you, Stock, say to the students who feel exhausted having to justify their existence every day?” Me, looking at said students, apparently with enough energy to drum and chant for hours: “Erm … I’m not sure. Maybe get their iron levels checked?”.)

Yet these are not the only students who have interests at stake. There are those who long to have robust arguments and vigorous disagreements with peers and elders, free from the fear that they will say something offensive and be punished accordingly. But these students don’t seem to get interviewed remotely as often. I don’t believe it’s because they wouldn’t speak to the media, in principle. Or at least — I think that if we collectively made it easier for some of them to ask for such things, greater argumentative disinhibition would become a more accepted norm quite fast, and a generation would collectively breathe a sigh of relief.

I don’t know how the younger version of me would look at present committee members, so impressively self-assured and full of vim, but this version of me (the Kendall Roy wannabe, that is) looks on with great affection and respect. In standing firm and holding a space where students are free to engage with big ideas in time-honoured, age-appropriate ways — whether by arguing, shouting, laughing, emoting wildly, or indeed glueing themselves to wooden floors — they are doing the world an enormous service. Perhaps we can relax a bit about the future after all.

The Oxford kids are alright - UnHerd

 

 

 

 

Time travel in Britain's lost rainforests (An AEON video)

In an ancient English rainforest, John creates charcoal and cultivates growth

Living and working in the woodlands of the Teign valley in Devon, England, the regenerative forester John Williamson has cultivated a deep connection to and unique understanding of this rare patch of English rainforest. This includes knowing that a healthy ecosystem means an eclectic variety of landscapes rather than perfect tree cover; that no parcel of land in Great Britain has gone untouched by humans; and that, while storms can mean devastation for people, for woodlands they’re simply another phase in an ancient cycle. In this short documentary, Williamson explains how, through viewing these woodlands in terms of the deep past, present and future, he’s developed a sustainable method of extracting wood and creating charcoal that actually encourages biodiversity.

Director: Hugh Hartford

Producer: Anson Hartford

Executive producer: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Website: Banyak Films

In an ancient English rainforest, John creates charcoal and cultivates growth | Aeon Videos

I Tell You (by Susan Glassmeyer)

 

    I could not predict the fullness
    of the day. How it was enough
    to stand alone without help
    in the green yard at dawn.

How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.

And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,

brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.

*
In class today a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke – one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband

to the treatment table while we
the unimpaired looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her

shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were

alone in their bed. I tell you –
his smile would have made you weep.

*
At twilight I visit my garden
where the peonies are about to burst.

Some days there will be more
flowers than the vase can hold.

 

Is trans the new anorexia? (by Lionel Shriver)

 Becoming a woman is an unappealing business

 

When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular lexicon about 10 years earlier, and public awareness of the perturbing derangement had been given a huge boost by the pop singer Karen Carpenter’s death in 1983. Yet not all these 18-year-old students were disturbingly underweight. It took me a minute to get it. They aspired to be anorexic. Anorexia was a prestige diagnosis.

While some of those students may have been merely flirting with the condition, they were canaries in a very dark coal mine. All too many of their peers were undertaking life-threatening calorie restriction in great earnest. Anorexia was already known to be the very deadliest of all psychiatric ailments. (Wanting to be anorexic, then, is like pining to contract necrosis.) In the Nineties, my natural ghoulish voyeurism inspired me to read several books about obsessive self-starvation, the best of which was Jenefer Shute’s harrowing novel Life Size.

So surely this month I jumped at the chance to read Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia? Beginning in 1992, the columnist struggled for many years with the eating disorder, for which she was repeatedly hospitalised for months on end. Yet before diving into what proved a compelling and forthright memoir, I resisted. Honestly? The topic felt dated. Because as a prestige diagnosis, anorexia has been replaced. With trans.

Although Freeman spends half a chapter on the overlap between the two afflictions — both are “rooted in the belief that if you change your body, you will no longer hate yourself” — throughout her account I began to notice other intersections.

Both neuroses are clearly communicable. Ever since a preoccupation with thinness took off in the Sixties, eating disorders have soared, making the more recent insistence that anorexia is more of a heritable genetic proclivity than a cultural contagion dubious. From the Seventies onwards, an accelerating number of young women have got the idea to express their discontent through debilitating hunger from lavish media coverage, and one another. In kind, since 2010 the number of teenage girls referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service increased by 5,000% — making claims of a purely genetic explanation equally iffy. Both these afflictions are social confections. Although tales of people who starved themselves or passed for the opposite sex exist in the historical record, eating disorders and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made these dire maladies up.

Freeman identifies her “trigger” at 14 for dropping an alarming amount of weight as a single moment. Sitting beside a prominently bony classmate in gym class, Freeman asked, “Is it hard to buy clothes when you’re so small?” “Yeah,” the girl replied. “I wish I was normal like you.”

“A black tunnel yawned open inside me,” Freeman writes, “and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’—‘normal’. Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”

Nowadays, there’s ostensibly no such thing as a norm. In Left-wing jargon, the clunky “norm” words — such as “cis-heteronormative” — are pejorative. A fifth of Americans under 30 identify as LGBT-whatever. Never mind that Eric Kaufmann has documented the large proportion of supposedly bisexual young women who don’t engage in actual same-sex coupling; today’s young people adopt the label of sexual atypicality the way earlier generations wore crocodile-logoed Lacoste shirts. As Freeman notes, normal is “nothing”. Not only heterosexuality but, increasingly, contentment with your natal sex is uncool. According to the report, 12% of millennials identify as either transgender or gender-nonconforming, compared to 6% in Generation X.

Both self-starvation and transgenderism guarantee elevation to a perceived social elite. At least in the minds of some anorexics, being immune to the temptations of crisps and biscuits that seduce mere mortals induces an emotionally nutritious sensation of superiority. Freeman portrays her fellow sufferers in hospital as competitive with one another over who eats less, as well as picky about how grimly skeletal one must become to qualify for admission to their rarefied circle; the same rivalry is readily located online. Public slow-motion suicide inevitably secures outsize attention from terrified parents, worried teachers and concerned physicians. (Freeman claims that anorexics don’t aim to look thin; they aim to look ill.) With its plethora of frenetic exercise rituals and strict internal rules surrounding food, being anorexic can readily evolve into an identity, attachment to which makes recovery still more difficult. A blandly healthy weight threatens the loss of knowing who you are anymore.

Coming out as trans likewise greatly increases attention from schoolmates, teachers and a whole industry of therapists, endocrinologists and surgeons. In a single syllable, “trans” likewise seems to offer a readymade answer to who you are. Freeman tells us that “when an anorexic says, ‘I don’t want to be fat, I want to be thin,’ they are saying, ‘I want to be other than I am, and what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.” Clearly, transition to the opposite sex makes the same statement: I want to be someone else. But is becoming someone else really an option?

Especially since girls came to dominate boys in paediatric gender clinics 3:1, both forms of dysmorphia often hit the same population: suggestible, insecure adolescent girls with a fragile sense of self who are desperate to forestall all that womanhood entails: painful periods; vulnerability to rape and pregnancy; sex, often portrayed in ubiquitous internet porn as female humiliation; and fat. For some anorexics, their refusal to grow into women is implicit; when girls take puberty blockers, their refusal to become women is explicit. Having suffered the physical indignities of mature femininity for over 50 years, I don’t entirely blame them.

Both diagnoses have significant intersections with autism, anxiety and depression, making patients susceptible to a tangible-seeming solution to a generalised discontent. Both populations mistake self-annihilation for a route to enlightenment and rebirth. Both populations seek to salve psychic torment by renouncing the body, the trans child through reconfiguration, the anorexic through evaporation. Both brands of patient embrace the recognisably religious practices of self-abnegation, redemption through suffering and purification via repudiation of the flesh.

It’s in the social sphere where the disorders part ways. When self-starvation was still a hot topic last century, it might have conferred a measure of cachet, but few parents these days would boast that their child is anorexic. I’ve a niece who’s suffered for years from anorexia, and my brother and his wife have been at their wits’ ends. The experience of having a child who refuses to eat is abundantly one of helplessness and despair. Ditto many trans parents — but not all.

For the paediatric gender clinic whistle-blower Jamie Reed testifies that in America’s liberal enclaves, having a trans kid has become a prestige diagnosis for many parents — one far preferable to the passé status of having a child who’s plain old gay. Reed identifies the root of the problem as another plain old: homophobia.

 Yet two distinctions between disordered eating and transgenderism are signal: diagnosis and treatment. In its latter stages, anorexia is visually conspicuous. While anorexics are often duplicitous, starving to death isn’t subtle; it’s not a secret you can keep for long. Freeman was hospitalised because her low weight was measurably dangerous. Yet according to current medical orthodoxy, diagnosis of transgenderism is purely subjective. The condition has no observable physical symptoms, no objective correlative. If I tell you I’m really a man, you have to take my word for it. The status is therefore unfalsifiable, the population of patients prospectively limitless.

As for treatment, anorexia is universally acknowledged as an illness. Doctors regard this potentially fatal form of dysmorphia as a psychiatric ailment that must be arrested and resolved. Not so transgenderism, which is often celebrated, if not beatified as a state of higher consciousness. “Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s delusions to the hilt. Rather than coach a child to reconcile with reality, clinicians twist reality to reconcile it with the disorder. Anyone who dares describe the bizarre and biologically baseless conviction that one was “born in the wrong body” as a mental health issue is tarred as a transphobe. Were teenage anorexics treated anything like trans kids, they wouldn’t be encouraged to finish their dinner, but rather abjured, “You’re right: you’re fat! Your true self is even thinner! You will never rise to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty until you completely disappear!”

Anorexics negotiate the universal human challenges of finding identity and purpose by shrinking their internal world to a simple commandment: don’t eat. But true anorexics can never be thin enough. Freeman describes a rivalry between anorexia ward residents over who’s been “tubed” — the gold standard of really having made it as an anorexic, because the very last medical resort is force-feeding. Thus the obvious goal of severely restrictive eating is, however hazily conceived, death. Meanwhile, before this morbid conveyor belt reaches its inexorable end point, anorexics undergo hair loss, the breakdown of internal organs, osteoporosis, and mental disarray. Fellow starvelings may whisper competitive encouragement on those websites regulators are always trying to shut down, but at least no one in authority is urging that, if a cadaverous anorexic just loses another 15 pounds, her body and her deep, innate inner being will finally match up.

Conversely, we’re implicitly dangling the promise that on the other side of transitioning to the opposite sex — or feigning transition, since inborn sex is written in our every cell — all a young person’s problems will be solved. Being trans is now a misguidedly easy-seeming shortcut to knowing who you are. But I’m betting that as an identity, being surgically mangled and hormonally discombobulated rarely goes the distance. Moreover, the physical price of buying this false promise of turning into a butterfly is stupendously high: sexual dysfunction, infertility, surgical complications and infections, and the side-effects of powerful medications for life.

What these conditions have most in common is being dreadful answers to the questions that inevitably torture young people: who am I, what makes me unique, what makes me loveable, what do I want to achieve, why does just being alive seem so hard, am I the only one who feels so dejected, what does it mean to become a man or a woman, and is there any way I can get out of growing up? The responsible adult’s reply to that last one must be a gentle but firm “no”.

Is trans the new anorexia? - UnHerd

 

 

 

 

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

 ~ William Faulkner

 

Every transformation demands a precondition, "the ending of the world"- the collapse of an old philosophy of life.

~ Carl Jung