Disruptions of feminist meetings by trans rights activists have become commonplace in recent years. Tactics include pressuring venues, blocking entrances, occupying meeting rooms, and heckling speakers. We have quickly become accustomed to this behaviour and even indulgent of its logic, not least the attempt to analogise attacks on lawful, peaceful assembly to earlier no-platforming strategies against fascists and others committed to destroying democracy.
This error has been normalised thanks to changes in so-called progressive political culture, which is not yet mainstream but enjoys institutional dominance. Specifically, progressivism has given up on tolerance, once the battle cry of liberals but now regarded as naive, outmoded in our age of hate, and even a tool of oppression itself. The world is divided into victims and haters and you must choose a side.
This dramatizes tension between how progressives see themselves and the material reality of their ideology
This can help explain why we recently saw another feminist event cancelled at Edinburgh University. The gathering was for a screening of Adult Human Female, which describes itself as ‘the first UK documentary feature to look at the clash between women’s rights and trans ideology’. The film can be watched in its entirety on the website of the production company, Reality Matters.
According to The Guardian, the 26 April screening was ‘cancelled by Edinburgh University after trans rights activists occupied entrances to the venue’. This was the second attempt to screen the film on campus, a date last December having been called off ‘when protesters confronted audience members and occupied a screening room minutes before it was due to be shown’.
This time Edinburgh’s security staff ‘refused to intervene because of the risk of physical confrontations with the protesters’. The university, however, insisted it was ‘fully committed to upholding freedom of expression and academic freedom’.
This takes progressive intolerance beyond deplatforming into something that, until now, many progressives would have considered enemy territory. In preventing the screening of a documentary film, those who blockaded entrances to the venue engaged in an act of censorship.
Now, disrupting or preventing public meetings or speeches on matters of political, social or legal concern is also censorship, but a generation or two have been alerted to the evils of ‘hate speech’ by schools, universities, public policy, policing and the wider culture. The concept of ‘hate films’ or ‘hate art’ is certainly not new but it has yet to settle in the progressive conscience, a worldview which inherited boomer romanticism about creative expression but has yet to realise it doesn’t share it.
The censoring of Adult Human Female dramatises a tension between how progressives see themselves and the material reality of their ideology. By progressive, I don’t mean left-wing or radical in the traditional sense, but a political inclination that crosses party lines and places inordinate emphasis on identity, language, subjectivity and emotional fragility.
These impulses are sometimes conflated with wokeness but I prefer the term ‘coercive progressivism’, because it leans into the tension I am talking about. While progressives believe themselves to be in the vanguard of modernity, advancing equity and autonomy, both their ideology and their methods are reactionary and authoritarian. They represent the loudest and most influential moral crusade Britain has seen since the days of Mary Whitehouse and her campaign to ‘Clean up TV’.
The new progressive orthodoxy on gender is really an old orthodoxy repackaged. Womanhood is reduced from material fact to emotional feeling — plus dresses and hair and make-up. Men who identify into womanhood not only get to rewrite the boundaries of that sex-determined class but are sometimes said to be ‘more of a woman’ than women who reject gender ideology. Female sex-based rights are undermined by redefining ‘sex’ to mean a legal fiction that is conflated with sex. Women’s legal advancements are a threat to men and children once again, with gender dysphoria replacing marriage and family as the victim.
The methods used to advance this ideology are familiar: revealed truth, historical revisionism, institutional power, regulation of speech and conscience, and the shaming of heretics. Coercive progressivism is a forwards-facing reversion and nowhere more so than in the politics of sex and gender.
Having confronted the sins and hypocrisies of organised religion, and partly dismantled the culture it shaped, we are now erecting a new culture shaped by faith. The new moral code has its own catechism, saints and unquestionable priests. Its gospel is taught in schools and its doctrines enforced by law and social convention. It preaches the supernatural as inerrant truth, assails empirical inquiry as blasphemy, demands deference to unfalsifiable claims, and, of course, has a major problem with women who don’t behave themselves.
When we think of progressivism in these coercive terms we can begin to recognise it as a postmodern spin on legal moralism – the enforcement of virtue through legislation – and the broader tradition of encouraging good behaviour by campaigning to rid society of immoral influences. Trans rights activists who prevented the screening of Adult Human Female may believe themselves to be in the anti-fascist or liberationist tradition, but their philosophy and methods recall a different tradition.
The new moralists use different language – demanding affirmation rather than virtue, damning hatred instead of obscenity – but the impulses and the effects are not dissimilar. Where the Society for the Suppression of Vice seized ‘obscene’ books, the Society for the Suppression of Terfs tries to prevent ‘hate’ books being published in the first place. Where the National Legion of Decency got American Catholics to pledge to boycott ‘all indecent and immoral motion pictures’ and the cinemas that screened them, the National Legion of #Kindness blocks the entrances to theatres showing hateful and phobic flicks. Mary Whitehouse never died, she just got younger and coloured her hair pink.
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