Lionel Shriver has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.
Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality
The bad news: the lie that you can choose to be whichever sex you feel like is entrenched in Britain’s school system. Activist teachers who’ve blithely ignored cautious government guidance aren’t likely to drop their warped ‘genderbread’ lesson plans or their exciting collusion with children against their own parents merely because of a spot of bad press. The fashion for sexually neutral language that gave us ‘birthing people’ and ‘bonus holes’ is embedded in the NHS, the media and many charities, and these dehumanising linguistic abortions won’t likely evaporate overnight.
Pronoun badges may eventually be preserved behind museum glass as fascinating artefacts from an era in which the West lost its collective mind, but for now they’re still garnishing lapels and aren’t yet subject to widespread social derision. ‘Preferred pronouns’ in emails continue to helpfully inform recipients that the correspondent is either a frightened conformist or a proud conformist. Transgenderism is even more sanctified in the United States, where support for inadequately trialled experimental drugs and permanently disfiguring surgeries even for children remains the ultimate progressive purity test. Only a deluge of lawsuits is apt to dislodge the catechism in America. The president wants biological men in women’s sports.
For the past decade or so, the cultural glorification of what was once sensibly characterised as a rare mental illness has displayed all the hallmarks of an irrational social mania. The fact that we all got the message from the off that if we’re not on board with this stuff we’d better keep our mouths shut is a red flag. Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality as if clutching a signpost in a gale. Social hysteria does not permit dissent. Those few who refuse to get with the programme will pay the price with exile, opprobrium and professional disgrace – if not, amid the very worst of our communal insanities, with prison or death. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, but in a crowd we’re a hive species.
In the thick of mass psychosis, prophets are unwelcome. It rarely pays to be ahead of your time. Even as this perverse infatuation with pretending to change sex subsides, commentators who stuck their necks out and pleaded for us all to get a grip are not assured any retroactive recognition. My colleagues J.K. Rowling, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Abigail Shrier and Kathleen Stock won’t necessarily benefit from their foresight. When a communal derangement ebbs, everyone who got caught up in the craze feels a bit abashed and wants to forget all about it. Mavericks who bucked the trend are unpleasant reminders of everyone else’s cowardice. As a rule, no one ever thanks apostates, much less apologises for the grief, insult and ostracism they bore. In kind, the chances are poor that all the clinicians, teachers, therapists, activists and politicians who powered the trans assembly line will ever be held to account.
In 1633, the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of propagating the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. It took 124 years for the astronomer’s heliocentric dissertation to be removed from the Catholic church’s list of banned books. It took 187 years for the church to permit Copernican teaching. Only in 1992 did a pope formally correct the long-standing wrong of the church’s condemnation of Galileo – 359 years later.
We now surely dwell in the very eye of another manic social hurricane, the unfalsifiable theory of purely anthropogenic climate ‘collapse’. Put aside for a moment the debate we’re not even allowed to conduct over the ‘settled science’ (an oxymoron). For sheer argument’s sake, let’s suppose that the computer modelling-driven construct proves wrong-headed. If we didn’t fully acknowledge that Galileo was spot-on for 359 years, how long could it take for man-made ‘global boiling’ to be declared a busted flush? Vast are the vested interests in this latest belief system, which flatters our transitory species as capable of dialling the average temperature of our whole planet up or down. Frankly, I can’t see this dogma being officially de-bunked during my lifetime, even if we quietly suspect for years that it’s hogwash. The ‘deniers’ will keep getting called names and losing their jobs. If it turns out that the sceptics were right, no one will ever thank them or apologise, just as vindicated lockdown sceptics get little credit today.
I have my own depressing theory. It’s credibly to our evolutionary advantage to be conformists. At any given time, your chances of survival are greater if you parrot exactly what other people around you are saying and claim to believe exactly what everyone else around you claims to believe. None of this marching to a different drummer! Don’t call attention to yourself; just try to blend in. Even in secular societies, heretics are in statistically high danger of defenestration or immolation, if only metaphorically.
Starting circa 2012, then, you were super smart to have exalted the ‘transing’ of children as humanity’s glorious liberation from dumpy old biological sex. Maybe starting around 2024, you’re also super smart to wonder aloud to your friends whether arresting adolescents’ normal endocrinological development into adulthood and chopping off their healthy body parts is a totally good idea. Then round about 2026 or so, I bet you’ll be best off pretending you never bought into this breathtaking medical scandal to begin with.
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