What terfs get wrong

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic.

We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers. Often it’s just the little things that convince you there is a general derangement at large – such as a talk given in Cambridge recently by someone called Leah Palmer of the Scott Polar Research Institute: ‘Queering the Poles: How queer voices are changing how we think about the Arctic and Antarctic regions.’

Very queer voices, in my book, and those that might not find very much resonance with Scott himself. Nor am I sure how Pope John Paul II or Lech Walesa would feel about ‘Queering the Poles’. But there are people like Leah are in their little victimhood silos, believing the North Pole belongs to them, believing that they have special agency when it comes to snow and polar bears.

Less immediately ludicrous, at first sight, was a story from one of our junior schools. Neither the school nor the people involved were named. What happened was that a boy handed around to his classmates invitations to his birthday party. All but one of the kids in the class received an invitation, and the child who didn’t asked why this should be. ‘Looks like you didn’t make the list,’ the birthday boy reportedly replied, a little snarkily. One can imagine that the excluded little chap was somewhat hurt by this, and indeed his mother contacted the school, full of righteous fury. The school decided that henceforth, when party invitations were being handed out, they had to go to all the children in the class, and that’s that.

But what if one of the children in the class was a detestable little shit? What if the dislike felt for him was very soundly based? Should the celebration be compulsorily marred by his presence? What if the excluded kid was a ruffian? Why should the parents of the birthday boy be forced to invite him into their home?

I suspect that when I was at school, if such a thing had happened and the mum had rung the head bleating, the answer would have been along the lines of: ‘Well, tell him not to be a detestable little shit, then.’ Today, though, nobody is a detestable little shit; none of us is to be judged, especially not by our peers. I think this is deluding, especially for the DLS, who will continue through life thinking that his unsavoury characteristics and nasty behaviour should not remotely prevent him from enjoying all the treats and benefits of his peers. Meanwhile, not being invited to a party now joins that rapidly expanding bunch of stuff known as ‘bullying’.

And then there’s J.K. Rowling and her Twitterspat with the lefty singer Billy Bragg. Arguing the toss about the lesbian – but trans-sceptical – feminist Kathleen Stock and her speech at Oxford University, Bragg made the point that just as with transgendered people, lesbians too feel ‘at odds with their biological reality’. Bragg was speaking in support of those who wished to ban Stock from speaking at all, and of course I believe this standpoint to be odious and arrogant. But on the narrow point – that both lesbians and the transgendered feel themselves at odds with biological reality – he is incontestably correct. There is no gay gene.

Oh, but the odium poured down on his head by Mrs Dumbledore (and indeed, by her various semi-house-trained dementors). His assertion may be, she tweeted, ‘the most homophobic and misogynistic thing Billy Bragg has tweeted yet, which is a high bar’. And so this woman – who has endured years of the most revolting abuse from the trans lobby for her principled refusal to get with the programme and accept that trans women are every bit as authentically women as, er, women – resorted to exactly the same kind of ectoplasmic lefty abuse when her viewpoint was challenged.

I have a lot of respect for the way in which Rowling has fought her corner, and by the same token nothing but contempt for the largely talentless cast (especially Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe) of the Harry Potter films who hung her out to dry because they wanted to protect their horrible image of being right-on air-headed luvvies. But her response to Bragg showed that Rowling is also bunkered down in her utterly spurious victimhood silo and when challenged resorts to precisely the same deluded grammar. Never mind if what Bragg said was misogynistic and homophobic. Those words have simply become insults and have no connection anymore to reality. But what if he’s actually correct?

When you examine what he said, it is, as I mentioned, pretty much beyond argument. An awful lot of these terfs behave similarly, of course – they wish to be considered kosher to the left on every aspect of the culture wars except transgenderism, not realising that the grammar they once used to castigate men and straight society is now the very grammar being used against them. They helped to build the foundations for this epic intolerance of rational thought – and every so often the old ideology rears its head again and we are reminded that their embracing of rationality goes only so far, before evaporating with a gentle phhutt like a cigarette being extinguished in a lukewarm cup of coffee.