"It is an intolerant, coercive force – and it has been thoroughly embraced by political and cultural elites in both the UK and the US.
In the UK recently we have seen Labour Party leader Keir Starmer criticise one of his MPs for daring to say that ‘only women have a cervix’. And we have also seen Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer condemn a gay- and lesbian-rights group for criticising trans ideas, calling it a ‘hate group’.
Even members of the Conservative Party are now exponents of the trans ideology. Indeed, the prime minister’s wife, Carrie Johnson, used her sole appearance at the Conservative Party conference to urge her fellow Tories to fight for the rights of trans people...
For our cultural elites, transgenderism vies with environmentalism as the cause of the 21st century. As sociologist Michael Biggs notes, the ‘transgender movement has transformed cultural norms and social institutions at breathtaking speed’.
The ease and alacrity with which trans identity has been promoted, and conventional distinctions between men and women have been eroded, have surprised even trans activists. An American law professor sympathetic to transgenderism wrote of the ‘stunning speed’ with which ‘non-binary gender identities have gone from obscurity to prominence in American public life’, citing as proof the growing acceptance of ‘gender-neutral pronouns such as “they, them, and theirs”‘, ‘all-gender’ restrooms, and the ‘increasing number of US jurisdictions… recognising a third-gender category’...
The UK and parts of northern Europe have proven no less hospitable to transgenderism...
Little wonder that in many areas of life now, the boundary between man and woman appears increasingly illegitimate. To the extent it still exists at all, it is presented as artificial, even oppressive. And those who choose to transgress it are celebrated by the media as brave and inspirational role models.
Transgenderism is making itself at home in the most unlikely of places. Rejecting long-held scientific assumptions, both Nature and Scientific American ‘have denied that there are clear criteria for classifying humans as male and female’. The British Medical Association has also fallen in line. In its guide to ‘inclusive language’, it advises its members to use the term ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘pregnant women’. Just recently the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, decided to call women ‘bodies with vaginas’. It seems that, even in the scientific, medical domain, biological reality is being sacrificed at the altar of transgender ideology.
Remarkably, transgenderism has also been embraced by big business. An advert for British bank HSBC announces that ‘Gender’s just too fluid for borders’. According to HSBC’s accompanying promotional material, its customers can now choose from 10 gender titles, including ‘Ind’, ‘Misc’ and ‘Sai’.
HSBC’s willingness to transform language may look like a harmless exercise in linguistic sensitivity towards people who wish to be known as Mx or Ser. But it is one of many attempts to impose a vocabulary that not only challenges age-old linguistic norms but also the sentiments that lie behind them. As George Orwell warned, taking control of language and redefining the meaning of words is the first step taken by those seeking to control people’s thoughts.
This obsession with words is hardly surprising. Ideologies that seek to shape people’s behaviour in pursuit of a political objective are inexorably drawn towards the policing of language. As laughable as some of the new vocabulary and pronouns may be, advocates of transgenderism are deadly serious – they want everyone to view social reality as they do, through the prism of transgenderism.
In many parts of North America, the policing of gender-related language is backed up by formal and informal sanctions. Directives issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights state that employers and landlords who intentionally use the wrong pronouns with their non-binary employees or tenants can face fines of up to $250,000. In 2018, California governor Jerry Brown endorsed a bill that promised to penalise healthcare professionals who ‘wilfully and repeatedly’ declined to use a patient’s preferred pronouns.
A tribunal in Canada recently ruled that refusing to use someone’s correct pronouns violates their human rights...
The tribunal’s ruling turns the individual’s demand to have his or her chosen identity validated and recognised by others into a sacred legal norm. This calls into question both freedom of expression and freedom of thought... As Orwell put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’...
This formidable capacity to silence critics is one of the most disturbing aspects of transgenderism.
Transgenderism is not content with merely abolishing the distinction between man and woman. It also aims to discredit any form of thinking that involves drawing binary distinctions between things.
Few have realised how dangerous this is. The act of drawing binary distinctions, of discriminating between different categories of phenomena, is central to moral thought and the formation of moral judgements. It allows us to distinguish between good and evil or right and wrong. Therefore the attempt to devalue the drawing of binary distinctions is not only an attack on reason, it is also an attack on our ability to exercise moral judgement...
Moreover, the attack on binary categories often calls into question normality itself. ‘In modern society, there is a huge misconception as to what is normal and abnormal’, writes one blogger. ‘The fact that there are two such categories, normal and abnormal, is just a reaffirmation of this misconception.’ One psychotherapist even challenges the validity of using normal and abnormal to refer to people’s mental and emotional states. ‘It is a real question as to whether those words can be sensibly used at all’, he writes, ‘given their tremendous baggage and built-in biases and the general confusion they create’.
Transgenderism also insists that the very idea of normality, indeed of normativity, represents a threat to trans identity. This attack on normality imperils communal life. If society is deprived of the idea of normal and abnormal, it loses the capacity to draw a line between desirable and undesirable forms of behaviour.
As I argue in Why Borders Matter, the crusade against binary thinking is principally driven by the desire to abolish moral judgement. Unfortunately, non-judgementalism already enjoys widespread institutional support in Western societies. Indeed, transgenderism’s rapid ascent rests precisely on the pre-existing prevalence of non-judgementalism in high places.
Numerous critics of transgenderism have rightly raised concerns about its deleterious impact on the status and rights of women. But this pales into insignificance compared to its impact on children.
The presence of transgenderism in education effectively estranges children from the norms and values of their community. It challenges their own and their community’s understanding of what is normal and abnormal. This morally disarms them and leads to them feeling confused about their place in the world. For transgenderism that is not a problem. Rather, it is an opportunity for the indoctrination of young minds, a chance to tell children that gender is a choice, and that there is no biological justification for sex-based identities. Right from their earliest years, then, children are estranged from the cultural traditions, norms and legacies of their communities. And as a result, they are plunged into an identity crisis...
That so many institutions have fallen under the spell of transgenderism is a sign that Western society is in serious trouble. So many people who are genuinely repulsed by this ideology remain silent and fear calling it out. This highlights the challenge transgenderism poses to those committed to defending a free and tolerant society.
So be warned. Unless checked, the authoritarian impulse driving transgenderism will become even more unrestrained – it is not a transient phenomenon that will soon fade away. And the absence of any serious opposition to it will only encourage its advance, especially given the backing it receives from big business and elite foundations and trusts."
Clearly, the fact that trans mania has swept the developed world at an amazing speed is proof that the "slippery slope" is a myth
