Where does confidence come from?

I always wonder how Jolyon Maugham QC can be so confident about the wack things he says. I don’t wonder it so much about Adrian Harrop and Owen Jones, because they’re rather childish and undisciplined and silly, but I have this idea that QCs have to do better than that. (To be sure, Harrop is a medical doctor and you’d hope that would apply to him too, but he’s just so goony that it seems futile to wonder further.)

Like this thing for instance.

How does he manage to be so confident that there is such a thing as a “transgender child” and that it is easy to know which children are transgender and that there are never any mistakes about it? How can he be so confident that all that is known and established and well beyond question? How can he be so very confident of all that that he thinks the only right course of action is prescribing puberty blockers? How can he be so confident that puberty blockers are in no way risky or undesirable or damaging such that if there is a mistake and the transgender child in question later turns out not to be transgender, that child will wish the puberty blockers had not been prescribed?

How can he be so confident that there are only two choices, prescribe puberty blockers (yay! happy transgender child) or do nothing (boooo! sad transgender child)? How can he be so confident that therapy, watch and wait, caution are not also choices? How can he be so certain that all children who say they are transgender are entirely right about it and also not at all influenced by the public relations campaign to make being trans the hippest best wokest thing ever? How can he be so confident that fashion and political rhetoric and social media and roleplaying games (thanks Sastra) have not created a new way for kids to make themselves special? How can he be so confident that the stories people tell about themselves are transparently uncomplicatedly true? A lawyer of all people!

The revival of feminism started decades ago, in the late 60s, and still many men don’t get it, think women are shit, can’t be bothered, don’t care. The trans craze has been raging for a few years and here are smug domineering women-hating men like Jolyon Maugham QC embracing it without a hint of doubt or skepticism.

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