A kindred spirit

An excellent article by Stella O’Malley at Spiked:

…the trans issue is a prism through which almost every major cultural, political, ethical and psychological question of our age is refracted. The debate around transgender identity exposes problems that extend far beyond medicine or mental health. That’s why I no longer define trans as an ‘unfolding medical scandal’ but an ‘unfolding medical and institutional scandal’.

To name just a few areas:

Medicine and healthcare

‘Gender medicine’ has revealed what happens when medicine becomes consumer-driven. Technical advances have made possible a growing number of elective medical interventions – gender medicine, commercial surrogacy, assisted dying, some forms of abortion – which are increasingly presented as ‘healthcare’ simply because they are medically possible. The distinction between treating illness and fulfilling consumer demand has become dangerously blurred.

And pseudo-lactation in men so that they can “feed” an infant a cocktail of hormones.

Then there’s the mess currently being created by the mental-health industry, which is never more prominent than within the trans debate. A culture of over-medicalisation, over-diagnosis and affirmation has transformed healthcare from what was once a process of exploration, uncertainty and psychological growth into little more than emotional validation. Therapy has shifted from helping people understand themselves to helping them feel affirmed and supported. 

Which shouldn’t be a need or desire in the first place. It’s too much. It’s expecting too much and ends up in demanding too much. We don’t get to be affirmed and supported by the whole world just because we exist.

Academia and education

Like healthcare, universities increasingly resemble consumer-driven businesses, anxious to keep their customers happy. I had always imagined universities as places whose purpose was to move us from darkness into light through the pursuit of truth. The poor quality of much research on gender medicine exposed just how vulnerable academia has become to ideology.

I’m glad she uses the i-word. I talk about it as ideology all the time, but I don’t see a whole lot of other people doing so. Understanding it as an ideology explains a lot.

The startling speed with which transgender ideology became embedded in education systems across the Western world exposed just how easily a new orthodoxy can become accepted, taught and defended by entire institutions. 

Seriously. One minute we had a bunch of friends who were skeptical, secular, open to questions, and the next we had an army of fanatical believers.

The decision of the left to swap class politics for identity politics has been both maddening and fascinating to watch through my splayed fingers. The unanticipated – and, let’s face it, largely unfathomable – swerve of large sections of the contemporary left towards advocating for the lifelong medicalisation of children who will one day become infertile and sexually impaired has yet to be fully analysed. Nobody yet knows why this movement that once championed the downtrodden, the importance of fair economics and equal rights now embraces self-reported identity, subjective truth and moral certainty, but it is important to reflect on it.

We’ve been reflecting on it. For years and years we’ve been reflecting on it.

My experiences of being cancelled, censored and censured for speaking truthfully about trans issues have shown me that modern censorship isn’t like Soviet Russia or the East German Stasi. There are no jackboots ensuring everyone stays in step. Instead, contemporary censorship more closely resembles the culture I experienced growing up in the Catholic Church, where public shaming made the policing of acceptable thought remarkably effective. Today’s censorship is led by relentless finger-wagging moralism from the new left and reinforced by professional regulators, social media moderation, reputational threats and institutional pressure.

And blog networks.

Over-policing and nanny-state officials have led to children being removed from home, just because parents have informed their daughter that she was not really a boy. While this may seem far-fetched, it is important to know that the UK government’s new Conversion Practices Bill promises to criminalise parents who insist on speaking the truth to their trans-identified children. Within this new culture, identity has become the new secular religion, and ‘identifying as’ has become one of its central and sacred rituals. In this context, parents are regarded as ‘dangerous’ if they don’t affirm the child’s new identity.

Bullseye again! “Identifying as” is another one of my targets for disdain.

Thank you Stella O’Malley.