How many of you, dear readers, have managed to escape any reference to ‘her penis’? To all who have, I envy you. The ground for policy insanity on gender identity has been assiduously tilled for several years by the insistence on ‘pronouning’ people by the gender of their choice untethered to biological reality. Whosoever controls the language controls the narrative and policy settings. In this Orwellian-cum-Alice in Wonderland world, God help us, paedophiles are ‘minor-attracted persons’. A lot of gender reassignment surgery is nothing less than surgical mutilation. What exactly is the difference between the positive-sounding ‘gender-affirming’ and the vicious sounding ‘female genital mutilation’? On second thoughts, strike that question – I don’t really wish to know.
We have been urged, as a very public signalling of virtue, to be kind, caring and compassionate towards sensitive souls trapped in the wrong body. But in some contexts, being kind to a tiny minority can ‘transition’ into being unfair to the majority. On September 4th, Danielle McGahey, who used to play club cricket in Melbourne, became the first transwoman to play in an official international cricket match. Athletics, cycling, swimming and rugby have banned participation by transwomen in female sports. The Women’s Rights Network campaigns to defend the sex-based rights of women. A spokeswoman said transgender women have “significant” advantages over females: “bigger muscle mass, larger skeletons, bigger lung capacity… 14-year-old boys can be faster and stronger than world-class female athletes.” Any international policy that permits McGahey to play in women’s competition is “unfair and unsafe”, she concluded. The selection of McGahey meant that a biological woman was denied selection in Canada’s national team. Why bother dreaming of fame, glory and pride in representing your country, if that prize can be snatched by a man in lipstick and a dress? What’s the point of having separate men’s and women’s competition if not to recognise the unfairness of the built-in physical advantages of males?
Media reports of the McGahey story used the pronouns ‘she/her’. The top-ranked comment from a Telegraph reader asked: “Why do you call it her? He is a man.” On many other similar stories too the most liked comments express exasperation at referring to biological males as ‘she/her’. Even when media reports are critical of such stories as convicted rapists being housed in female prison wards, they go along with the pretence that the culprit is a ‘she’.
Why so? The U.K.’s Independent Press Standards Organisation provides vague guidance on how to refer to transpeople. Associated Press guidance, widely adopted, instructs journalists to elevate feelings of gender identity above facts on sex. The Australian Government Style Manual (2023) requires using a person’s preferred pronouns in official content. Are journalists and editors compelled to follow? Whatever happened to media houses using science-based common sense aligned to settled community values, instead of meek compliance with woke guidelines from faceless, unelected and unaccountable language police?
The wilful suspension of biological reality with pretend facts is a threat to women. Transwomen do not have the right to colonise women’s sports and spaces. The war against women’s identity, rights, privacy and dignity is lost once you accept the science fiction of addressing as ‘she/her’, a 6’3” bearded man with a functioning male organ which he will proudly display in a woman’s spa, regardless of how embarrassed, offended and unsafe the girls and women in there might feel. As for relabelling ‘vagina’ as a ‘bonus hole’, as recommended by Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust (!) in the U.K., this linguistic outrage is grossly offensive, degrading, hateful and hurtful. When I first read of it I assumed it was misinformation but no, it was a serious proposal. Where is John McEnroe with his fiery “You cannot be serious!”?
The root of the pronouns pathology is the terminological sleight of hand in legally reclassifying ‘born male’ as ‘assigned male at birth’. The purpose of a birth certificate is to record the objective sex of the newborn baby, not to assign a subjective gender to it based on the parents’ prejudices and mental health issues. This leads directly to the pathology of preferred pronouns into which the masses have been conned by the insistence that it is but a small act of kindness that costs us nothing but may save vulnerable people from ideationing or committing suicide.
We cannot have a society or constitute a community without shared frames of reference and patterns of action. Pronouns are a social-linguistic device for objectively differentiating males from females according to biological facts, not a matter of subjective individual preference. The claim – that subjective feeling and self-affirming gender identity must be given legal recognition and protection – is an existential threat to society itself. Because it’s limited to Western societies, it is an existential threat to Western society.
There are good reasons to create sex-separated toilets, changerooms, refuges, crisis services, prisons and sports that provide safe spaces for girls and women, and only them. Using the full force of the law to coerce and compel everyone to genuflect to biologically false facts is reminiscent of communist totalitarian systems where people must show obeisance to party diktats or risk the public humiliation of show trials, public confession of errors and spells in re-education camps. How many victims will it take before authorities move to protect women prisoners from manipulative and abusive male predators? How many children will be sacrificed on the altar of the ideology of gender-altering surgery before the medical profession calls a halt?
‘Gender-critical’ writers are gender-realists. ‘Gender-neutral’ language is not neutral or inclusive. It’s anti-woman. It erases more than half of humanity as a distinct category and excludes their rights to safety, dignity and privacy. How can you possibly refuse someone you call ‘she/her’ the right to use a women’s toilet or changing room and compete in a women’s swimming competition?
Transgender athletes – biological males asserting they are women to compete against females – are cheats. Women’s sport was not created as a separate category for males who cannot cut it in men’s competition. Nor was it to affirm identity but to ensure fair competition and, increasingly, equal prize money. And if they stand on the medallists’ podium, they are also thieves with no shame who have stolen the honour, recognition, prize money from the female competitors – and their dreams, hopes and ambitions.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published by the Spectator Australia.
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“We have been urged to be kind…”
Not really. In many places certain kinds of “unkindness” as determined by the establishment are criminal acts, and those that are not will lead you to being banned from social media and disciplined at or removed from your workplace. That’s not “urging”.
My boss doesn’t care what I say or think – I thank him every time that I look in a mirror.
Your clients might though.
They don’t seem to. I’m also happy to lie to any of them for money.
That’s good. It probably varies according to what line of work you do, where you live, what kind of clients you have. I can see scenarios where a sole trader of some kind is unlucky enough to be pushed into a corner by some extremist, and then it’s all over social media/local Facebook group/their Google reviews page – though maybe in taking a stand you could end up attracting more business. There’s a staunchly anti-lockdown, sceptical cafe in a certain East of England market town run by someone who used to post here, that makes no secret of its stance but seems to tick along OK.
Well said. I find it easy to stand up to this woke nonsence in my private
life as I’m happy to stand up for what I believe to be right and sod what
others think; however, what is so clever about the spread and widespread
invasion of woke ideology is the pernicious way adherents enforce conformity.
For example, I regularly use Linkedin for work purposes where the use of
preferred pronouns is widespread with many putting them on their profiles.
Belief in man-made catastrophic climate change and reducing “carbon
consumption” along the lines of Net-zero is also very prevalent. During
“covid”, the unmasked were labelled granny killers and covid deniers
and so on by the majority.
The problem for me is that when it comes to my business life – I’m a coward.
I’ve seen what happens to people who put their head above the parapet and I
daren’t risk anything that might threaten my job or the company’s business. It
disappoints me that I am not braver, but I don’t see many of the groupthink
people ever changing their minds so console myself that preaching to those with entrenched views is not worth risking a career.Consequently, their thinking
has little opposition, which no doubt reinforces their conviction that their
beliefs are correct.
I have the utmost respect for those in the public limelight that have stood
up for their views despite the cancelling, abuse and loss of livelihoods they have
suffered.
Test
It works! Anyone else had the glitch that says you are not allowed to write the word ‘n.once’?
Just a glitch?
Yes, my nonce was invalid too!
Strangely, it’s just allow this post including the full word!
But is everybody’s nonce invalid at the same time? I’m sure mine’s been invalid but I’ve seen others post a few min earlier. It’s a mystery alright. I actually managed to find a nanosecond window to post between nonces earlier. After that the site was having none of it.
I was ‘Nonce invalid’ at about 10 pm last night, so I gave up.
An explanation from the DS team is now overdue.
It may not be 100% under their control – it could be a glitch in some software component that they use that either appears from time to time without pattern or warning, or a glitch caused by an automated update of one or more of the components they use to provide the DS pages. Most of the time people try to keep these things up to date automatically as the updates not only provide new features but also fix vulnerabilities that protect your site – the providers don’t always test them properly or they simply miss things.
Yes I think someone emailed them so it’s not like they aren’t aware of the problem. It would be nice to have some communication from them as to what the issue is and what they’re doing about it, especially as it seems to be an ongoing problem. Until then it’s just pot luck I guess.
This is plain and simple a software error. Whether the error is due to bad coding or bad design or both cannot really be told without knowing more about the technical details (I’m certainly not going to bother with — I have enough of them I need to deal with as part of work already).
I got a reply to my mail from yesterday from Will, stating this was a problem with a third-party plugin which has since been addressed.
Yes, though the article might better read “trans-identified males” rather than “transwomen”.
Absolutely. Any word or phrase containing the word “woman” means, to me, a female.
Great article. This is now 100% pure gaslighting. They’re not even bothering to remotely pretend to look like a woman anymore. Anyone see that Canadian ‘women’s’ rugby player Ash Davis? He looks like he runs the local skip hire and routinely injures scores of women whilst crashing his balding moob covered male carcass into them. His team are perfectly fine with it obviously because he wins them games. The other team have to be fine with because this is what the cult demands.
https://www.rebelnews.com/_trans_rugby_player_confronted_as_unhinged_teammates_scream_police_arrive
I never gave them up!
A bloke’s a bloke even if he is wearing lipstick.
“Whosoever controls the language controls the narrative and policy settings. In this Orwellian-cum-Alice in Wonderland world…..
When I first read of it I assumed it was misinformation but no, it was a serious proposal.”
A bit more adherence to controlling the language would not go amiss Dr Thakur. ‘Misinformation’ is lies / lying and I have stated many times that we must not cede the language. Protecting pronouns is essential but we should not give way on any aspects of OUR language.
Notwithstanding that minor criticism this is a fine article.
“first transwoman”. I don’t accept the premise of the word choice.
“man” uses far fewer letters
We must never use the language of the enemy. There is no such thing as a transwoman. There are men and women. Which of those two categories each human falls into is immutable, and is not “assigned”, it is determined by fate/God whatever at conception.
We also need to talk about people who “identify as disabled”. There are able-bodied people who “have always felt like they should be disabled” and feel “a bit ashamed” when they order their first wheelchair but then feel “like their true selves”. Fetish? Mental disorder? Obvious parallels to the whole gender thing.
Might it not be easier (and more fun) to actually make them disabled
Even better idea: Disable the wheelchair and then declaim loudly Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.
How many have not seen Ricky Gervais’s SuperNature show on Netflix?
Let’s sort it – “Show us yr Growler”
Amen, brother. Or sister