The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

Any student wondering whether the world really works like this can be instantly presented with the library of intimidating evidence that the gobbledygook he is failing to comprehend is his fault and not the fault of the writer of the gobbledygook. Of course sometimes when it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity. This is one of the reasons why Butler and others write so badly. If they wrote clearly they would attract more outrage and ridicule. It is also one reason why this field finds it so hard to detect what is sincere and what is satire. The claims made from the social sciences in recent years have become so unmoored from reality that when their walls have been assailed by genuine intruders it turns out that they have no defences to either detect or repel them. One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. This was an academic paper published in 2017 which proposed that: The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14 The claim was peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immer...