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‘intra-group status jockeying’. The idea is that people seek not only to elevate groups they are part of, but also to elevate themselves within those groups.
The ‘Scopes monkey trial’ became a byword for science denialism and the battle between faith and reason.
News of how entrenched gender-identity ideology had become went worldwide when J. K. Rowling tweeted to her fourteen million followers: ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill’.
When the pair were invited onto Sky News, Harrop described the dictionary definition of woman as a ‘symbol that makes transgender people feel unsafe’. ‘It was perfect,’ says Keen. ‘To win this fight, all we have to do is get transactivists to speak.’
British political culture is deeply suspicious of extremists, including liberal ones (in the American sense). The Left is more communal and less individualistic than in the US, and performative social-justice activism is not a condition of university entrance, meaning ‘wokeness’ has been relatively slow to spread from the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences to other fields.
We humans are social animals, and ‘because everyone else does’ is not the only social reason we hold beliefs, or at least profess to hold them. Another is because we subconsciously think they will make us look good. And sometimes, in what social scientists call preference falsification, we claim to hold views that we are well aware we do not because we think others will despise us if we admit the truth. All this misrepresentation and second-guessing can create ‘pluralistic ignorance’ – a situation where people do not understand their fellow citizens’ true views, but think they do.
‘Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.’
In Rowling, cancel culture had come up against someone too big to cancel – someone who could say that the emperor had no clothes. In her sole commentary on the row over Troubled Blood, she made the point nicely, tweeting a picture of herself in a t-shirt with the slogan ‘this witch doesn’t burn’. In democracies, policy capture can take campaigners only so far. Once voters openly disapprove of a measure, politicians start to take notice.
The idea is that beliefs can be thought of as ‘employees’ of our minds, some of which are ‘hired’ because they are competent, and others because of whom they know. The two sorts earn their keep in different ways, says Simler: ‘merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good’. Merit beliefs are based on evidence, and if our understanding of the evidence changes, the beliefs do too. Crony beliefs, by contrast, are about fitting in, winning allies and making the right impression. Among Simler’s examples of crony beliefs are conspiracy theories, which play
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Further signs that gender-identity beliefs are cronyistic include the repetition of mantras and the insistence that there is ‘no debate’.
People vary greatly in how much they care about being liked versus being right. Some loathe conflict, and will therefore stay silent even about big problems or worries. Others find cognitive dissonance so unbearable that they cannot stop themselves from probing weak points in socially convenient beliefs, and speaking out about what they find.
I doubt any mammalian species could live like this: other people’s sex is too evolutionarily salient. If you disagree, that’s fine – but you will have to argue for your unisex utopia, and wait for the rest of us to buy in. You cannot simply declare that it already exists, and that the rest of us must live in it.
The gender-identity debate has become so heated, and the political climate so poisonous, that engaging in good faith looks difficult. It will take a renewed commitment to two interests shared by everyone in a secular, liberal democracy: freedom of belief and freedom of speech. As an atheist, I do not have to pay even lip service to any religion – in return for which I gladly accept the right of religious people to discuss their faith, wear its symbols, worship freely and proclaim positions I oppose, such as the immorality of same-sex marriage or the importance of wifely obedience. I demand the
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All the harms I have described – the destruction of women’s rights, the sterilisation of gender non-conforming children, the spread of postmodernist homophobia, and the corruption of medical and scientific research – would crumble before a renewed societal commitment to the Enlightenm...
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Such children are much more likely than the average to grow up gay, as long as they are left in peace to work that out themselves. That well-meaning people’s revulsion at gay conversion therapy has been co-opted to support a treatment pathway that turns proto-gay children into ‘straight’ trans people is the most upsetting of all the harms done by gender-identity ideology, and the one I most fervently wish to see ended.
For example, someone who refuses to put ‘preferred pronouns’ in her email signature can now tell HR that she is exercising her legally protected right not to express a belief she does not hold.
