The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

The situation escalated even further when Rowling criticised an online article for its use of the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ rather than the more obvious, and certainly less cumbersome, ‘women’. The invective reached fever pitch; some former Harry Potter fans even went so far as to burn their copies of Rowling’s books. If only they had read their history, they might have thought twice about the optics of such a move. One journalist somehow reached the incredible conclusion that Rowling had been ‘radicalised online’. This alarmist phrase brings to mind all manner of transgressions. It’s not as though she joined a fanatical death-cult, or endorsed a national policy of eugenics, or embedded subliminal Nazi propaganda into her latest book for children. Rather, her ‘radicalisation’ amounts to a belief that there are biological differences between men and women. ‘If sex isn’t real,’ she tweeted, ‘there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth’. That anyone could possibly consider this a form of ‘radicalisation’ speaks to the loss of critical faculties when one becomes immersed in an ideological thought process that can never yield to reason or compromise. This kind of mass moralistic outbreak is usually described as a ‘witch hunt’, a term which most obviously brings th...

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