Smoke and mirrors
Joan Smith notes politicians’ refusal to stand up for Joanna Cherry.
Starmer is a KC, like Cherry, and leading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”.
Such things should not be happening in a democratic country, governed by the rule of law. On this occasion, the venue has put out a mealy-mouthed statement, blaming the cancellation on the fact that a number of key staff, including management and box office personnel, “are unwilling to work on this event”. They say they are ensuring that their employees’ views are respected, a position that suggests those views are reasonable.
They are not. Every time this happens, the objections are based on things the victims of no-platforming have not said. None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. They have not demanded that trans people should lose their jobs, be prevented from holding meetings or stopped from carrying out academic research. They are simply upholding the rights of another group, women and especially lesbians, to whom all these things are being done in the name of “trans rights”.
Let me repeat that key point. None of the individuals who have been targeted have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. We keep being told that’s what’s happening, and we keep pointing out that it’s not.
The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing. At protests organised by trans activists, we don’t see placards demanding “let men use women’s toilets now” or “make women share cells with rapists”. Instead, we see banners claiming that feminists are calling for “genocide” and comparing a belief in biological sex to Nazi eugenics.
The truth is not a crowd-pleaser, so they lie about us instead. How progressive.
You gave us a “nutshell” summary with what was wrong with the Tavistock. Here’s a nutshell with what is wrong with trans activism:
Trans activists lie to conceal what their opponents say; they lie to conceal what exactly they are demanding. They rewrite the language to do both, launching their political attacks from a platform of novel, repurposed meanings designed to hide truth. It’s all lies and deception, bullshit and bullying. There is no “good faith.”
Actual human rights and social justice campaigns depend upon clear communication and truth to achieve their goals, because they are describing a wrong and counting on public support to correct it. Discussion and dialogue are central to this process. What better way to advance a just cause than to have a public airing of the issues involved? A just cause has nothing to fear from robust, open discussion and lively debate. Ideally, this is how democratic politics works. But not with trans activism, the “social justice” movement that is neither social nor just. It is a campaign that is dangerous to women’s rights that has been reliant on secret, back-room deals designed to avoid and short-circuit public scrutiny, questioning, and accountability. It is thus a danger to democracy, too. It’s no accident that one of their rallying cries is “NO DEBATE!” Honest, open debate is poison to their program. Truth is its enemy. Truth is “transphobic.” Having forgone the normal channels used by rights campaigns to win public acceptance for its goals, trans activism has no choice but to rely on coercion to hang on to whatever gains it manages to make in secret. Any movement that is, at its very foundations, so fundamentally reliant upon lies and the secrecy required to maintain them, will inevitably and unavoidably corrupt any individual or organization that embraces and supports it.
[…] Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smoke and mirrors. […]