Looking for a face-saving way to recant
Helen Joyce on the awkward retreat from gender ideology:
An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.
Which is tragic for them, because there isn’t one. Their faces are stuck with what they did and said for so long.
Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who used to say “trans women are women, get over it”, now says the next Labour government will “work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.
Why did two clever men ever believe that men could become women? Or that little children could discern their innate gender identities before they could tie their shoelaces?
Believe or claim to believe. I for one always struggle with the difficulty of believing they really actually believed it as opposed to just saying it. It is difficult to believe.
Streeting, like so many gay men, was presumably misled by some gay campaign groups’ adoption of trans ideology despite its incompatibility with gay people’s rights. As for Sir Keir, he’s a lawyer, and lawyers are prone to believing that laws can overwrite reality.
Ahaha I never thought of that. It helps explain the witless belief that having a “gender certificate”=you really are the other sex. It’s like saying if you have a certificate that says you’re a tiger then you’re a tiger…but maybe to lawyers that’s just truth.
Funny how many people fell for this when they have no trouble understanding the concept of a “legal fiction” when the government declares Rwanda safe.
Exactly.
The hope now is that many of the cowards who remained professionally deaf and blind to the downsides of pretending sex can change, join the rush for the exit. The self-proclaimed sceptics who used to be so scathing about homoeopathy but swallowed the ludicrous claim that it was possible to be “born in the wrong body”. The New Atheists who genuflected to a godless neo-religion. The civil servants supposed to uphold impartiality in public life, who put their pronouns in their email signatures.
Yessssssss!! We all know all too well about those self-proclaimed skeptics and New Atheists. I hope their faces are a deep uncomfortable red.
I was prompted to do a Web search for the Solomon Asch Conformity Study. Ironically, that link quotes an opinion that the result might be a reflection that In the 1950s America was very conservative, involved in an anti-communist witch-hunt (which became known as McCarthyism) against anyone who was thought to hold sympathetic left-wing views.
… for a very, very, VERY long time. Maybe the rest of their lives.
Biologically = bio + logically
= life reality + clear thinking..
The rest is bullshit.
Sounds like a grudging admission preceding a “but” that’s supposed to mean that deep down he was actually correct.
I’m all for the continued embarrassment of the loudmouths and bandwagoneers who cynically chose to use gender bullshit to polish their progressive credentials. But I’d also like to see some accountability for those who pushed and implemented government policy that hurt women in service to gender ideology. I want to know who said “yes” to putting men in women’s prisons and rape crisis centers, and single sex, women’s hospital wards. I want to know who said yes to the lobbyists’ demands, eagerly implementing them with little or no public input, oversight, or scrutiny. There was (and is) no excuse for the thoughtless, reflexive promotion, adoption, and enforcement of these measures, particularly when women foresaw their consequences, and screamed bloody murder to try to stop them. I want these people identified, and called to answer for their destructive actions. It won’t happen of course, but it should.
I wonder how much of the “belief” is belief by repetition, like a sort of self hypnosis. They may not really actually believe it to begin with, but they basically browbeat themselves into accepting it by publicly professing the cult dogma over and over. They tell the rest of us to shut up and “deal with it” because that’s what they’re doing, and they have to think that’s proper in order to think of themselves as virtuous.
There’s probably some of that. Also probably the tendency of lawyers to fall in love with their own “too clever by half” arguments and go from thinking “you know, it’s a bit of a reach, but I can make a non-frivolous argument that X is true” to “X is absolutely true!”
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