The belief is a sin
Jonathan Best on the attempted (and failed) no-platforming of Jenni Murray:
On March 1st, an open letter was published on Facebook demanding that Leeds Lit Fest and The Leeds Library cancel an event with BBC Woman’s Hour broadcaster Jenni Murray on the grounds that she is ‘an active transphobe’ and guilty of ‘hate speech’. The signatories included Trans Leeds, Non-Binary Leeds, Trans Pride and Yorkshire Mesmac (all of whom might be expected to sign such a letter) and five of Leeds’ arts and culture organisations: Live Art Bistro, Leeds Queer Film Festival, Aire Place Studios, Oxygen Films and the artist collective Queerology.
With four decades of experience as a BBC journalist, including more than thirty years presenting Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Murray is one of the UK’s most popular and accessible feminist voices. She’s interviewed hundreds of interesting women, from Hilary Clinton to Cher, from Shirley Williams to Bette Davis. And she’s got a new book out too - A History of the World in 21 Women. To their credit, Leeds Lit Fest and The Leeds Library stood firm behind their programming decision and the sold-out event went ahead as planned.
They failed, but not for want of trying. The new silencing of women is just like the old silencing of women, and these people who think they’re doing the latest most woke thing are profoundly mistaken. (I kind of hope it wakes them up at night a few years from now. I kind of hope they wake up sweating with shame and guilt, and that that happens to them repeatedly. I’m evil that way.)
Ultimately, Jenni Murray’s sin is to hold a belief; that trans women are not women. This conflicts with a foundational principle of modern transgender ideology; that trans women are women. To assert that a male human being who identifies as a woman is a woman is a metaphysical claim and, as such, we all have a right to examine it and choose to either accept or reject it.
We have the moral right, but in practical terms, we often don’t have the actual right in the sense of being free to do so without being shunned and silenced and even fired. This situation is both ridiculous and destructive, and I wish it would come to its natural end with more speed. Why do I think it has a natural end? Because it rests so heavily and unbudgeably on a delusion, and that makes it vulnerable.
However, within the context of today’s LGBTQ politics, Murray’s rejection of the belief that trans women are women is seen as illegitimate and amounts to a secular blasphemy. In fact, the signatories to the open letter have adopted a position not so different from the religious leaders who tried to censor Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979. Many Christians were deeply hurt by that film, arguing that it failed to respect their sincerely held beliefs. Similarly, some transgender people are genuinely hurt when the beliefs they hold about womanhood are not respected by other women. But just as the Bishop of Leeds cannot compel me to believe in the Resurrection, so Live Art Bistro cannot compel Jenni Murray to believe that trans women are women.
Or the rest of us, either, and the more frenzied the bullying gets, the more people back away.
And of course protesting one film (Life of Brian) is significantly different from demanding that this “blasphemer” never speak or write on any subject ever again.
This is the point I am making more and more lately. “Trans women are women” is a metaphysical claim– trans ideology makes others. Insisting that other people must accept metaphysical claims or be effectively shunned goes against many of the values nominally held by the people who promote this ideology.
Trans dogma tries to evade this problem by conflating claims like “No, trans women aren’t women” with “Trans people should have no rights!” or “Violence against trans people is OK!” or “I hate trans people” (and my personal favorite, “Trans people don’t exist!”). They’ve been remarkably successful at spreading this conflation. How poorly that speaks of the bullshit detectors of the supposedly rational people who fall for it.
I just had a holy-shit-the-tide-is-turning moment. Here’s what happened…
Last week I was out having cocktails and as the bar wound down I invited a young guy back to mine for another.
Somehow the topic of transactivism came up and we ended up in a screaming match for two hours. He had all the woke jargon and dogma down — everyone’s a TERF, biological sex is a social construct, gender is the most wonderful thing ever, gender identity is Serious Business, feminists are bitter old crones, etc. It infuriated me how brainwashed he sounded, how absolutely closed it seemed his mind was to new ideas, and how ready he was to dismiss anyone who didn’t toe the line as a heartless bigot. Needless to say, no kiss goodnight for him. What an ugly night.
But last night I bumped into him in the gaybourhood again, and he completely surprised me: we reconciled! Over a friendly drink he said he’d thought a lot about what I’d said and he’s changed his mind. I like the way he put it: a “bubble” has emerged over the past few years, and it needs some deflating. (I.e., he’s waking up to transactivist overreach and a backlash is due.) It wasn’t a total conversion — at one point I joked that gender is a prison and he replied something about how sometimes there’s fun to be had with it, but frankly that’s a fine reply by me.
I must say, it was refreshing to see such a change in someone who only days before was drunk on the trans Kool-Aid. So maybe there’s a little hope after all. Start with martinis, bat some flirty eyes and then do a lot of shouting. That’s the winning formula.
(No, but seriously, what I think really cracked the seal for him was trans sports and the attacks on Martina Navratilova. She’s so unimpeachably pro-LGBT and the arguments for males in female sports are just so obviously bad, I could see even in the heat of the shouting that his certainty was starting to waver.)
Artymorty, your story gives me hope.
(I’m actually having dinner tonight with someone I’ve disagreed with on this issue. I’ve been wondering if it would come up.)
The trans sports thing seems to be peaking a lot of people.
The metaphysical claims aspect is what made the Freethought blogs craziness so bizarre. Still does.
Another thing that peaks people about transwomen in sports is the jarring images that accompany the articles: I think the idea of trans naturally evokes in many people an image of a “perfect victim” transwoman — young, petite, ostensibly homosexual, and vulnerable-looking. And when they see the reality — unmistakably male-bodied, hulking bodybuilders demanding to be treated as women in every possible context — they start to see the issue with a little less starry-eyed emotion and a little more hard reasoning.
Every generation has its ‘fashionable nonsense’, which appears seemingly out of thin air, and rapidly picks up a head of steam to the confusion and consternation of those not affected (infected?) by the latest fad. Inevitably the nonsense first runs its course, then runs out of steam to vanish back into thin air. Afterwards, even those who were once at the forefront of the movement will often deny playing a part, or will claim involvement out of mere curiosity.
The two questions to ask now are: how long will the current madness take to exhaust itself? and what nonsense will take its place?
Acolyte of Sagan,
Indeed, I’m reminded of the shameful history in progressive and gay circles of advocating pedophilia under the guise of sexual liberation. The left has chosen to collectively memory-hole the whole ugly history and the culprits just pretend they never had anything to do with it. (*Cough cough* Peter Tatchell.) Just like before, vulnerable children are in the crosshairs of radical activists. But unlike before, we now live in the age of social media where everything is documented and the Internet Never Forgets. Interesting times ahead…
Hm…. someone ought to write a book….. ;)
Artymorty, AoS
The thing that came to my mind is repressed memories. Again, real world people getting hurt by someone else’s delusion, going to jail for crimes they did not commit, losing their children, having their children hate them.
Fashionable nonsense would be one thing if people didn’t get hurt, but it seems so often that someone does. Even seemingly benign things like mesmerism and spiritualism were often used in lieu of real world solutions, and taken too seriously. People got bilked out of real world money, too, and it’s easy to say serves them right for being suckers, but in the end, most people fall into some irrational belief system at some point (I’m wiling to bet that if we surveyed this crew, all of us would raise our hands to “have you ever believed and/or acted on something totally ridiculous?”). Astrology? Benign enough if you just “read your horoscope” but if you make decisions based on it, things could go wrong. Gurus? Yeah, they can lead you to things that are less than good. Goop? Well, I suspect no one on this site is unaware of Goop and the serious issues. And, of course, the anti-vax delusions.
(Raises hand).For a brief period in my teens I was quite taken with the
theoriesludicrous ideas of Erich von Daniken and his “ancient astronauts” as well as the Bermuda Triangle. Held out forlorn hope for some sort of deism into my lateish twenties.(Keeps hand raised).
I’ll get back to you in a few years when I figure out what present silliness I currently take seriously…(repeat as necessary)
The other thing about fashionable nonsense is that it never quite goes away. It’s always lurking around in the background to spring up anew at the slightest bit of attention. Anti-vax never quite went away but there definitely seems to be renewed levels of idiocy there.
Flat Earth was never really much of a thing in the first place but it bubbles along just fine anyway and seems oddly popular at the moment.
Homeopathy seems a lot less popular than it was a few years ago, but I’m sure it will be back in force next time there’s the least bit of celebrity and/or media attention.
I was involved a few years back in getting the UK drugstore Boots to make a clear distinction in its shelving between actual medicine and bollocks. It worked, for a while, but it wasn’t long before the homeopathy was back on the shelves next to antihistamine with no distinction between the two.
In some ways, the problem gets worse over time because it turns from flaky woo of the moment to venerable knowledge of the ancestors, now rediscovered through the wise intervention of a celebrity.
But, since the ‘beliefs they hold’ are mutually exclusive, anyone can be ‘witch-sniffed’ whenever its convenient. You can’t sustain beliefs in infinite gender fluidity and immutable, inherent ‘real’ gender at the same time. Unless of course, you’re a trans-activist of a certain stripe.
The repressed memory parallel is a dismayingly close fit; I think about that a lot. Both are more political than homeopathy and Goop and similar, hence both are more alluring to people who think of themselves as lefties and more angrily defended. The left can be so fucking gullible…which is basically where B&W came in.