TheWokeSociety

UK Daily Telegraph

Douglas Murray

From the green movement to trans, the dogmas of the age are both dangerous and rarely challenged

 All ages have their dogmas, taboos and sacred values. In this regard our age is no different from any other. What is so striking is the sheer oddity of the things we have decided to make holy, the things deemed so crucial that almost everyone feels compelled to agree publicly with them or at least to pretend to agree with them.

Christianity, in its Protestant and Catholic forms, at least made sense. There was an origin story and a body of learning and scholarship that grew out of it. The occasional burnings at the stake were a reminder that overreach can happen but there was a logic to it that an outsider could comprehend and even a critic might understand. What, by comparison, is the logic of the unifying themes of our own age?

Being concerned about the wellbeing and future of our planet is a natural and healthy instinct. But how is one to square that instinct with the attitude of the moment? An attitude best demonstrated in an apparent willingness, at any moment, to grip our head in our hands and shout: “We’re all going to burn.” We celebrate strange child prophetesses when they come to tell us we have sinned. We listen when we are told that wholesale societal immiseration is the only way out of our situation. And a disturbingly high number of adults turn out to be prepared to agree publicly with the most insane claims if for no other reason than to keep the peace.

When Extinction Rebellion vandals dig up a beautiful lawn in the name of saving the environment the police stand happily by. When the same group bring the capital city to a standstill the police seek to appease them and even work with them. Before long every politician is in agreement not just about the debate but the terms we must use to describe it. So now everyone agrees that we are living in a “climate emergency”, a term nobody used this time last year but which nearly all politicians now reach for whenever a river bursts its banks simply because a bunch of fringe extremists have a skill at bullying everyone into agreeing with them.

What are our other sacred values? Well one is that there is no such thing as biological reality. The same police who are happy to stand by as hooligans wreak violence take any transgression against the emerging trans orthodoxy especially seriously. As do the political class, once again demonstrating why intelligent people steer clear of politics these days.

On morning television earlier this week the Labour Party’s Dawn Butler was being questioned by Richard Madeley about her party’s recent insistence that people who believe in biology should have no place in the Labour movement. As somebody who wouldn’t be sad if the Labour Party never got anywhere near power ever again one might be tempted to encourage such initiatives. But the problem is that such dogmas have a tendency to break out from the places that nurtured them. The exchange between Madeley and Butler was a fine demonstration of the problem.

What Madeley was trying to do – very gently it must be said – was tease out whether there might not be some dilemma underneath the claim that the Labour Party is now making about the right to be whatever gender you say you are. Butler would hear none of it. As with all truly dim people, she had already decided where the parameters of the discussion should be even though she is majorly, magnificently, mortifyingly wrong. Madeley asked her whether chromosomes and external signs of sex may not be signifiers of some kind? Did they not, in fact, suggest that sex is not a social construct but a visible, provable biological reality?

“Talking about penises and vaginas doesn’t help the conversation,” Butler countered, wearily, as though such things are so last century. It was clear that Butler’s ideal conversation would be one in which evidence and facts had no place at all. She went on to suggest that Madeley was implying that “trans women aren’t women” which made Madeley backpedal for his life, insisting that of course he wasn’t saying anything of the kind. By introducing genitalia into the conversation he was merely putting forward a possible argument that some lunatic fringe weirdo might still attempt to advance. “I don’t hold that opinion at all,” he insisted, like a man begging for his life.

“When a child is born they are identified and observed in a particular sex,” he continued, his mouth audibly drying, as anyone’s might when they know the words might be their last. “A child is born without sex,” Butler immediately rejoindered. “The child is informed [sic] without sex at the beginning, but anyway.” And there you had one of the other great beliefs of the time. The insistence that however many days we have left before we all burn to death, we might best use them pretending that the penis is a social construct invented only yesterday by Richard Madeley to give cover for his transphobia.

If our society’s sacred values have come to seem madly random and ill-thought through that is because they are. And if some of us object to them and would like to see them interrogated more regularly, more publicly and more assertively it is for a number of reasons.

The first is that the taboos and sacred values that we are currently embedding as a form of replacement religion are mad and bad in and of themselves. It is not good to tell children that they are unlikely to make it into adulthood. It is not wise to pretend that biological reality is merely a figment of some bigoted imagination. But it’s what comes next that is the real problem.

For a society softened up by such stupidity will in time lose the capacity to push back at anything and will fall for absolutely everything. We are relatively lucky that at present the worst the green extremists have done is some intermittent anti-environmental vandalism. We are lucky that the trans extremists have merely limited themselves to intimidating the occasional meeting of women’s rights activists.



The test comes when a society is forced to move on from these ideas to ones even more far-ranging and sinister. It’s not enough to just get with the beat. And if you do, then rest assured that the beat after next might be absolutely anything.

Men & women

THERE’S NO QUESTION OF OUR BIOLOGICAL SEX

COLIN WRIGHT EMMA HILTON

That is settled as a scientific fact, not a construct
Transgender ideology can take on a comical character, as in a recent American Civil Liberties Union commentary objecting to sales tax on tampons and similar products while pondering: “How can we recognise that barriers to menstrual access are a form of sex discrimination without erasing the lived experiences of trans men and non-binary people who menstruate, as well as women who don’t?”

Yet it’s one thing to claim that a man can identify as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly, we see a dangerous and anti-scientific trend towards the outright denial of biological sex.

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic,” an article in the scientific journal Nature declared in 2015. “Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

A 2018 Scientific American piece asserted that “biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male”.

And an October 2018 The New York Times headline promised to explain “Why Sex Is Not Binary”.

The argument is that because some people are intersex — they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics — the categories male and female exist on a spectrum, and are therefore no more than social constructs. If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favour of a new bespoke “gender identity”.

To characterise this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.

In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells — sperm and eggs, respectively — and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction. In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98 per cent of the time.

The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova. No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex spectrum or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.

There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorised as male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a spectrum or a social construct.

Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise — to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself — is a category error.

Denying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. It raises serious human rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.

Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. Female-only spaces are necessary because of the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty.

The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce.

The denial of biological sex also erases homosexuality, as same-sex attraction is meaningless without the distinction between the sexes. Many activists now define homosexuality as attraction to the “same gender identity” rather than the same sex. This view is at odds with the scientific understanding of human sexuality. Lesbians have been denounced as “bigots” for expressing a reluctance to date men who identify as women. The successful normalisation of homosexuality could be undermined by miring it in an untenable ideology.

Those most vulnerable to sex denialism are children. When they’re taught that sex is grounded in identity instead of biology, sex categories can easily become conflated with regressive stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Masculine girls and feminine boys may become confused about their own sex. The dramatic rise of “gender dysphoric” adolescents

— especially young girls — in clinics likely reflects this new cultural confusion.

The large majority of genderdysphoric youths eventually outgrow their feelings of dysphoria during puberty, and many end up identifying as homosexual adults. “Affirmation” therapies, which insist a child’s cross-sex identity should never be questioned, and puberty-blocking drugs, advertised as a way for children to “buy time” to sort out their identities, may only solidify feelings of dysphoria, setting them on a pathway to more invasive medical interventions and permanent infertility. This pathologising of sexatypical behaviour is extremely worrying and regressive. It is similar to gay “conversion” therapy, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into “proper” alignment with themselves.

The time for politeness on this issue has passed. Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex. When authoritative scientific institutions ignore or deny empirical fact in the name of social accommodation, it is an egregious betrayal to the scientific community they represent. It undermines public trust in science, and it is dangerously harmful to those most vulnerable.

Colin Wright is an evolutionary
biologist at Penn State University; Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of
Manchester.

Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex