Recent events indicate that the struggle against the dehumanization represented by trans ideology is far from over. True, the U.K. has closed down the Tavistock child gender identity clinic, the U.S. is moving against allowing men to compete in women’s sports, and scientists are starting to free their research in this area from the grip of ideologues and activists. More celebrities are voicing their concerns: Malcolm Gladwell has expressed regret over his silence on a 2022 panel about the issue, claiming this was more the result of cowardice than conviction. No surprise there. How many celebrity advocates for trans rights have read any of the relevant philosophical or medical literature?
Despite the turning of the tide on the scientific (and to some extent the political) front, the situation with transgenderism is still ambiguous and remains a danger both to its victims—preventing them from obtaining proper care, rather than “affirmation,” for their condition—and to basic freedoms such as that of speech, something that once distinguished Western democracies from regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The evidence is all around us.
There was the widespread and pitiful use of “preferred pronouns” for the Annunciation Catholic School shooter in Minneapolis (one must respect a man’s identity politics even after he has slaughtered children at worship), the intimidation of a Canadian gender researcher (follow the science, but only to the extent it follows the pronoun preferences of the moment), and last week’s arrest of comedian and writer Graham Linehan as he disembarked in London from a transatlantic flight; Linehan was accused of “inciting violence” after posting anti-trans tweets on X. And yesterday, there was the tragic slaying of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, reportedly while speaking about trans mass killers, though details on the killer and his motivation have yet to emerge. In any event, Kirk faced threats and vitriol from trans activists throughout his career, and gave a number of de-transitioners a platform to speak. Now, his voice has been silenced.
All these indicate that trans misogyny, attacks on women’s safety, and opposition to freedom of speech continue, with the stakes becoming higher all the time. The trans issue is not simply about protecting children from hormonal and genital mutilation. We make a fatal error if we stop once that is achieved. The trans question is about the nature of public life and humanity as a whole. It is no surprise that it has gained traction in Western society at the moment when the very question of what it means to be human is now a source of social confusion rather than cohesion. And it is clear that this dehumanization will be pressed forward by all means necessary, including the use of violence.
The capitulation of the American cultural commentariat on the pronoun issue (helpfully summarized by Lionel Shriver in The Spectator) is no surprise, with the New York Times as always leading the way. And the real chaos that underlies the ostentatious moralism of these opinion writers and pundits has been exposed. When a member of a class that regards itself as innocent victims proves to be a malevolent victimizer, they have no coherent moral calculus by which to frame their response, revealing the amorality of their creed. But while elite pandering to pronoun preferences, even of murderers of children, is sadly no surprise, the response to Kirk’s murder defied belief. Before the barrel of the gun was cold, media pundits were fretting that it might be used by the administration to its own political advantage, and even that to think and speak certain thoughts—presumably including those that do not conform to the progressive denial of reality—will inevitably lead to violence. Blaming the victims is apparently justified in certain circumstances, not to mention making shameful public comments that Kirk’s widow and children might well see. Such people lack any semblance of decency. They have no sense of a shared humanity.
Back in the U.K., the arrest of Linehan for his tweets was another shocking escalation of the culture war. To those unfamiliar with his work, he was the writer of Father Ted, a cleverly absurd Irish comedy that brought the tradition of dark Gaelic humor, exemplified in works such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, to the small screen. He then went on to write The IT Crowd, another hit series. But in recent years, he has become notorious for doing what satirists always used to do: critiquing the smug pieties of the ruling class, in his case the sacred cow of that most absurd rebellion against reality, transgenderism. In this he has stood nearly alone, with so many of his earlier friends and collaborators now exposed not so much as anti-establishment as anti-that-old-establishment-to-which-they-did-not-belong.
Linehan was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow. While U.K. police do not typically carry firearms, they do so at airports. But why five of them, and why in a very public space where they would be armed? Linehan was not on the run or in hiding or brandishing a weapon. Perhaps they feared that Linehan would tell a joke and innocent bystanders would die laughing? More likely they were indulging in the level of theatrical drama they deemed necessary to send a signal to anyone else tempted to behave likewise. The chief of the Metropolitan police might whine about lack of clarity in the law, but the response of his officers was unambiguous: Tweets we don’t like, even from months ago, will be met with overwhelming armed force.
When I visited the U.K. this summer, I was struck by the relentless media mantra that Trump was destroying democratic freedoms. I would suggest there are numerous ways in which such freedoms are being killed. One of the more subtle is that of Havel’s greengrocers at the Gray Lady, NPR, and other news outlets abusing the English language to deny reality. One of the more obvious is the deployment of armed force to arrest a comedian for social media posts. Perhaps most obvious of all are media pundits who find ways to blame a murder victim for his own death, simply because he voices opinions not tolerated at cocktail parties in Manhattan or at the Illinois governor’s mansion.
