Biology Denial - the "Kevin the teenager from Harry Enfield" of political philosophies
Why biology denial is the most adolescent and mediocre of social forces
Imagine being so gullible you were persuaded that every human possessed a hitherto unknown gender soul. Imagine then you required the teaching of this eccentric belief in schools. Imagine closing what passed for your mind to the objection there was no evidence for such souls. Imagine then demanding the field of medicine accommodate this dogma and calling for radical, irreversible surgery for minors who couldn’t consent to tattoos. Imagine simply ignoring suggestions this was homophobic or misogynist. Imagine extending your belief far beyond the evidence of your own eyes and demanding women’s sport practically cease to operate as a fair category. Imagine morally countenancing vulnerable female prisoners being locked up with male bodied sex offenders and simply ignoring the painfully obvious objections to such a course. Imagine practising a faith so brittle and thin-skinned even the mildest criticism was shouted down as “hate”. Imagine being so intellectually incurious and fundamentally stupid.
We don’t have to imagine any of this of course because we live in an age of increasing political and social dysfunction brought about by the craze of denying the realities of biology. We have gay conversion by gender, where little camp boys are told they’re really girls trapped in the wrong bodies. We have woman routinely sacked or forced from jobs because they dared to say a woman is an adult human female. We have that most poisonous of afflictions a Western democracy can suffer - McCarthyism by gender - a place where it’s not very difficult to find a person conspiratorially saying in hushed tones “of course I agree with you but I would never dare say so”. That gender rules by fear in this way tells you much. It recalls Machiavelli’s advice to Princes who could never be loved by their subjects and have decided that it is better to be feared than deposed.
For modern societies to be bought low by some old religion of scripture would at least have some dignity about it, to see great old democracies under sustained stress from a creed that dabbles in psycho-babble, pseudo-science and cult-like silencing tactics is quite another. Biology denial may be many things but it is not an intellectual equal to the forces that oppose it as even a brief comparison between say Professors Stock and Bulter will demonstrate.
Biology denial has something of the adolescent mind to it. It presumes a complete world view in the way an arrogant 18 year old first discovering the Communist Manifesto does. It chants mantras about “trans rights” but can never identify the missing rights in question. It talks passionately (and in rather Oprah Winfrey-esque) about being “your true self” yet endlessly promotes uniform (and often gruesome) body modification and meme-like anime aesthetic styles. It often pretends at great knowledge and will produce endless YouTube videos about bourgeois preoccupations such as the definition of “non-binary” status, yet such videos will never tell you more than this amounts to very much more than deeply suburban (and quite unremarkable) gender nonconformity. It is what it eats and so it produces only pornography and poorly-worded slash fiction, there are no great pieces of biology-denier art, no great poems and certainly no organic musical culture emerging from it.
Like an adolescent, it is prone to tantrums. Any dissent is construed as “hate”. It cannot imagine that there could be a reasoned, nuanced or genuine opposition to the faith and so it closes it’s minds not just to the opposing merits of the case, but to the discussion of the merits of policy generally. It makes ridiculous, hyperbolic and fundamentally teenage accusations, most recently we had “Helen Joyce is calling for genocide” just as one might hear a spoiled teenager slam their door and update their social media status to “my parents hate me”.
“Gender” is a thing half-formed just like an adolescent mind is.
It has the start of a political prospectus for the reformation of society but is no further than three words into several paragraphs and it has no idea where the sentence is going. It has decided it has all the answers but will brook no questions. It is King Joffrey to our nervous courtiers, an irrational, ill tempered and volatile force not yet old enough to control it’s impulse for recreational sadism. It is rule by a mad king and rule by a young king.
Biology denial is thus utterly unequal to any of the debates it dabbles in as is becoming increasingly obvious in the UK with its descent into middle-class eccentricity.
Take the conversion therapy disaster for Stonewall in the UK.
First, Stonewall required there be no government consultation at all because this movement now despises democracy and the great unwashed questioning it. The adults in the room pointed out this debate was principally about the fundamentally grown up question of proper clinical paediatric practice. Being a childish force it had no answer other than to get a hashtag trending on twitter.
Second, many organisations such as Gay Men’s Network, pointed out that homophobia was now a safeguarding concern at gender clinics. Being unable to construe opposition as anything other than hate Stonewall et all had no response. Nor, tellingly, did they have a single word to say regarding homophobia here, a position many might think odd, given the claims made by that charity.
Finally, when a number of organisations succeeded in persuading the government to take homophobia seriously and wait for the interim expert review into this area of medicine we were treated to the full teenage strop. Stonewall and it’s numerous state-funded proxy charities announced they would flounce out of a government conference because, something, something, something..transphobia. (A response that frankly many 16 year olds would be ashamed of.) Finally, Stonewall hooked up with the Good Laugh Project, (a part time comedy show which loses high profile cases for public entertainment) to report our own UK Human Rights regulator to a UN committee whose members include those paragons of gay rights, Russia and Uganda. With devastating understatement the Minister of State in committee describes this eccentric move as “not doing this country any favours at all”. The coda to the story is the UN had little difficulty in telling this formerly serious national charity where to stick it.
The ill-fated legal adventures of the gender borg are objectively hilarious of course but consider if you will the above a sort of tragic vignette as to what a poor joke a formerly serious charity has become. These antics have objectively diminished the seriousness with which any government would treat those who claim to speak for gay people. They infection of biology denial has given gay rights a teenage character, a sort of national embarrassment like a badly behaved adolescent at a family get together. A social force that has fallen for a fad, irrelevantly stamping its foot.
There is, of course, a deeper and more obvious tragedy.
Gay rights, such as the right of to grow up free from conversion therapy by gender, the right to live your live free from abuse from your own charities calling you a “sexual racist”, the right to disagree without cancellation, the right to be taken seriously as a minority group with adult political concerns fundamentally distinct from heterosexual “asex, aro, demiromantic queers”, the right to unedited gay history, to a legacy of gay people fighting for gay rights instead of being told “you owe all your rights to trans people” (a wicked lie designed to rob us of agency and dignity) - all these rights are under serious threat.
If there was ever a time gay people needed groups to ditch teenage misbehaviour and get serious about adult policy making and discussion than that time is surely now.
"The number of people currently claiming to have a gender identity is less than the number who were claiming aliens were probing their bumholes 20 years ago. Just because a phenomenon has been studied doesn't mean it exists outside a belief in it" @ Shatterface (Twitter) 3:02 PM May 9, 2021
And the gender dysphoria agenda is being pushed so aggressively, even onto tiny kids. A couple of days ago, I wrote a review of the newly re-opened Burrell collection in Glasgow. One of my criticisms was the dumbing down of the information about the artworks, directing this information at small children instead of at adults who could interpret it for small children. But some of the plaques also pushed the transgender a gender for these same small children. I don’t know if it’s possible to post photos here, but if it is, I can post an example.