Speaking Truth as a Human-Rights Offence

Recently, one of the most important conferences about modern politics, ethics, social policy and the influence of philosophy on contemporary culture was held in Killarney, Ireland. The theme was transgenderism, but because of the influence of transgender ideology in law, science, family relationships, language, human rights, religion, sports, medical ethics, employment and on how we define sex and gender, the event’s real significance pertained to what it means to be a free person in the early 21^st-century.

While debates about individualism versus collectivism are perennials in liberal democratic politics, the primary relevance of the Genspect ‘Bigger Picture Conference’ is that it was held at the same time, and in the same town, as the annual meeting of EPATH, the European Professional Association of Transgender Health, which is a subsidiary of WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.

The timing was deliberate because, up until now, a captured psychological and medical establishment has had the entire field of transgender ideology, and hence ‘gender-affirming care’ as it is euphemistically framed, to itself. Contrary to commonly accepted medical ethics, methodology and scientific truth have been recast to suit the ideology. Researchers and academics from all over the world have had their lives destroyed and careers cancelled because their work is not in accord, and does not confirm, the claims of transgender ideology. The aim of the Genspect conference was to present other perspectives on an issue which officially has only heard from an activist class advocating an extreme transgender agenda and which claims that all other views are transphobic – including, to give just one example (there are many), the extraordinary claim by Stonewall head Nancy Kelley that a lesbian who does not want to have sex with a transwoman — a man with complete with penis and testicles who identifies as a woman and as a lesbian – is ‘sexual racism’. To get the full flavour of contemporary irrationalism, dwell a little longer on Ms Kelley’s analysis. What it and she are saying is that being heterosexual or homosexual is now transphobic by definition. Fail to affirm everything the captured institutions of the establishment claim about transgender ideology and you’re summarily guilty as charged and deserving of any and all adverse consequences.

Here are some examples of this extraordinary state of affairs: stating that removing the healthy breasts of a teenage girl or the penis and testicles of a teenage boy is not an optimally good thing is transphobic. Questioning whether transitioning children is ethical is transphobic. Dare to point out that puberty blockers inflict irreversible and damaging medical effects, and you will be described as a transphobe. Imply that social contagion, spread via echo chambers on the internet, rather than changing social mores, is behind the unprecedented growth of teenage girls identifying as trans, and you’re a transphobe. Being the concerned parent of a child who claims to be trans and not immediately affirming the child’s new identity and you, too, are a transphobe. Decline to use someone’s nonsense pronouns and you are not merely transphobic but a bully to boot and, quite possibly, an advocate of gender genocide.

To be absolutely clear, the word ‘transphobia’ and its derivatives, as well as ‘hate’, ‘bigotry’, etc. in reference to any trans issue have been drained of meaning and no longer enjoy any relationship with truth. Do not take seriously anyone who uses these words to criticise opponents of trans ideology. They are activists, not genuine seekers after truth or advocates of human rights.

To put this in perspective, imagine a religious faith or a political philosophy, say Catholicism or socialism, were to insist not only that their view is the only correct and acceptable stance but also — and here’s the salient point — that everyone else must publicly affirm the metaphysical and epistemological truth of the ideology. Decline to do as bid and you will run the risk of having reputation besmirched and/or suffering professional suicide. Never think, not even for a moment, that uttering gender heresy, even in a whisper, will incur no consequences if overheard. Anyone with integrity would revolt against such an illiberal imposition. And yet this is exactly what transgender ideologues insist people must do to avoid the slander of being called a transphobe. It’s also what hate speech laws, currently being enacted from Queensland to Ireland and throughout the liberal democratic West, are attempting to do. It’s the logical equivalent of banning people’s right to say that 2 + 2 = 4, or, in this instance, that a man is not a woman.

All of these issues (and more) were discussed at the Genspect conference, which had some of the foremost experts on the subject of social and medical transitioning attend the conference and who gave speeches on the dishonesty of EPATH and WPATH — and on the various organisations around the world advancing an ideological agenda rather than a scientific investigation of the rights and wrongs of transgenderism. Below is Helen Joyce,  author of Trans: When Ideology meets Reality, giving the conference keynote speech. If you do one positive thing today, watch this video.

The overarching solution to the problem of trans rights, though, is simple: liberal democracy and free speech. But because of trans activists’ insistence that words have both a common, surface-level meaning and a deeper ideological meaning, the truth is ignored by policymakers who only hear the superficial rhetoric of human-rights. It’s how ordinary people find themselves in the Kafkaesque, Orwellian, and Huxleyan nightmare captured in this video. Who might ever have thought we would live in a world envisaged, to a remarkable degree, by the three most dystopian novelists of the 20^th-century.

Extraordinarily, the totality of contemporary culture and politics is a combination of distinct parts of their respective visions — and now all in one nightmarish package that encompasses the wholesale abuse of language as a political tool, the medicalisation of adolescent confusion and adult existential angst. Add, too, the use of bureaucracy as a means of furthering an agenda and blocking criticism of it. All this, we are told, for the common good.

Transgender ideology and its capture of formerly reputable scientific and medical institutions is one of the most serious issues facing societies today. All over the liberal democratic West, people are having their lives destroyed because they won’t affirm ideas that they know to be untrue. It’s a crisis that undermines the validity of liberal democracy and of reason and science as societally accepted arbiters of truth. Give in to this ideology and everything, no matter how irrational, will be allowed.

Think about that the next time someone tells you to be kind.