HONESTY CARRIES A HIGH PRICE

HOW crazy is identity politics? How hard is it to speak honestly now without getting burned and banned? Ask Holly Lawford-Smith. She’s a senior lecturer at Melbourne University, teaching climate ethics and race privilege, plus radical feminism, of course.

She’s lesbian, too, so is the very model of a modern Leftist academic. The last person you’d expect to be banned from Twitter, right?

But Lawford-Smith, who has fought for safe spaces for women, also refuses to believe that a transgender activist like, say, Britain’s Alex Drummond can now be called a woman, just because he says he is.

She refuses even more to call someone like Drummond a woman when he does not take hormones, and has kept his beard as well as his penis.

As Lawford-Smith puts it: “I can accept her claim that she has the gender identity ‘woman’ without accepting that having a ‘woman’ gender identity makes someone a woman.”

For saying something unfashionable, yet still so obvious, Lawford-Smith has become a pariah.

Twitter has suspended her for “hateful content”. A French magazine scrapped an interview with her.

But more worrying is the vicious response from three American professors, Robin Dembroff, Rebecca Kukla and Susan Stryker.

This trio demanded Britain’s Institute of Art and Ideas remove their articles from a website in which Lawford-Jones’ own piece appeared.

All four had been asked to write whether gender identity should replace sex as a definition in law, but the three Americans said their responses could not run alongside Lawford-Smith’s.

As Lawford-Smith puts it, these “establishment feminists” believe “if someone asserts with apparent sincerity that they feel like a woman — or is a woman — then the person is a woman”, and for Lawford-Smith to deny it is evil.

Indeed, the Americans said debating her would be like debating “whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior”.

Given Lawford-Smith publicly identifies as lesbian, that abuse is particularly sick. How ironic that her vilifiers claim to stand for tolerance.

Still, the abuse is one thing. Worse is that here are three more academics who think debate is wrong, and academics who argue with them should not just be smeared, but shunned and silenced.

Once again, debate is the enemy. Another sign of the death of reason.