Trans militants will plunge us into crisis
MILITANT transgender ideology is now a serious threat to our democratic freedoms. Contemptuous of women’s rights, childhood innocence and biological science, the supporters of this dogma increasingly resemble an intolerant cult bent on crushing dissent from their creed.
The latest heretic in their sights is Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Her organisation was established by the last Labour government to combat discrimination and to uphold essential liberties, yet today is in chaos as a group of activists wedded to the hardline trans agenda seeks to oust the Baroness from her post.
In the process of this attempted putsch, she has been labelled “a bigot”, “a fascist” and “scum”. And what crime has she committed to warrant this abuse? Simply that she has emphasised how the reality of biological sex is central to our laws on equality while she has also called for women-only spaces, like changing rooms and refuges, to be protected.
Only a few years ago, such a stance would have been simple, compassionate common sense. But in the Orwellian madhouse constructed by the trans revolutionaries, logic and decency have been turned into thought crimes.
Our public life has been gripped by a form of insanity, where even senior figures are willing to peddle blatant fabrications and delusions. So, interviewed on Tuesday, Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, absurdly claimed that a woman “quite clearly” can have a penis. The campaign of vilification
BBC radio news devoted chunks of airtime this week to concerns about vaping. But I found the panic overdone. After all, vapes have played a crucial part in the reduction of smoking. As someone with Parkinson’s, I find a few puffs on a cannabis oil grape-flavoured vape deliciously relaxing. It can help me ignore the preachy drone from Radio 4.
against Baroness Falkner is revealing because she is such an unlikely target for radical venom.
Born in Pakistan and married to a German academic, a former Liberal Democrat and employed for a time at the Commonwealth Secretariat, she seems like a classic member of the modern, progressive establishment.
But her liberal credentials count for nothing in the face of the howling lynch mob, who are interested only in domination not dialogue.
These campaigners love to pose as victims, yet they are the true bullies as they seek to blackmail institutions and silence critics. Their climate of intimidation is wrecking lives, as epitomised by the experience of the philosopher Kathleen Stock who was driven out of her post at Sussex University for her gender critical views. She is just one of a host of employees who have lost their jobs because they were deemed to have failed the trans purity test.
This is a movement that presents the best-selling author J K Rowling as an enemy of the people because of her support for women’s rights; that spreads vile misogyny on social media; that promotes lifechanging medical intervention on children – and argues that female prisons are the appropriate accommodation for cross-dressing male rapists. Some argue that the trans issue has been blown out of proportion, since only a tiny fraction of the population actually changes their gender. But that is far too complacent an attitude, which ignores how much our society is now convulsed by doctrinaire hysteria. It is little wonder mental health problems are soaring among young people when they are constantly encouraged to question their identities and embrace lunatic concepts, like the theory aired by a BBC TV children’s programme that there are more than 100 different genders. Similarly, womanhood is being marginalised and degraded by an ugly code that reduces femininity to a bunch of emotional and physical stereotypes.
Just as the integrity of women’s sports is menaced by arrogant female impersonators, so the fashionable obsession with objectifying the body helps to fuel the disturbing explosion in pornography.
When the World Health Organisation declares that “sexuality advice starts from birth”, we have truly plunged into a new age of decadence. Unless we reverse this indulgent, destructive trend, our civilization will slide into crisis.
● Fredrick Forsyth is away