It's a Matter of Faith
I love Andrew Doyle. He’s got such a lovely screen persona that I can’t help believing he’s lovely off screen too. And his Free Speech Nation monologues skewer the idiocy of the week perfectly.
This week he was talking about JK Rowling – not for the first time – and pointed out that despite the constant accusations of transphobia, activists can never provide a single example of her being transphobic.
Any evidence relies on dishonestly changing the meaning of the word “transphobia” and can therefore be discounted. Like this example:
I think Andrew is wrong about this though.
Many people far cleverer than me have noticed that Gender Identity Ideology operates like a religion. It requires faith from its adherents, and the chanting of mantras. Those who ask difficult questions are discouraged or even excommunicated. There is a price to pay for not observing the orthodoxy.
And with that in mind, it seems to me that Noah may well be pinning his colours to the mast in good faith.
The problem is we’ve all been assuming that when activists say “trans women are women” they can’t really mean that because we can see that it’s not true.
“No”, we tell ourselves. “What they mean is that trans identified men should be treated as if they are women. They mean it symbolically in the way that the Eucharist wine is symbolically the blood of Christ for CofE priests.”
But I’m starting to think that we should take them at their word.
I can’t know if Noah Michelson is sincere, but some activists appear to really believe that trans identified men are women. They seem to sincerely believe in gender identity. Not as an idea, but as something real that defines what it means to be a man or a woman. And if this sounds ridiculous, consider that for Catholics the communion bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ through transubstantiation. I don’t say this in any way to mock belief in transubstantiation which is sincerely and deeply held by many, but to point to the power of faith.
Some people, it seems, genuinely consider JK Rowling (and the rest of us who do not believe in gender identity in this way) to be transphobic. Because for them, “transphobia” is the lack of belief in the reality and primacy of gender identity.
It really doesn’t matter to them if JKR says she has trans friends. Or that she loves trans people. Or that she would march with them if she thought their rights had been denied. None of that matters. She has denied the central article of faith.
If anything, her claims to love trans people makes it all worse because it makes her a heretic. Someone who could and should have been on their side but chose the other lot.
Women who hold that biological sex defines who is a man or a woman and bang on about our need for single-sex spaces and safeguarding. Who won’t accept men in women’s sports. Who point out the vulnerability of those women who have suffered violence at the hands of men. They’re the worst transphobes of all and must be silenced by any means possible.
Not just because we’re women, but because the minute a believer thinks about these objections they have to make the (ironically binary) faith-based choice: are trans women really women? Or are they not? Should gender identity have primacy, or should it not?
It's what caused Nicola Sturgeon such a problem with Adam Graham. There could be no fudging, and she failed the test. Sturgeon demonstrated that she no more believes that “trans women are women” than the vast majority of the Scottish electorate. She was caught in a lie.
You either allow these men into women’s spaces because you believe they are women. Or you do not.
So arguing about whether the rapist Adam Graham is a “woman” now he’s calling himself Isla Bryson misses the point.
The question is, do you believe that everyone has a gender identity that defines whether they are a man or a woman and about which nobody can or will ever lie when asked?
I do not. And if that is what now passes for transphobia, so be it.