The Little Mermaid, updated

NOTE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: due to other commitments, I’m struggling to post fortnightly as originally promised. So I’ve taken the decision to pause paid subscriptions for the moment. I know times are financially very tough for many, and are likely to become tougher soon. This piece, as all my other pieces on Substack, are free to read. Thank you for your understanding.

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When it comes to typing out what is now happening in our institutions thanks to lunatic LGBT pressure groups, there are just too many sentences that make your brain scream. “The council’s menopause strategy was reviewed by two external agencies, producing the decision to remove the word ‘woman’”... “The violent male sex offender was placed in a women’s prison on the grounds of her vulnerability”... I tell you, it’s all too much. Trying to process it mentally, you feel the pull of the gin bottle at 10 in the morning.

Hats off to those who can still face it, but personally I don’t think I can write one more straight-faced sentence about the ludicrous, off-the-charts batshittery of mainstream LGBT organisations. And believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve just spent the morning attempting a serious piece on the current legal attack on the charity status of the LGB Alliance by Mermaids. This case has reached court this week, reportedly providing some jaw-dropping moments from Mermaids’ witnesses along the way. But really, there’s only so long you can spend trying to be bland and measured about a situation this insane.

Funded by the National Lottery, deeply embedded in many of our public sector organisations, and championed by many a celeb and politician, Mermaids UK is an organisation that - let’s just say – seems to have a remarkably child-like worldview. From the available evidence, Mermaids staff seem to see the world as structured like a children’s fairytale. There are goodies and baddies. Mysterious things no-one can understand keep happening. To save your child from evil, it’s important to keep incanting the right spells and taking the right potions.  And so on.

So - in lieu of the serious piece I can no longer bring myself to write -  I thought I’d write this general worldview up as the pastiche of a fairytale it really is. As you read, remember that versions of this particular story are also operative in educational settings, NHS services, social services, the judiciary, the media, and police forces across the land. And then be sure to run screaming with manic hollow laughter to the nearest darkened room.

The Little Mermaid, updated

Once upon a time, at a hospital where Birthing-Persons give birth to children of indeterminate sex, a trans child is being born [1].

This is a special child. Unbeknownst to all, something called a gender identity lies within the newborn as it innocently sleeps. A bit like the seed in Jack’s pocket yet to grow into a beanstalk, this gender identity has yet to germinate and unfold. But one day it will.

Soon thereafter, the sex-assigning fairies arrive at the hospital, and sort the newborns into two groups: half into boy-babies, and half into girl-babies. Our hero is assigned “boy” by the sex-assigning fairies.  Nobody objects, for they know no different. The gender identity needs time to germinate. It is not ready yet.

Time passes.

One day, on his fourth birthday [2], our trans child wakes up and realises that there is something inside him – or rather, inside her - demanding attention. Quite mysteriously[3], her gender identity has somehow arrived, and it fails to match her original sex-assignment by the fairies. A gender identity is a bit like the magic mirror in Snow White - it never lies. There has been a mistake at birth. Our hero now realises that “he” is a she, and that she is really a girl.

Our heroine tells her parents about her gender identity. But they have already noticed that she is different. She is small for her age, she is feminine, she is not like other boys. They nod sagely when she tells them. For they had already suspected.

After the child realises that she is a girl, a clock starts to tick -  a bit like the clock in Cinderella, about to strike twelve. This gender identity must be affirmed at all costs by those around her. It’s a race against time! Spectres of misery, mental health deterioration, and even the possibility of suicide lurk around the corner, should the family fail[4].  

Not only must her parents treat her as a girl from now on, they must ensure that siblings, grandparents, teachers, family friends, and medical professionals do too. They all must use her new name and respect her new pronouns. And they must never, ever refer to her original and erroneous sex-assignment, for fear of distressing her. For - like the Princess so delicate she could feel a small pea under layers and layers of bedding – she is highly sensitive to events that ordinary mortals would not mind.

More time passes.  As our heroine reaches adolescence, she starts to feel a secret interest in boys at school. She starts to feel self-conscious around them. She gets crushes. This reassures her. She thinks it is further evidence that she is really a girl.

But by her thirteenth birthday, storm clouds are gathering. Her body is swelling in places that girl’s bodies don’t normally swell, and failing to swell in others where they do. She is keenly aware of the emerging differences between herself and other girls. A new race against time begins. Once more her mental health, and perhaps even her future life, is in peril.

Her parents make the journey with her to procure the special potion that will save her. Our heroine takes the potion. Time is now frozen. For as long as she takes the potion, like Peter Pan she will not grow up. She and her parents are relieved. Disaster has been averted once again.

Meanwhile, other dangers lurk. Our heroine must also be protected from the evil baddies in the world: from the transphobes and the bigots at the LGB Alliance, for instance. These people pretend to worry about what social transition does to children, or about the effects of puberty blockers upon young bodies, or about whether gay or autistic youths are being confused by societal narratives into thinking they are members of the opposite sex. They masquerade as reasonable and caring - but, like the evil witch in Hansel and Gretel, or the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, they are not what they seem[5].

Equally, our heroine must be kept away from any therapist who might suggest to her that she is not really a girl. This would be “conversion therapy”, and it is something that only evil transphobic baddies would attempt. For, like the genie in Aladdin, once it is out of the bottle, a gender identity is very hard to get back in and must be listened to.

Generally speaking, whatever bad things happen to our heroine during her teenage years, transphobia is always the cause, and more affirmation of her gender identity is always the magical solution. If she is bullied, or mentally unwell, or does badly at school, or has dark thoughts, it is because of the transphobes. No other cause is possible. All around her must keep chanting the spells to see the evil transphobes ultimately defeated.

More time passes.

Our hero is now 18, and small and undeveloped compared to her peers. She has not gone through puberty. Like Snow White asleep, she has never been kissed.

It is now time for her to make the final crossing into womanhood, courtesy of a surgeon’s knife. Like the Little Mermaid, crossing over will feel as if a sword is being passed through her body. And afterwards - also like the Little Mermaid - she won’t be able to return.

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[1] In the words of Mermaids Chair of Trustees, Dr Belinda Bell in court this week: “"I'm not sure that people come out of the womb with a sex".

[2] A parent testimony currently on the Mermaids website approvingly describes a male child realising he was a girl at four, and thereafter being treated as a girl by his family.

[3] Mermaids website, ‘The toys and clothing question’: “Discussing gender identity is difficult enough, but for children and their families it can feel impossible to put things into words”.

[4] Mermaids frequently make expansive claims about the supposed connection between failing to affirm a child’s gender identity, and suicide. See for instance here.

[5] From Mermaids’ witness, Paul Roberts, head of the LGBT Consortium to the court, 12th September 2022 as reported by Tribunal Tweeets: Barrister: “you believe that [the LGB Alliance] have deliberately adopted a positive stance to deceive the Charity Commission and the wider community. Paul Roberts: “yes that is correct”.

Photo credit: Kristal O'Neal

On writing

I write this in Paris, where I’ve come for a week’s change of scene and to catch up with work. I haven’t written on this Substack for longer than my advertised schedule, for which I apologise to any impatient subscribers. A lot of things in my life have changed in the last year, and one of them is that I’m now entirely in charge of my own routine, with a lot of competing demands on my time. This is liberating in many ways and in other ways disastrous, for easily imagined reasons.

I find that one of the slightly paralysing things about having a Substack is that you can write about anything you want.  Perhaps others find this an unmitigated joy but I do not. My mind gapes passively at the possibilities stretching endlessly before it. Occasionally ideas reach in and grab me, but not as often as I’d like. Unlike my other current writing gig (a fortnightly column for UnHerd), I don’t have an efficient editor feeding me new ideas, or nudging me to file by 5pm. My inner editor needs a decent managing editor, and my inner managing editor needs an editor-in-chief. There’s just no satisfactory chain of command in there.

 I also don’t yet have a clear sense of the game I’m playing here – what the rules are that I need to respect, or could deliberately break for effect. In other words, I don’t quite know what my genre is. Yes, I could endlessly mine the rich seam of total lunacy in queer culture (and don’t worry - I’ll be back at that coalface soon) but I don’t want to only do that. And nor do I want to turn into one of those culture warriors whose official persona has got too close to their subscriptions base. I have no acerbic take on critical race theory. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s true.

 In these circumstances, what else to do but to fall back on that old staple of the blocked writer and write about the practice of writing itself? I am in Paris, after all. A couple of nights ago, I drank too much with a real writer, a novelist and journalist (hello, Robert) – someone who takes writing very seriously and does it beautifully. We sat at his neighbourhood bar in the 10th, watching minor pavement dramas unfold, with various glamorous locals dropping by at our table intermittently to smoke, chat, and complain. I’ve never wanted to live in Paris more. In between, Robert did me the courtesy of talking to me about my writing, in a way hardly anyone has ever done: not about the content but about the form. It was a thrill.

From about the age of 11 til my twenties, I wanted to be a writer, by which I meant a novelist. In the piles of books I lugged home from the library to read at the weekend, the clever weirdo heroines of the stories I liked most would want to be novelists too. Jessica Vye in A Long Way From Verona; Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture The Castle, Jo March in the Little Women books, Joey from The Chalet School series. Being a teenager though, I didn’t do much about it, except to ask for a typewriter for my birthday, and keep an extremely boring diary. (“Got up. Rearranged the furniture in my room. Read some Hamlet”, I seem to remember one riveting entry going).

Fictional characters who wanted to be authors also tended to be readers, and through them I learnt what else I should be reading in order to be a fully rounded person, according to the various archaic 19th and early 20th century visions of their creators. Dickens, Bunyan, Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Flaubert, Cervantes are some of the big names I remember struggling with in my early teens, probably way too early, because I assumed my development required it. I think it’s possible that the more of the greats I read, the less I felt able to ever see myself in the same profession. I then went to University and studied French literature, but with a view to taking it all apart not losing myself ecstatically in it. Fiction became work, and I disengaged emotionally. By the time I hit my mid-twenties I had abandoned the ambition of being a “proper” author by my own lights, and sublimated it into writing a philosophy PhD about imagination and film. In lieu of writing fiction, fiction became my philosophical topic and the focus of my academic career.

Writing philosophy is an art, in its own way. There are rules and you have to learn them – indeed, you have to work them out yourself because nobody will ever tell you what they are. After you’ve done that, you can satisfy some level of creativity by working ingeniously within the constraints already set: the canonical views about the topic in question, the existing objections made by others, the range of argumentative moves generally permitted, and so on. People pretend that the aim of academic philosophy is truth, but more often I think it’s to make an original and clever point that isn’t obviously false. Once you know the rules, you can occasionally break them too. Most academics do predictable things, or make tiny adjustments to existing bodies of thought. Truly brilliant philosophers pull off breathtakingly unexpected moves, or even change the rules for everyone after them.

With a few exceptions, though, most philosophers are uninterested in writing with an eye to aesthetics. I know I wasn’t. I was busy churning out the required quota of at least one article per year, aiming for (at least) an “internationally excellent” publication according to UK benchmarks, with a silent prayer that it didn’t suffer the abject humiliation of being “recognized nationally”. Writing well was not particularly a concern, though of course I didn’t want to do it badly. Nor was it a concern of many others I knew. Academic philosophy generally is the last place anyone sane would go to find mellifluous prose. Pretensions of authors in that direction are usually strangled, if not at birth then at least by the time of the second referee’s report.

The pseudo-technicality of the discipline is part of the problem, particularly in the branch of philosophy I was in (what’s known as “analytic” philosophy). People can’t just be told things; an audience A has to be told of proposition p on the basis of an informant I asserting sentence S. There’s also a general reticence to say anything straightforwardly. No philosopher has ever used a positive when a double negative would leave him less exposed to possible objection. For instance, you never say a particular intellectual position is plausible; you say it is “not implausible”.  As the double negatives mount up, so does an ugly congestion of sense.

Another problem is that you write with anonymous referees in mind – referees who, you are aware, could be anyone from superstar professors to pedantic graduate students. Writing for this ill-defined a hypothetical audience has the effect of making you spell out simple things in overly laboured ways, as if you can’t trust the mind of the reader to grasp them on their own. (Indeed, based on my experience of anonymous referees, quite often you can’t). Meanwhile there’s a simultaneous tendency, at least unconsciously, to gin up the obfuscation and impenetrability in other ways, in hope of an impression of depth and seriousness and the avoidance of devastating objections to your central thesis that will put back publication for at least another year. The former effect means that, for instance, you can’t use a demonstrative like “this” or “that” without spelling out what exactly it demonstrates. The latter means that you can read the same three pages in a mainstream journal in your research area approximately 46 times and still not have a clue what the hell it is saying. Even when you wrote it.

For whatever reason, most philosophers just don’t care much about form, caring only about content – even when their topic is the form-content distinction itself. What formal tropes they adopt tend to be nicked from other philosophers, not because it was good writing in the first place but only because it makes you look more sophisticated, or like part of an in-crowd. When I started out, I was reading a lot of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, which in practice meant my authorial voice sounded like it had just retired hurt from the hockey pitch at a 1930s girls’ boarding school. Others seem to prefer the atmosphere of a 18th Century parsonage, where people “utter” rather than speak, questions are “nice” in Jane Austen’s sense, problems are approached like maidens “at first blush”, certain assumptions are treated as “brute”, and people inexplicably say “thus-and-so” a lot. Each of these verbal tics then re-emerges incongruously in a thousand PhD theses written by hipster 20-somethings.

I’m not pretending I was immune to any of these habits. I was not. One strange feature of my current situation is that sales of my only academic monograph – a dry and technical book about imagination and fiction - have increased significantly, something fairly unusual with an academic book that’s several years old. I feel very sorry for the poor sods that joyfully crack that spine like they’ve discovered Material Girls: The Prequel. May I take this opportunity to apologise to any readers here to whom this applies.

When writing for academic audiences, it was always obvious to me that there were certain things I couldn’t say. Understandably, jokes and irreverence were out for nearly everybody, as was any reference to sex - though the latter tended to emerge unconsciously anyway. (I first realised this when re-reading an old article of mine about pornography in which - in an attempt to talk about the perceiving self-  I found I had talked about “the bare seat of experience”.)

But there were other more subtle boundaries too - so subtle that I was unaware of them consciously. In academia, for a long time, there were things I could not even think let alone write. What would have been the use to me of questioning the catechism of the modern progressive university ? My career progression depended on assent, as did my social status at work and an easy life. Indeed, one interesting thing I observed in my last days at Sussex was that uniformly, the very few colleagues prepared to stand up for me publicly were those already considered “difficult” by peers.

The most I could do, for most of my working life, was to “entertain” the falsehood of various progressive principles for short and focused periods, safe in the knowledge that my cognitive objective was really to find ways to see off objections to those principles and so further cement their status. What I couldn’t do was let myself genuinely acknowledge the open possibility that some established progressive principle was wrong. But then my university started telling me that transwomen were women. And I belatedly found that even I had my limits for epistemic sleepwalking.

Nowadays, as I say, I write exactly what I like. This freedom may be somewhat paralysing but it’s also the best thing ever. No obsessive grad student, or Gender Studies professor panicking about their career, can whip up a mob on social media or report what I publish to my superiors - because there are no superiors. No anonymous referee can defend their patch by finding disingenuous reasons to reject my submissions. No boss can haul me in for a frosty chat - or worse, a friendly one.

And I can write in whatever emotional register I feel like. Writing as an academic, I always did have trouble suppressing my contemptuous side. It would emerge, half-strangled but still perceptible, towards arguments or authors I found fatuous. Editors would patiently reign me in. Now I can be scathing - outright mocking, even. It’s glorious. And nor do I have to wait years between creation and publication. I press “send”, and thousands of people – you, even! - read me, within days. It can be scary, especially knowing that so many enemies stand ready to pore over every word, and extract bits in order to ridicule or defame me to audiences I’ll never see. But it’s still worth it.

Occasionally now, I get approaches from friendly faces working in Universities, inviting me to apply for full-time jobs there. I politely decline. I know that in leaving mainstream academia, I’ve inadvertently gained something incredibly precious, which enlivens my life immeasurably. I’ve gained a full-throated voice. How could I ever go back?

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On guilt-by-association

I’m currently isolating in bed, on day seven of a second bout of Covid. I’m confined to my room so I don’t infect others. In conjunction with recent events in the grassroots feminist Twittersphere, somehow this experience is putting me in mind of a different kind of presumed infection: the implication of guilt-by-association. When you wield guilt-by-association as a weapon, or feel this kind of guilt yourself, the charge is that there has been association with Bad People, and that an infection has occurred as a result. And it might be contagious.

I’ve witnessed the operation of this critique in various settings for a few years now. It is often used against supporters of my academic freedom, both to criticise them for associating with me and to deter others, so naturally I have a personal interest in examining its structure. Here, for instance, is University of Ghent Professor of Philosophy Eric Schliesser criticising an academic organisation for inviting me to give a talk, thereby suggesting that there is a “debate with sides” here, something which he describes as “not a neutral act”.  Here’s another philosophy professor, Mark Lance, writing in Inside Higher Ed and criticising 12 fellow philosophers who had signed a letter in favour of my academic freedom, comparing the signatories to those who would defend the permissibility of arguing that Native American people were “the devil, likely lacked souls, were more akin to beasts than humans and absolutely must be at least converted, and if not, removed (i.e. killed)”. And here’s academics Robin Dembroff, Rebecca Kukla, and Susan Stryker ostentatiously withdrawing from an online symposium at the Institute of Art and Ideas when they realise that they had been, in their words, subject to a “non-consensual co-platforming” with me and others. In each of these cases, there is an attempt to demonstrate the guilt of those who would associate with me - even where the associates in question have been careful to specify that they do not agree with me about the perniciousness of gender identity ideology.

But I also see guilt-by-association used by feminists against other feminists. And indeed I have used it in the past myself. Within left-leaning feminism, as within the Left generally, it is a heavily used tool. There is sharp criticism of any feminist who would associate for strategic reasons with those on the Right, and in particular with the Christian Right in the US.  After the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, this dispute has been reignited online - and then some. Readers who keep up with internecine feminist wars will know who and what I’m talking about, and for those that don’t, it doesn’t matter. My point is not to get caught up in specifics. In a way that is what the hovering threat of guilt-by-association wants me to do – to justify, explain, exculpate particular people, or myself. But I feel no guilt. My aim instead is to examine the structure of this kind of accusation, and what it might mean.

It’s important to notice that the person criticised for their associations - call this person “the Associate”- doesn’t have to share the character flaws or disgraceful opinions of the people with whom she associates, in order to be subject to critique. In fact, in most cases it is probable that the case against the Associate in this respect is at least unproven. For if she obviously did share those flaws or opinions, there would be a much quicker and more direct route to criticism of her, simply by pointing this out. Still, though, as my opening analogy suggests, I suspect that this reasonable point is often hidden in the visceral images of infection, contagion, and contamination in the emotional driving seat.

Sometimes guilt-by-association is even supposed to operate at several removes. For instance, this article (hosted by an organisation I vehemently support, written by a woman I respect) posits guilt-by-association for those UK feminists who associate with US feminists who associate for strategic reasons with the US religious right (= two removes). And it also posits some guilt-by-association for “a larger group” in the UK, who “whilst having no such links, either endorse this strategy or refuse to acknowledge it exists” (= three removes). That this larger group of women apparently should be deemed somewhat guilty for “refusing to acknowledge” the existence of the guilt of those with whom they associate is a further characteristic feature of this style of manoeuvre. In a moral universe in which guilt is presumed to travel fast as lightening, failing to publicly disassociate yourself from what others deem to be bad behaviour is also treated as deserving of some penance.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that attempts to induce guilt-by-association often try to collapse the moral gap between Associate and those with whom she associates. Generally speaking, inducing guilt in another person doesn’t tend to be a particularly rational process. Despite this, I would still like to consider the matter from a rational point of view.

The first thing to notice is that an ambiguity is built into many discussions – is the problem supposed to be simply associating with Bad People privately or doing so publicly? If it was the latter, this presumably would leave room for backroom associations, collaborations, and deals, where these are judged to be strategic.  So I’ll take each possibility in turn, starting with private associations.

At the extreme end, there is sheer revulsion at the thought of associating with someone, even only privately, who is assumed to be completely and utterly evil. You should not associate with completely and utterly evil people, in any capacity. Ever. Case closed.

I do not disagree with the general premise here, but clearly this argument is a sledgehammer when applied to many people on the Right. In a great book called The Dark Knight and The Puppet-Master, Chris Clarke documents how the Left tends to be susceptible to the fallacious guiding myth that a sliding scale operates between Left and Right, coinciding with one between Good and Bad. (Take a wild guess at who the good ones get to be.) This view has been expressed to me sincerely many times, most boldly by a university colleague and former friend who once told me that the more left-wing someone is, the nicer they are. After four years of being defamed unfairly, mostly by lefties, mostly for reasons of social capital – including by the bloke that originally said this to me – I can tell you categorically that this is false.

Not only does the Dark Knight myth romanticise those on the Left, it unfairly demonises many on the Right, who are acting out of their own set of positive values, however (one may judge) incoherently or imperfectly. Not every Tory is a swivel-eyed Thatcherite neoliberal lunatic - and for all I know, even some of these may have a soul somewhere. Many have a vision of a good society in which freedoms and social responsibilities are balanced. Being wrong about how to achieve this, or about how to rank social priorities in the first place, doesn’t make you a monster.

The same goes, I feel compelled to record, for many religious people with qualms about abortion – who after all might be coming at that position from many different directions, from Catholic to Muslim to Hindu and beyond. And I presume it’s also true of some evangelical Christians. I wouldn’t trust my vote, my healthcare, my bodily autonomy, my children’s education, or my overall set of values to any of these people, but that is not the point here.

There is a further argument used, concerning the impermissibility of private associations with Bad People, which refers to the importance of maintaining your “principles”. This point is often invoked by feminists in their invective against such associations. But this seems to assume that the set of relevant principles is quite narrow.  Are you inevitably inconsistent in your principles if you are an atheist pro-choice feminist who associates for purely strategic reasons with a religious anti-abortion anti-feminist? What if you also have the principle: “sometimes associations with political enemies are strategically useful for furthering political goals?” It is obvious to anyone who works in politics that bipartisan associations often can be useful. In many political systems, it would be impossible to get valuable things done otherwise. Why should feminists in particular have to keep their hands squeaky clean at the expense of choosing what they think will be effective action?

This now moves me towards consideration of public associations with political opponents, and objections against them. For I assume it will be quickly objected to my last point that strategic associations between feminists and their political enemies are not in fact effective. Ever.

The main objection usually offered here is about how such associations might appear to third parties on the Left. In a nutshell, this objection says that the existence of such public associations will confirm the suspicions of other left-wingers and liberals, who have always suspected that women sceptical of gender identity ideology were in the grip of rightist, reactionary, anti-woman thinking, and will see this point confirmed in any such public associations.  Thus the credibility of gender-critical women will be tarnished within this group.

Note that this objection could only possibly be of psychological relevance to women who already considered themselves to be on the Left – as many of the women habitually criticised in this regard are not. Why should women who are not on the Left care how those on the Left see them? (Again the spectre of the more irrational side of guilt-by-association arises: but aren’t these women morally suspect anyway, simply because they are not on the Left?) But in any case, moving on: even as it pertains to left-wing women, I find this argument to be unconvincing when offered as a blanket reason to avoid any such associations.

To be clear, I think it’s true that some on the Left will be deterred from thinking more deeply about the problems with gender identity ideology, if they are aware of alliances between existing critics of such ideology and people on the Right. This will be true, for instance, of people with a very shallow, cautious, or essentially contrarian response to political issues, who wait to find out what opponents think before forming a view in opposition to this. If these are the people the Left wants to win over, then they probably should do as suggested, and avoid the associations in question.

But there are also many on the Left who who are not so shallow or contrarian, who can grasp basic humane points about children’s health or women’s rights without waiting to see who else agrees with them; who can understand that people across political divides can agree that water is wet, and that sterilising young people or putting rapists in women’s prisons is wrong; and who also can grasp precisely the points I am making in this essay, about the value of sometime associations with political opponents in order to achieve wider goals.

Perhaps even more importantly, there are also a lot of people not on the Left, or even particularly on the Right – relatively apolitical people - who also can grasp these basic humane points in relation to the impacts of gender identity ideology, and who also don’t think tribally about who else might agree or disagree. This is arguably the vast majority of people, including women who it would be useful to reach. If those who strategically associate with people on the Right do so, the better to get the message out to these apolitical people in particular – and surely this is a thoroughly worthwhile goal, since there are so many of them - then I see no problem with the effectiveness of that plan in principle. It is perhaps to be expected that women on the Left would specially prioritise the good opinions and agreement of fellow travellers on the Left, but this doesn’t mean that it is the only possibly useful goal.

There is also a challenge here for those left-wing feminists who freely use guilt-by-association against other women, and especially against those who are not particularly on the Left, which includes the apolitical majority. How strategic is it really to launch scathing public attacks about the associations of other gender-critical women, knowing that this will inevitably cause many of them to feel humiliated and defensive and exposed? How wise is it to insinuate that through these associations these women are evil or at least in league with evil people, and so morally contaminated themselves?  If the aim in doing so is to demonstrate the author’s own purity to those imaginary allies on the Left she hopes will one day appear like White Knights around the corner, that is one thing – though whether they will ever come is quite another. But if the aim is to win these women round to your point of view – or even just to appeal to the neutral witnesses looking on in confusion, seeing only paternalistic, lofty attempts to judge and shame women for not understanding arcane political relationships between people they have never heard of - I think this particular strategy is counterproductive.

It seems to me that anticipating how imagined others will react to a particular association, and how this in turn might then affect oneself, is at the heart of why guilt-by-association is so often used by women against other women. For women tend to be particularly alive to the intricate, mutually referring structures of the social world in an intuitive way. (Perhaps I’m wrong but it is my suspicion that the peculiar degree of feminist agonizing about dodgy associations would be met with bafflement by many seasoned male politicos.) But in my experience, women can also be blind to how what is done in the name of principle and effective strategy - or any other high-minded thing - can be a way of hiding competitive urges and personal dislike. So if you are going to wield guilt-by-assocation, and you care about integrity in the way you say you do, you had better be sure that when you use it, it isn’t a way of outgrouping a woman that somehow threatens you personally - of saying “Don’t sit with her!’, à la Mean Girls. And even if you are sure that this isn’t the case, it certainly won’t stop it seeming that way to many observers.

So wouldn’t it be better simply to present your arguments robustly and directly against those on the Right and those who are anti-abortion, and leave it at that, treating other women as adults who can make their minds up about whether or not to then associate for what they judge to be strategic reasons? It seems telling to me that more energy is sometimes put towards criticising and shaming Associates than is directed towards criticising the individuals and organisations with which they associate. When this happens, it starts to look to me like what this might be about, at least partly, is keeping dissident women in line.

In the touchy world of online feminism, saying this – I know – will have its own negative effects. It does not sit in that comfortingly clear-cut place of “either-for-us-or-against-us”. Though I have barely named names here, and don’t want to, those who use guilt-by-association habitually will feel judged and defensive too, and probably retaliate. And so on the tedious cycle goes. I am resigned to it. Still, I think these things are worth saying.

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Texas on my mind

Hello dear subscribers,

Thank you so much for the warm response to my latest piece on Pride, and for generally being so supportive of my writing here. I really value having this space in which to speak my mind, and I also value you.

Tomorrow I’m off to Texas for a week, to do some teaching for a new university focused on free expression, the University of Austin Texas (you can read more about this venture here). I’ll be doing a philosophy mini-course on varieties of feminism - from liberal to radical to post-structuralist to intersectional to post-liberal - and there will be lots of controversies for students to explore. I’m looking forward to doing some teaching again - it’s been a while. And I’m sure I will be writing about this experience later.

Madly prepping for this trip means I’m slightly behind on my writing schedule, though I hope to have something substantial for you soon. Many apologies for the delay. In the meantime I thought I’d draw your attention to some other writing I’ve done lately, for other outlets, which you also might enjoy. Most of these are from UnHerd where I am also a columnist, but a couple are from elsewhere.

UnHerd April 12th, Five Rules for Fighting Transactivism

UnHerd April 20th, You Can’t Police Offence

The Times, May 3rd, Different by Frans de Waal review — what apes can teach us about sex.

UnHerd, May 6th, The Emptiness of Being Queer

UnHerd, May 19th Why Can’t The Left Take A Joke?

Common Sense, May 29th To the Class of 2022: Maybe Don't Reach for the Stars

UnHerd, May 31st Stella Creasy’s Bourgeois Feminism

UnHerd, June 11th Boris Can’t Keep A Story Straight

See you soon!

Kathleen x

Photo credit: Gay couple on Texas Ranch, Getty Images.

Photography by Braden Summers

Creative #:542710271

Pride

Me, freshly out.

It’s June. It’s the beginning of Pride Month: the Holy Week of the LGBT+ calendar, except that even the Roman Catholic church didn’t have the vision to ask for a whole month. All over the land, flags have been raised, twitter handles bedecked with rainbows, and boxes of pronoun badges freshly cracked open. As I write, HR managers are gearing up for a jam-packed month of propagandising about whatever cash cow the LGBTQ+ protection racket currently has its eye on (“asexuality awareness”, for instance; or ruining women’s sport). Given the vice-like grip they now have on UK cultural life, it’s only surprising the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations weren’t rejected as a diary clash.

This annual festival of naked men and naked political manoeuvring is incredibly dispiriting to any lesbian or gay man who doesn’t believe in the underpinning values – if you can call them values at all.  Some of my friends have become positively averse to the sight of the rainbow flag, and shudder whenever they see one. In Brighton, given the ubiquity of rainbows – from buses to shopfronts to lighting displays and beyond - this means you shudder on average about 4 times an hour. And not in a good way. Rather than feeling proud as robotically instructed, many feel ashamed of what’s being done in their name.

This is obviously ironic, because part of the original motive for Pride parades was, precisely, to redeem homosexuality from the inherited shame that surrounded it in a mostly straight culture. Rather than just submit to the cultural implications of unnaturalness and grotesquerie - and the consonant requirement of even “tolerant” people that homosexuals could do what they liked as long as they did it quietly behind closed doors - gays and lesbians wanted to shout “I’m gay!”  from the rooftops, unashamed. Thanks to such efforts, these days it is easier to shout “I’m gay” from the rooftops, unashamed. And especially if you’re straight.  As a very recent report on seismic increases in LGBT+ identification puts it: “The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.” Taking pride in being gay was apparently so successful a project that the envy of many straight people was eventually the result.

Of course, being able to shout joyously from the rooftops does somewhat depend on the location of the rooftops in question. Lesbians and gays in orthodox religious or traditional working-class communities still find it relatively hard to come out. But there is relatively little interest in gay liberation for them any more. Times have changed and political campaigning objectives move on. It would be self-sabotaging of any successful LGBTQ+ lobbying group to prioritise wading into such genuinely contested intersectional territory, when they could be focusing upon easier more friendly pickings: dramatic stories that middle-class white people can really get behind, without any felt ambivalence.

But even in those social locations where coming out comes relatively cheap, it is not as if feelings of shame are fully absent. For lesbians in particular, the shame-inducing narrative of one’s attraction to women is likely to meet other shame-inducing cultural scripts for women, exponentially increasing self-loathing.  The combined effects of such scripts – predicting deviancy, failed femininity, and strangeness – are still alive and kicking. They are especially pertinent for some younger lesbians, or so they tell me. As this great little documentary makes clear, some young women don’t even like the word “lesbian”, choosing new more ambiguous titles for themselves and seeking to merge into some cooler male-associated gang: to be with the gay boys or amongst the queer womxn, or whatever.

And now, of course, there are new cultural scripts from which many lesbians have to try to protect their minds. Some of these scripts derive from internet pornography, turning lesbian relationships into a degraded horrorshow of a spectacle in order to provide masturbation fodder for sexual tourists. In the visual language of porn, lesbians are nothing but a hot aesthetic, only really doing it to turn men on, and indicating by means of elaborate eyerolls and lip-licks and camera-ready positions that they are more sexual, more deviant, more nasty than other women. Queer porn may change the aesthetic considerably but the often violent objectification of female bodies remains.

Meanwhile, there are the scripts created by solipsistic males who wish to role-play being a lesbian, some of them viewing it as the ultimate in degraded turn-ons. Too much porn with a side-order of entitlement and narcissism has given us the modern phenomenon of the trans lesbian. Quite fantastically, this figure has been joyfully ushered into the lesbian club by venal media outlets and bureaucrats to the cheers of naïve children, while the rest of us have looked on aghast. Entry into lesbianism is now presumed to require only some unfeasibly unsuitable daywear, a vacant look in the eye, a winning head-tilt, and some light adjustments in the jockstrap area. If you’re lucky, Diva Magazine might even put you on the cover. Failing that, at the very least, you stand a good chance of being able to infiltrate some socially awkward group of queer womxn and start bossing everybody about.

I find doing “personal” difficult, and God knows, I hate identity politics – but in these times of cynical performances, I think it’s worth sharing something honest about what coming out as a lesbian has meant to me. I came out 10 years ago this month, aged 39. Before that, I had limped through an ostensibly heterosexual life feeling like I was no good at it, but unable to admit to myself the fundamental reason. I self-identified as a “difficult” woman, but not in a celebratory or recuperative way – quite the opposite. I felt very ashamed of the fact that I didn’t fit in. I generally felt awkward and wrong a lot of the time: too tall; too argumentative; too emotional; too clever for most people, but still not clever enough for my colleagues. I drank too much, was emotionally dysregulated, and generally quite angry. My marriage eventually ended, sadly for all involved.

After a while, an insistent thought started to pluck at my mind. I started to allow myself to think about what had previously been impossible. Maybe I could try to live out what, on some suppressed level, I had been dreaming of for over 25 years. The tentativeness and diffidence I felt in considering this change may sound gauche to the average casually bed-hopping metrosexual type. But for me, this was serious. I was serious. What lay ahead of me felt awe-inspiring to contemplate - almost sacred.

Of course, I also felt very foolish. I was not unaware of the comic aspects of embarking on such a huge change at such a relatively late age. I didn’t know what I was doing in several senses. I didn’t even know any lesbians socially at all, apart from a few I worked with. I first tried to get up to speed on my own, in amateur fashion: I read some books, I watched The L Word, I bought the 2012 lesbian uniform (Superdry!). And then thought, sod it. Stop living in your mind. Take it out into the world. And I did. For the first time, I entered a beautiful, complicated, entirely female world that had been there all along, behind a door, but I hadn’t had the key. I felt like I was entering another dimension.

In the words of Mrs Dalloway: what a lark! What a plunge!

I joined about five dating sites simultaneously and started to have some adventures.  I also managed to make friends with some brilliant platonic godmothers who benevolently watched over me as I stumbled inexpertly about the scene. They would listen to my stories, tease me for my mishaps, advise me and scrape me up off the floor after emotionally bruising encounters. With apologies to Hogarth - and with the hope that there is no madhouse at the end (though there’s still time) – what I affectionally think of as my Dyke’s Progress had begun.

I learnt early on about the special feeling of being in a room that contains only other lesbians – a space unlike any other I’d ever known, and so thrillingly transgressive and exciting when you’ve never been in such a female place, with that unique kind of ambient energy in it before. Within a couple of years I was even marching at London Pride, holding one side of a banner for a lesbian volleyball team (and I don’t even play volleyball). Look look, I’m a real lesbian now! I may or may not have thought as I filed down Oxford Street. Yes, there was a lot of comedy in my early lesbian period, and a bit of tragedy too, but there was also a steady drumbeat of relief and joy accompanying it. For the first few years, I couldn’t get over the fact I was now in that wonderful secret garden – and I marvelled constantly that nobody could ever come along to take back the key.

I also started to drink less, breathe more fully, stand up straighter, move through space more easily, get angry less. A small thing, perhaps, but after years of religiously putting on makeup every day– to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to do a no-makeup selfie when that Facebook trend was hitting, and I was tagged by a friend - I stopped overnight. Nearly all my press pictures since have been without any make up at all, and I haven’t minded one bit. I don’t need to hide from the world anymore. I was ashamed as a straight-acting woman, but I really do feel like the proudest lesbian in the world.

In 2018 - when I first felt moved to throw a couple of rather repressed blog posts out into the void, on the problems with gender identity ideologies as I then saw them – I had been out as a lesbian for 6 years. The language of these rather amateurish posts was carefully chosen – rendered garbled and inelegant, even, in a desperate attempt not to offend if possible (so for instance, I even used “women-who-are-not-transwomen” to refer to women, though I wouldn’t do that now). I was keen not to take on the issue of whether transwomen were women directly, but only to try to argue more conservatively that there were clearly different groups of people here, who might have conflicting interests in some areas.  And one of those groups was obviously lesbians.

The first wave of aggression I received for these posts was in many ways the one that hurt me most, though it happened with the least general publicity, relatively speaking. It was from the philosophers, my tribe up until then - or the closest thing I had to one. The leaders of the online feminist pack quickly circled. These are people who spend half their working lives trying to develop complicated technical theories to justify whatever ethical mantras are presently socially expedient, and the other half hanging out online performing a simulacrum of goodness, or at least some degraded approximation of it. They are nearly all straight, though some of them have non-standard pronouns in their twitter handles and self-consciously interesting hairdos. Yet, even on the grounds of logical consistency if not actual moral feeling, there was no room in their stony little self-righteous hearts for a lesbian with a non-sanctioned point of view about the political desirability of men being treated as women.

After my second or third blogpost – and recall that I was self-publishing these on Medium at the time, not yet promoted to Professor, and with no particular prior following or web presence - I received an email from Justin Weinberg, a US philosopher who ran a philosophy news website. This site was, and is, very popular with progressives in the profession internationally. Weinberg and I had never interacted before. Coldly but politely, he told me he had just commissioned a well-known transwoman philosopher to write a published response to my blog-posts, and would be putting it on his site later that day. He just wanted to let me know that this was being published – and to say that if I wanted to write a response to what was going to be written about me, he would be “open to considering it” (or something equally etiolated).

Later that day, the piece “When Tables Speak” by the famed Professor Talia Mae Bettcher of California State University appeared on his website. You can read it for yourself. If you are empathic, you can perhaps imagine how it felt for someone relatively lowdown the philosophy pecking order, in a humdrum position in a humdrum university, to be snidely dissected in public in this way by someone perceived as prestigious, in front of what felt like the eyes of the whole profession. (If you are not empathic - or if you have always wanted me to be wrong - you will no doubt conclude, as indeed many of the philosophers did, that I brought this all on myself).

Either way, at the time, Bettcher’s prose was just what the online feminist philosophy vultures had been waiting for, for it gave them permission to increase the intensity of their already active public hostility to me. Academic Facebook pages were lit up with self-righteous denunciation as they linked to Bettcher’s post. The popular Feminist Philosophers blog, which was ran by women I knew, placed the post upfront with the title “Important article by Talia Mae Bettcher” and the single instruction “Everyone should read this”. It was the most fun bonfire since the last bonfire, and there hadn’t been any good bonfires for a while.

The point of dredging up this personally painful thing here is that, at one point in the piece Bettcher addresses a point I had made in one of my original blogposts.  What I had said (translated from the garbled, hedged language I was using at the time) was that the special atmosphere in lesbian bars and clubs changed when transwomen – i.e. males - were in them. To this, Bettcher responded by sneering that I clearly had not read enough books or academic articles – for if I had, I would realise that this claim had been thoroughly debunked.

“For, example, I could address Stock’s allegation that trans women often exhibit male energy while in a lesbian space. This allegation is old as dirt. And it’s been discussed by a slew of trans writers. Now at this point, I suppose you’ll want the references. Another strategy, however, would be for you to actually explore the literature on your own. Typically philosophers aren’t so disempowered about learning something new! We go ahead and search! For example, how hard is it to go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Okay. I’ll give you a hint: Pat Califia (1997), Julia Serano (2007), Talia Bettcher (2009/2014), Lori Watson (2016). Just a few examples!”

Case closed, eh? Or so the attendant mean-girl philosophy chorus also triumphantly thought, having never set foot in a genuinely lesbian-only social space in their lives.  It may seem incredible – or maybe not – but these academics, most of them married or partnered with the opposite sex, and who in my experience tended to lead relatively cautious, conventional lives all round, felt completely empowered to talk about what happens in a space that is not theirs, and never will be theirs, on the basis of what a male had told them about it. Not just that - but despite all their professional cant about “lived experience”, they were emboldened to publicly mock and denigrate a lesbian for saying otherwise.

The memory of the blind self-satisfied arrogance of those people has stayed with me over the past few years, though technically I’ve experienced far worse. That one in particular lodged under my skin and left a wound, perhaps because it tried to trample over something that was so dear and precious to me. At the time – after a suitable period of drinking gin, lying on the floor, and weeping about my lost philosophical reputation -  I posted a reply to Bettcher’s post in reasonable and scholarly prose, taking the points made there one by one and addressing them. To the point about the stupidity of thinking lesbian-only spaces might be altered by the inclusion of heterosexual males, I said something relatively restrained, and only moderately ironic.

But I am not now in the University system anymore. And now if I could go back in time, I would say to Bettcher, and to any of the straight philosophers who took the cue and started to mock me online for making that and related points on behalf of the interests of lesbians, a group to which I could not be prouder to belong – just who the fuck do you think you are? You will never understand what we have. It is ours and ours alone.

NB Later version corrected: Bettcher is at California State University LA, not UCLA. Apologies for the error.