Dear Posterity,
So tell me, how does it feel to be the only generation in history to have absolutely no explanation for what we’re doing here and no story to give life purpose? “Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meaning,” writes Douglas Murray, this month’s author of the Book of the Month. Today’s postmodernism has annihilated all metanarratives, leaving no satisfactory explanation for our existence, our purpose, or our future. The destruction of metanarratives has inevitably created a vacuum, into which postmodernism has desperately thrown every conceivable idea to create meaning and explanations.
The result has been a very odd, apparently improvisatory value system based on “woke stuff” made up by Millennials about 20 minutes ago, which is being used to tear apart millennia of oppression/civilization. “You have to be pretty d*#& reckless to be leaning this hard on so many untested heuristics your parents came up with in untested fields that aren’t even 50 years old,” states mathematician/writer Eric Weinstein. Formulated as the foundation for a new morality and metaphysics, this becomes the basis for a type of general madness.
That’s not preventing this generation from believing an imprudent, ad hoc ideology that falsely promises to resolve every inequity not just in their own lives, but every inequity on Earth. Originally introduced via academia, we see this insidious worldview creeping into the workforce via mandatory “commitment-to-diversity” trainings…which are nothing more than thinly veiled efforts to force intersectionality—the theory that states the more minority groups in which a person identifies, the more oppressed he/she is; e.g. a black, homosexual woman is more oppressed than a black, homosexual man because she is in three categories of oppression vs the man’s two categories—upon professionals via employment law…and even in church! (See Tom Pennington’s sermon on Matt Chandler and David Platt’s teachings here…).
Entangled in this rashly cobbled-together system is an elaborate network of invisible cultural tripwires that blow up unsuspecting or deliberate passersby again and again. The first trip wire, argues Murray, was anything to do with homosexuality. Then women’s rights: “Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any time in history, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘mansplaining’ seep out of the feminist fringes and into the heart of places like the…Senate?” Next was race. “Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to suggest that things had never been worse…suddenly, everything became about race,” writes Murray. Finally, society stumbled into the most uncharted territory of all: transgender rights. “Although the newest of the rights questions also affects by far the fewest number of people, it is nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and rage.”
In all of these circumstances, the wars had been won…yet the war wasn’t stopping. It was morphing. “These movements began to behave – in victory – as their opponents once did. When the boot was on the other foot something ugly happened,” states Murray. Why have each of these movements careened off course in perpetual quest for new battles? After slaying the dragon, the movement-warrior restlessly hunts the land for another glorious fight; he needs a dragon, even after slaying ever-smaller dragons. “He may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons,” states Murray. Murray argues that these movements have morphed into discontent with being equal; instead, they’ve started to settle on unsustainable positions such as “better.”
The problem is that these rights issues have moved from being “a product of a system” to being “the foundations of a new one.” According to Murray, this is like flipping a bar stool upside down and then trying to balance on top of it. In other words, “The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of the system that produced them.” So what’s the solution?
The solution is a frank conversation without tripwires, rage, and violence. Without it, we’re left with a future in which “racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to play games back that have worked so well on themselves,” writes Murray. This is precisely the reason Murray makes a methodical, careful assessment of each movement in turn. Let’s take a brief glimpse at each included in the book:
Gay
As a gay man, Murray first attacks the argument that gay people are born that way. To date, there has yet to be a “gay gene” discovered in the genetic gene pool, and both the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Royal College of Psychiatrists do not believe that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable. Murray takes it one theoretical step further, however: would anyone really want the discovery of a gay gene? Would parents be allowed to genetically edit their unborn child as a result? What would be the justification for preventing them?
In short, Murray’s argument is this: gay rights activists have now contradicted themselves in their cries for gay equality; if they truly desired equality, then they would stand by their original demands that it is simply no one else’s business what consenting adults do in private. Instead, “the manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing about them…do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands?” For current gay rights activists, Murray would say yes.
The deep concern with this type of behavior is the very intolerance these activists claim to combat. “The problem with this is not just that we are at risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but that we may be preventing ourselves from listening to arguments that may be partially true,” writes Murray. The beauty of contrary opinions is that they can correct your own erroneous view, and even if it’s in error, it might help others remember the truth more rigorously.
Murray is also skeptical of the rate at which society has so rapidly shifted its stance on gay issues because “unexplored, even unexploded, issues and arguments are left behind in the wake. When Piers Morgan demanded of his guest, ‘How can you think nobody’s born gay!?’ he displays too great a certainty over a question that is still uncertain.” Whether anyone is born gay does not preclude Murray’s poignant point that being gay is still not a one-way street…if sexuality is so “fluid” as activists claim, then why are people who were once gay but subsequently decide to be straight so ostracized from the gay community? Gay people are celebrated when they come out, yet when a gay person comes out as straight, they’re questioned, disbelieved, doubted, and permanently cast under a suspicious light. “Today the person who once did anything gay is the one believed to be living a lie,” asserts Murray.
Murray delves further into a plethora of topics too numerous to extrapolate here, but absolutely worth reading:
- How unstable it is to base one’s identity on sex/sexuality since it’s constantly in flux in today’s society.
- How each letter of the LGBTQ community truly has little in common with the others.
- The injustice to gays delivered by current activists who publicly act out things in “gay pride” marches that would make many homosexuals, as well as heterosexuals, blush.
- If gays have achieved the same rights as everyone else, should they be subjected to the same standards (monogamy etc.) or is there some kind of opt-out? In this sense, do gays truly want to be “equal” to heterosexual marriage or rather have “a little gay bonus”? For example, in this “Me Too” era, why do gays have more latitude in using sexually explicit language/jokes (e.g. Ellen DeGeneres’ game “Who’d You Rather”) than heterosexuals? When discussing equality, to which standard must all comply?
- Writing women out of anything in the past was a serious faux pas, yet that’s exactly what’s occurring with gay men announcing that they are “having a baby.” If anyone questions how this is possible, they’re labeled a bigot. When gay men, and society at large, act as if having a baby is a natural byproduct of homosexual unions, “they’re lying to a whole generation of young gays” because “two gay men will find it exceptionally difficult to have a biological baby.” (Which man will be the biological father? How much money does surrogacy cost, etc.?)
- A “Not only equal, but slightly better” mentality is strong in the gay debate.
Murray’s conclusion: does being gay mean that one is attracted to the members of one’s own sex, or that one is part of a grand political project?
My point of departure is at a juncture where things get a little weird in the book:
Murray claims that because gay men also “receive” during sex, they’re “in on the secret” of women. Because women are the one thing that men desire, she is the end point, the destination. Gay men disrupt this natural order since they “fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again…it is like falling through a reflection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me, my self.” To Murray’s point here I would say: this would then make gay men inherently selfish, seeking their own selves during the act of sex. Not only that, but by making this statement, Murray is ironically positing the very “slightly better” mentality of gay activists he so passionately decries by claiming gay men are somehow in on a woman’s secret.
For the record, it is inaccurate to claim that gay men are parallel to women because they also “receive” during sex. For one, women have uniquely intricate female biological parts, and the act of sex is fundamentally different than it is with men in every conceivable way. We all know this to be true, but perhaps Murray (and others) need to hear it again: men are receiving into their anus, a wholly unsexual body part not naturally intended for such activity. Women are also not “falling back into themselves” during this intimate act. Women have the powerful, supernatural capacity to give, not take…to mysteriously formulate LIFE as a result to sex, the pinnacle of self-sacrifice, and entirely opposite to gay men.
What Murray—and the world at large—fail to consider when addressing the topic is the divine design of men and women in sex. Just as Eve was separated out of Adam, “taken out of man,” during the creation of the world (Genesis 2:21-22), she is then divinely reunited with him when they come together in sexual union…a glorious rejoining of the original one flesh. The two become one…again! This reflects the source of every human being’s longing for completeness in sex, a desire to feel full and whole: the reunion of Adam and Eve is a picture of that fuller wholeness we so deeply seek. This simply cannot be compared to the experience of a gay man.
The sexual experience of women and gay men is also not comparable due to God designing men and women in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27). This means each sex needs the other to better image God more fully. Each sex is better able to communicate something about the nature of God through the interplay between one another. Each is able to moderate something about the other sex and add to it in a complementary manner. Additionally, as the image bearers of God, this union of flesh, the “two becoming one,” is a reflection of the plurality of the three persons of God being united as one in essence…thus, the union between a man and woman resulting in one flesh reflects the very Trinity itself. This is deep theology, and not something I would expect Murray or any non-believer to carefully think through. There’s so much more to be said on this topic, including the real reason God designed sex between a man and a woman, which I delve into here.
In short, the sexual experiences of women are not comparable to gay men in any regard, thus Murray’s claim is grossly oversimplified and simply false.
Interlude: The Marxist Foundations
Nestled neatly in between Murray’s next target is the first of three interludes: The Marxist Foundations. Murray assails the Marxists argument—that human interactions are solely based on power—in this first interlude: “For them absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act.” But what about forgiveness, charity, or love? These Marxist roots are the foundation upon which the modern field of social science has constructed its empire. And at the top? Yes, that old arch enemy, capitalism. Capitalism is to blame for all our woes! Just as the old claim that Marxism would set free the oppressed laborer and share the wealth, so this “new version of an old claim” asserts that the patriarchal white males must be removed so that power can be shared among minority groups.
This time, however, the notion of “class struggle” has been modified to include new political subjects—women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements, etc. But why? Murray explains:
“The utility of such groups is obvious: their ‘highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities give purpose and drive to a socialist movement that needs new energy…unless they cohere together these groups might just pursue their own agendas and their own needs. What is needed is to bring all these movements under one umbrella: the umbrella of the socialist struggle.”
In short, because Marxism failed in every possible way, its demoralized supporters set out to find or create a new class of “exploited” people. “The legacy of Budapest, Prague, Vietnam, and Cambodia (just a few of their own examples) had left many socialists reeling. But in this ‘whole series of positive new phenomena,’ a new energy could be harnessed.” The problem? Marxism. doesn’t.work. Socialism is a bankrupt ideology. That will never change.
As a result to living in a time of such intellectual disarray, what was once considered absurd—white privilege, minorities, marginalized members of the population, social struggle, intersectionality, etc.—has now spilled out from the academic arena into mainstream society. Consequently, even the academic arena has become a farce: “…large sections of academia had ceased to be the exploration, discovery, or dissemination of truth [but] had instead become the creation, nurture, and propagandization of a particular, and peculiar, brand of politics. The purpose was not academia, but activism.” Unintelligible activism at that, as Murray hilariously observes: “The one thing that all purveyors of the ideologies of social justice and intersectionality have in common is that their work is unreadable. Their writing has the deliberate obstructive style…when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true…prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something.”
Perhaps this unintelligible jargon is no accident: “Any student wondering if the world really works like this can be instantly presented with the library of intimidating evidence that the gobbledygook he is failing to comprehend is his fault and not the fault of the writer of the gobbledygook. Of course sometimes when it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity…if they wrote clearly they would attract more outrage and ridicule.” Murray hits the nail on the head, as this is something I’ve personally witnessed in the academic setting.
Women
Murray next goes after the dysfunctional double standard established by the third and fourth wave of feminists, which he describes as “an unresolvable challenge and an impossible demand.” Which double-edged sword is this? It’s the ridiculous expectation that a woman must be allowed to be as sexy and sexual as she pleases, but this does not mean she can be sexualized. Sexy, but not sexualized. This is impossible.
Thus, the current cries of red-faced women worldwide yell in unison: I can dress and act sexually provocative at all times, but don’t you DARE believe that this is the message I am communicating. This is but only one of many contradictory settlements; they also demand that they are exactly the same as men, yet simultaneously (and magically) better than men.
So where does that leave us? Perpetually toggling nervously between the belief that women are the same as men, yet also better. If you think this is ill-defined, “it’s because it’s ill thought through,” writes Murray.
These women activists have a big problem with their analysis of men, however, and it’s the same pitfall into which so many other groups have fallen: they continue to insist that every relationship is centered around power. If that weren’t negligent enough, they solely focus on only one type of power (you’ll have to read the book to discover which one), thus our conversations are being limited.
Amidst all the accusations of privilege, no one ever bothered to define it! Just what is privilege anyway? Does it mean to inherit money? One person might see it that way, but another might see it has a handicap: receiving too much too early disincentivizes people to make their way in the world. Who makes that judgment call? Who should have privilege, and why do they deserve it instead of any other group? How do we fairly apportion it?
Thus, we have mandatory “unconscious bias,” “intersectionality,” and “diversity inclusion” trainings to attempt to address things like this elusive “privilege.” Herein lies the crux of the issue: “These new systems continue to be built on group identities which we still haven’t come close to understanding. They are systems built on foundations which are nowhere near being agreed upon,” writes Murray.
As a woman, I’ve also observed the feminist phenomenon described by Murray to include their odd position of never receiving more benefits, rights, and privileges at any other point in history, yet simultaneously insisting they’re egregiously oppressed. At no other point in history have women had such limitless opportunities, influence, and positions. With the major battles for equality behind them, we would have expected feminists to confidently step into stride with their victories, yet “if anything ever picked up steam and careered off down the tracks just after having pulled in at the station, it was feminism over recent decades…defeat was imminent just before the point of victory.” Claiming an “undeclared war” had been launched against women in every element of Western society (in the media, movies, television, clothes, academia, politics, economics, and popular psychology…everywhere!), feminists pursued their quest for “equality.” The problem? The movement largely ignored a fair amount of evidence to the contrary.
As a result, we often see women activists “behaving like bullies but then seeking shelter behind the claim of being bullied when confronted with the pushback of reality.”
The underlying issue for most of this is of course: why do women’s rights even matter anymore if a person’s sex is not biologically fixed, but merely a matter of “reiterated social performance”? This is further explored in Murray’s chapter on “Trans” below. But first, our second interlude.
Interlude: The Impact of Tech
Murray writes that social media is a system of ideas that claims to be able to address everything, including every grievance; thus, demands for social justice and intersectionality fit fairly well into this environment. That’s a problem in and of itself, but a more overarching issue is that addressing moral transgressions has been repackaged as bullying. “The internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying in the guise of social activism to become the tenor of the time. The urge to find people who can be accused of ‘wrong-think’ works because it rewards the bully.”
What did we expect when we eradicated the space that used to exist between public and private language? “Social media turns out to be a superlative way to embed new dogmas and crush contrary opinion just when you needed to listen to them most…and it does so by encouraging people to focus almost limitlessly upon themselves…if you feel at any point anything less than 100 per cent satisfied with your life and circumstances, here is a totalistic system to explain everything, with a whole repository full of elucidations as to what in the world has kept you back.” Such a self-obsessed platform makes opposing viewpoints impossible to swallow, let alone digest.
This is exacerbated by the fact that Silicon Valley is not morally neutral but rather “several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college,” writes Murray. Take “Machine Learning Fairness” for example:
“Social justice activism is assumed…to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations; there are multiple questions on diversity—sexual, racial, and cultural—and answering these questions ‘correctly’ is a prerequisite for getting a job.”
The danger of Machine Learning Fairness is that in the interests of weeding out human biases, “humans have laced an entire system with biases.” It sacrifices truth in pursuit of a political goal.
Race
The third movement Murray lambastes is the highly contentious issue of racism:
“In pursuit of anti-racism these people turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else. At the very moment when the issue of race might at long last have been put to rest, they have decided once again to make it the most important issue of all.”
In short, a discipline intended to de-stigmatize began to re-stigmatize. Simply put,
“Defining an entire group of people, their attitudes, pitfalls, and moral associations, based solely on their racial characteristics is itself a fairly good demonstration of racism. For ‘whiteness’ to be ‘problematized,’ white people must be shown to be a problem.”
Even more unjust than this, as well as bizarre, is the pattern of making the most extreme claims in the places least likely to experience any such catastrophe. Murray summarizes:
“So whereas there are countries in the world which might be described as having something resembling a ‘rape culture’ (where rape goes unprosecuted and indeed is sanctioned by law), Western democracies could ordinarily not reasonably be accused of being among them. In the same way, whereas there are places in the world where racism is rife and there are societies which could at some point teeter back into some kind of racial nightmare, one of the places least likely to switch into ethnic cleansing in the style of 1930s Germany must surely be a liberal arts college in a liberal state within North America. Strangely, it is at precisely such places that the most extreme claims are made, and the most extreme behavior is found.”
This phenomenon is an important cog in the crowd-maddening mechanism, asserts Murray, because the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. “In an age of shouting for attention on social media, the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.” Those who simply operate above the fray do not hold a valid opinion in this type of environment. Come, all ye outraged.
Murray states that as people at safe liberal arts colleges in America have started to believe or pretend to believe that racism is ever-present where it is demonstrably absent, so in the wider world an obsession with race—and the ability to say racist things in pursuit of an alleged anti-racism—has become utterly normalized.
It’s perfectly reasonable to have a desire to atone for past mistakes, but “these acts of atonement often feel less like an act of healing and more like an act of re-infecting.” For example, when National Geographic issued a public apology for its previous magazine covers, Murray chides, “It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916, women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labor in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown up, shot at, and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.”
There’s also the fascinating point that this odd path only allows for traffic to move in one direction. Thus “an Indian may become distinctly British but a white, British man could not become an Indian.” Because the boundaries here are constantly shifting, is inter-racial adoption appropriate? No one knows…the whole territory is on the move…yet again!
He continues with examples of the unforgettable Rachel Dolezal event (Dolezal, a white woman, claimed to be black): when Michael Eric Dyson commented, “I bet a lot more people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support Clarence Thomas,” he indicated that black doesn’t have anything to do with skin color but only politics. “So much so that a Caucasian wearing bronzer but holding the ‘right’ opinions was more black than a black Supreme Court Justice [holding conservative opinions].”
Perhaps Murray’s best point about race is that today, “‘black’ isn’t a skin color, or a race—or at least not those things alone…’black’—like gay—is in fact a political ideology. This presumption goes so deep—and is so rarely mentioned—that it is generally simply assumed.” Take Kanye West’s support for President Donald Trump, for example. When West stated, “People expect that if you’re black you have to be Democrat,” the media lashed out. The Atlantic wrote a scorching piece titled, “I’m not black—I’m Kanye: Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom.”
Or the blunder when Thomas Sowell published his conservative book Intellectuals and Society, of which one of the reviewers from the London School of Economics (LSE) heavily criticized, including the line that it is “easy for a rich white man to say.” There’s only one problem: Thomas Sowell is black. LSE’s reviewer only believed Sowell to be white because of the nature of his politics.
Therefore, “You’re only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances, and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm,” states Murray.
Ultimately, in this culture, one is not black based on the color of one’s skin. He/she is black based on holding the “right” opinion.
Interlude: On Forgiveness
Amidst such a hostile and severe environment we arrive at Murray’s third interlude, forgiveness. It is a welcome reprieve from such acrimonious ongoings, a cool drink of water which extinguishes the self-righteous flames of castigation.
Murray posits a healthy reminder that only the worst version of someone’s life contains the information that makes the internet stop and look. There’s a whole person yet to be known, appreciated, befriended on the other side of that screen.
There’s a larger problem than the collapse of the barrier between public and private language: the lack of any real mechanism for getting us out of the situation in which technology has landed us. Murray explains:
“As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin, and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered…we do not know who could offer [forgiveness], who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to an endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation.”
The options? Either forgive only the people we like, or the people whose tribe/views most closely fit our own, or at least, aggravate our enemies. If you dislike so-and-so, you will not forgive him, but if you like him, all is well. The other option is that if you are rich or famous enough, you can simply use PR people to “prostrate yourself before the swiftly moving dogmas of the age” in the form of groveling tweets and online posts. The Christian, however, will opt for a third option unavailable to the world: genuine forgiveness, regardless of personal dislike of the offender. Consider the words of Hannah Arendt:
While the world spins round and round in its painful, toxic cycle of cross generational shaming, the Christian is set free by Christ.
Trans
Among all the subjects included in the book, “none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans.” Why? Because the entire subject has become so emotive and incendiary that dealing with it “requires a forensic approach.”
Murray argues that the best place to begin is with people who are born intersex (with both male and female biology—people who have visible, biological justification for being described as between the sexes) since it is the clearest hardware issue of all, then move inwards along the spectrum to address those with no proof of difference other than testimony; their brain tells them they are the opposite sex, an occurrence of which no one knows the cause or how common it is. No physiological differences have been shown to exist between non-trans and trans people, no clear hardware reason to explain why some people desire to change their sex. Therefore, beginning with intersex people offers a tangible reference point. The more one moves down that spectrum, however, the trickier it gets, particularly because we leave the biological shore and wade into the murky waters of personal anecdotes, opinions, and testimony.
How do we navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony? Intersex is biologically provable. Trans may or may not turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable as well, states Murray…but no one knows in which field it should be placed.
New York-based endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin tried to frame it this way: “I ask myself, in mercy or common sense, if we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction?” Herein lies the truth: the body is the tangible reality, the physical standard, while convictions are susceptible to change. We do not alter the standard to fit the undulations of personal perspectives. The more you do, the further you move away from reality, which is the anchor in this sea of confusion.
One example of this is an account relayed by a trans individual Murray identifies as James. James began to wonder whether the answer to some of his questions “didn’t lie in psychology rather than surgery. Specifically he began to look at ‘what I need to do to be content with my body, not change my body.’” Of all the consultants he spoke to, not one had engaged him with questions like these. But shouldn’t they? Irreversible actions should be handled on a much more scrupulous basis than a patient’s feelings. Of course there are almost no extremes that some people will not go to in order to satisfy something they believe to be true, but the question becomes “about whether what one person or even a lot of people believe to be true about themselves has to be accepted as true by other people or not.”
Before the days of surgery, very few were willing to operate at such an experimental stage: “Nobody was sure of what it was that led some individuals to want to change from one sex to another. Did it represent a form of mental illness? If not always, then might it on occasion? If so, how could anyone tell the two states of mind apart? How could this urge to remove a part of one’s body be distinguished from a patient telling a doctor that they believed themselves to be Admiral Nelson and in pursuit of this belief wanted their right arm removed? Could somebody wanting their penis removed be anymore sane?” A number of assurances had to be made—the patient must in no way be psychotic or be relied upon in their current sex, and must have been receiving hormone treatment for a length of time, as well as lived in the role of the desired gender for a number of years.
Murray next revisits the “both-sides angle” that he introduced in the “Gay” chapter: a trans person has a view “not only on the movement between the sexes but of the distinctive ways in which society looks—or at any rate looked—at men and women…the things people say to men but not women [and vice versa]…and also that greater secret: not how the world views men and women but how men and women differently view the world.” Is this why people are so unsettled by the trans issue…because of some kind of protective jealousy? I think not. The reason is due to the violation of fundamental biology on its most sacred, intimate level. These are maters of identity, philosophy, biology, and most important, spirituality. That’s not taken lightly.
As a gay man, Murray takes issue with the sloppy, haphazard, and unfair manner the trans movement has been blended with the gay one. While there are some similarities that exist between gay and trans—for example, there is nothing genetically different about gay people; it’s their behavior that makes them gay, and society has been asked to acknowledge that (whether you do or not is a personal conviction), and likewise, people are trans when they say they are, not due to any biological difference, thus the demand to be accepted as such without any outward sign—there is one very significant difference: for a gay person, all existing hardware remains in place, allowing for options to be gay or straight without irreversible or permanent results. A trans person faces a life-altering permanency. Thus, people expressing deep concern and caution in regards to transsexualism are not “denying the existence of trans people,” demanding that trans people should be treated as inferior, or causing trans people to commit suicide. Instead, they’re simply urging caution about something “which has not remotely been worked out yet—and which is irreversible.”
Here is the irony of the trans movement: it claims that no differences exist between the sexes, yet if anyone were to ask a trans person of the power of estrogen and testosterone, they would be the first to set the record straight. Have a conversation with a trans person and they’ll relay their experience of transitioning. Reading various accounts of those transitioning, I’ve discovered a common theme: transitioning people are the first to admit that there is a VERY significant difference between the sexes. A man transitioning will become more emotional, experience a softening of the skin, redistribution of body fat, a shift in taste of music and movies. Another man transitioning to a woman expressed the shifting to a fundamentally different view—moving from an interest in the “great affairs” of his time to a new concern for “small affairs,” writing, “my scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for telling detail. The emphasis changed…from places to people.” (James Jan Morris, Conundrum). The very fact that one has to take estrogen or testosterone clearly indicates a difference between the sexes…one must begin taking the desired hormone to supplant their existing hormone because…they’re different!
So why is there such a push for trans support? No one wants to be caught on the “wrong” political side of the trans issue like they were on the gay issue. Countless people are now negatively looked upon for arguing against that movement and cavil at the notion of repeating it.
Finally, Murray criticizes the prejudices and contradictions of the trans movement, especially in light of other social movements. Today it’s considered prejudice to believe all gay people are either effeminate men or masculine women. So why does this not apply to trans? The trans claim insists that people who perhaps don’t like the right sports or who are slightly effeminate are not simply gay, but inhabiting the wrong body! The trans movement profoundly undermines the gay movement. Instead of the popular slogan, “Some people are gay. Get over it,” we now have, “Some people are gay. Or possibly trans. Or the other way around. Get over it.”
Trans also runs contrary to the intersectionalists (those who claim victimhood based on intersecting minorities). For example, Murray highlights an incident that took place in 2014 at the all-girls school, Wellesley College: when a female student transitioned to male, her fellow classmates forbid her/him from running for the position of multicultural affairs coordinator due to feeling it would perpetuate the patriarchy at the college. One student stated, “I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there.” This student had traveled all the way around the oppression cycle! From woman, to trans, to white man, and therefore the personification of white patriarchy. From minority to oppressor.
So if this female-to-male was stopped in his/her tracks for encroaching on the women’s turf…why not the same treatment toward male-to-female? The feminist tripwire has snagged many casualties, so much so that a woman must be silenced if she objects to a man claiming to be a woman, most notably J.K. Rowling (who insisted that women must be protected from domestic violence), Julie Bindel (who disputed that a male-to-female should be allowed to train as a counselor for rape victims because it undermined a woman’s right to seek help from another woman), Suzanne Moore (who claimed women were angry with themselves for not having the ideal body type of a “Brazilian transsexual”), Julie Birchill (who angrily challenged the right of a man calling himself a woman to lecture or call a woman names), and Germaine Greer (who stated that people born as men could not be classed as women, and decried that so many trans male-to-female chose the body shape that only reinforced stereotypes), among others.
An argument that had worked for race had not worked for women. In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white woman, could not identify as black because “a person who has grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like.” Feminists were making the same argument about transsexuals, but for no logical reason, weren’t permitted to do so.
“Women who tried to hold the boundary of womanhood around women started inviting the same vitriol everywhere,” writes Murray. For the feminists, the trans movement does not challenge social constructs about gender but rather reinforces them, documented by male-to-female trans people who choose the body type of a men’s locker room pin-up poster, or those who take up stereotypical activities such as knitting, etc. Despite all the vilification of these feminists, no one has stopped to ask: why should they get on the trans train? “Why should…feminists feel entirely fine about men who become women only then to either flaunt their perfect breasts, take up knitting,” or even erase their athletic accomplishments? After all, in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds for disqualification…unless, it turns out, the person is transitioning to the opposite sex. “In which case sensitivity overrides science,” writes Murray.
Despite all this, medical directors continue to ignore the warnings of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. One 2018 report stated that the UK has seen a 700 per cent increase in child referrals to gender clinics in only five years. Even if there are people who suffer from gender dysphoria, and even if life-changing surgery was the best option…how do we differentiate from those who had such ideas suggested to them but later turned out to have made the wrong decision? Medical directors in the field seem extraordinarily confident, and are quick to conclude that children are capable of making such monumental decisions. Yes, teens are capable of choosing their own college, or who to marry, but these decisions are not irreversible like choosing to change one’s sex. Encouraging children toward medical intervention over a matter that is so incredibly unclear is reckless…but when faced with such “threatening rhetoric, blackmail, and catastrophism,” why would we expect to see things improve? Anyone who disagrees with the trans movement is considered hateful and someone who encourages violence. Ultimately then, this suggests that non-trans people should remain silent on the issue and only speak when they can be affirming. “An unbelievable unclear issue is presented as though it was the clearest and best understood thing imaginable,” bemoans Murray.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most bizarre development of these social rights movements is the hierarchy of victimhood. What’s worse, there is a hierarchy of victimhood and oppression that exists even within each of these groups. The rules are unclear, but the prejudices are not. How is this hierarchy supposed to be prioritized and ordered? Take one step up the hierarchy if you’re a woman. Two steps upward if you’re black. Three steps upward if you’re trans, but not so fast, take a step downward if you’re a white trans. Three steps up if you’re a black trans man, but you just obtained male privilege so that will be detracted…you’ll need to take a step down. This is perfectly evidenced in Laith Ashley’s (a trans fashion model) comments to one reporter in 2016 when questioned whether she/he had experienced discrimination for being a female-to-male transsexual: “I have gained some male privilege. And although I am person of color, I am fair skinned and I adhere to society’s standard of aesthetic beauty in a sense. And for that reason I have not necessarily faced much discrimination.”
So she/he had moved downward for becoming a man, a couple upward for being a person of color, but then downward again for being a light-skinned person of color, but that tanked since she/he had hit the negative score of being attractive. How on Earth is anyone supposed to figure out where they rank in this oppressor/oppressed hierarchy when there are so many competing “privileges”? This constant self-analysis is enough to make anyone question every conclusion about anything…which in turn makes it not only impossible to perform this analysis on others but certainly on oneself. What is the point of an exercise that cannot be done? “Perhaps rather than derange ourselves by working out a puzzle that cannot be solved, we should instead try to find ways out of this impossible maze,” suggests Murray. I agree.
Yet the confusion only worsens. Herein lies the paradox: the countries which are most advanced in human rights are the ones now presented as among the worst. Ironic, since we do not hear of such violations in unfree countries. “Only a very free society would permit—even encourage—such endless claims about its own iniquities,” states Murray. Someone can only present an experience as verging on the fascist if the person complaining is as far away from fascism as it is possible.
The inquiring aspect of liberalism has been replaced by dogmatism—a dogmatism “that insists questions are settled which are unsettled, that matters are known which are unknown, and that we have a very good idea of how to structure a society along inadequately argued lines.” Thus, “the foundations are that anyone might become gay, women might be better than men, people can become white but not black, and anyone can change sex. Anyone who doesn’t fit into this is an oppressor. And that absolutely everything should be made political.”
Has anyone considered the opportunity cost of all these different groups vying for oppressed status? “It robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do,” adds Murray. We could be devoting our focus to real issues like intersex, or the role of motherhood in feminism, a particularly neglected field.
Instead we’re stuck with irrational arguments, illogical assertions, and endless contradictions. Why? First, because they’re ignoring the Marxist substructure of the movement. Second, there is nothing about this movement that really suggests it is interested in “solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in.” Thus, “it is an analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy.”
As a result to Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” proclamation, society has now resorted to other means for demonstrable morality. Raising the plight of these groups (women, gay, race, trans) has become “not just a way to demonstrate compassion but a demonstration of a form of morality.” This has become the guidance on how to practice a new religion. To extol these issues and “fight” for their cause is now a way to show the world that one is a good person.
Nowhere is this more evidenced than on the university campus. Ill-informed activists pressuring ancient institutions into going against the only principles that justify its existence is quite frankly, a farce. Additionally, “If a university is going to encourage non-experts to judge experts and privileges people who do not read over those who do, then what is the point of the university?”
Our age is doing a number of things we wouldn’t be doing if we had simply allowed ourselves to continue thinking, but thinking is forbidden on campus these days.
The result is a kind of madness. This madness in which we currently live is a result to what Murray calls “overcorrection”: an over-reaction to the fact that there has been prejudice against people in the past and that the fastest and best way to address this is to “over-compensate for a time in order for us to arrive at equality faster. In actuality this has simply communicated that some groups are more valuable than others: white people are to be more disparaged than black, men are not as smart as women, and heterosexuality is ‘really just a bit dull and embarrassing.’”
This outlook of madness is all-encompassing, pervasive, and almost inescapable if you’re not paying attention. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored this point well: no sooner had the outbreak begun than those standing on the moral high ground began to racialize the virus. The media, politicians, and journalists insisted on bringing the world’s attention to the higher mortality rate among ethnic minorities…one could hear the audible cry, “Aha! More evidence for racism in society!” There were pushes to assert that the virus disproportionately affected women, even though statistics revealed men were doing more of the dying. In response, experts began claiming that although more men were dying, somehow women were doing more of the suffering. So entangled are we in this dysfunctional rhetoric that we can’t even face a pandemic “without looking at it though these familiar, divisive goggles.”
Indeed, a hallmark trait of the madness of crowds, and one of immeasurable reasons to read the book in its entirety.
With every esteem and respect,