Many years ago, as an undergraduate member of our Union board, it fell to me to chair a meeting at my university.
After all those years, I can’t honestly recall what the meeting was about, but the “Rads” (radicals, as we used to call them in those days) evidently decided to break it up.
The verb “no-platform” wasn’t in use then, but the effect was the same. They filed into the front seats carrying red flags and simply shouted me down, so that nobody sitting behind them could hear a word from the platform. The meeting, naturally, was a washout.
It was during the Vietnam War and I was a bit of a rad myself at that time, but the events of that evening changed me forever.
I looked into the eyes of people, some of whom I had thought of as friends, and saw—what? A sort of blankness, a vacancy (“the lights were on, but nobody was at home”), even hatred?
They certainly knew how to hate, we discovered, just as intensely as the pro-war activists.
Nothing has changed. Except that the frequency of such demonstrations of intolerance has increased and—far more seriously—the willingness of university authorities to denounce such outrages has diminished almost to vanishing point.
Educational and political leaders have been, with few brave exceptions, cowered into silence.
When I arrived to speak there was a mob of over 100 students outside. As I tried to enter, they shouted: “Shame on you!” Once I was inside, they chanted:
“[Expletive] your system! [Expletive] your hate!”
“Trans rights are not up for debate!”
Not Even Easy to Express a View
I have a confession to make. I have never taken the trouble to memorise all the letters in LGBTIQA+ (I had to look them up this time on the web) because I don’t believe that such a unified group of people exists—it is riven with deep discord.The Canadian speaker quoted above is gay, but that didn’t save him from abuse.
There is no room to move in the modern secular puritanism, no quarter given for any deviation from dogma.
I have been organising a conference to take place in July this year on “wokism.” The call for papers includes these words:
“The idea that the naked emperor is actually wearing clothes has its funny side, but the humour is fast disappearing as school children are taught to believe that girls can be boys, that boys can be girls, and that grown-ups should not be allowed to deny it.”
We would have been happy to accept offers of papers who disagreed with us, but there were none.
Nevertheless, the college where it was to be held notified me that they had withdrawn their approval, so we now have to find an alternative venue.
That won’t be easy, as I know from previous experience. When we do find a suitable location, I have been advised not to reveal it to participants until a couple of days beforehand, just in case of mischievous interference.
The person who gave me that advice was a women’s rights activist who had suffered a similar disruption several times.
Somebody else (sadly a person we would have expected to support us) recommended that we go out of our way to ensure that our line-up of speakers should include transgender activists.
But we consider that to require groups that have a special mission to always present arguments for the opposing view seems a bit like insisting that Christian sermons include the case for atheism, or that scientists speak up for alchemy.
Atheists and pseudo-scientists have their own outlets which they are generally disinclined to share.
They are asking us to display the tolerance and openness that the intended host college refused to extend to us. Fair enough, I guess that’s their right.
But it is people like us (and, to a much crueller extent, people like Moira Deeming, Kate Forbes, Kathleen Stock, Mary Eberhardt and even good old Germaine Greer) who are actually being suppressed. Somebody has to speak up for the contrary view.
Gone Too Far
I have only one or two acquaintances who have transitioned. But I have a number of good friends who are gay. I do understand and would never, ever, persecute them.I voted against same sex marriage because I do not think it the function of government to change the meaning of words, but I’ve always supported the recognition of gay partnerships.
If I were to meet a trans person I would treat them with the greatest courtesy and respect. None of us understands the mental processes of another.
But on the matter of gender the world really has lost its wits. It’s one thing to honour any person’s wish to use particular pronouns, but it’s quite another matter to demand (on pain even of dismissal) that employees of universities and big corporations nominate their preferred pronouns in every item of correspondence.
This is beyond stupid. It is actually abusive bullying.
Worse still, its overuse insults and trivialises the sufferings of those who really endure misery and even death at the hands of tyrants.
Let’s be clear: there are tyrants (fascists, if you will) at both ends of the political spectrum.
Politics are often viewed as a sort of linear polarity ranging from left to right, but a circle offers more useful imagery: if you wander far enough to the left, you’ll end up at the bottom with all those nasty types who strayed to the right. Bigots, abusers, bullies, liars, haters—they’re all the same really, regardless of which side of the spectrum first spawned them.
