BEWARE THE GENDER BORG - PART 2

On January 6th this year I wrote an opinion piece for hospitality sector website Propelhospitality.com. This was titled ‘Enough is Enough’ and was a critique of gender ideology and the implications for hospitality premises of gender self-ID. In that piece – ‘How I Got Cancelled by the Gender Borg For Daring to Criticise its Ideology’ – you can read a full account of what then happened to me as a consequence.

The furore created by daring to suggest that sex is binary and immutable caused my publisher’s commercial sponsors to threaten to withdraw their funding. As a result, the publisher parted company with me and publicly apologised for publishing my article. Over the following week I was denounced as transphobic by two pub companies and by the leaders of all three of the hospitality sector’s trade bodies. And it got worse. On January 13th Propelhospitality.com published no less than three articles taking aim at my opinion piece and denouncing me. I had been cancelled!

But such is the ferocity of the Gender Borg that the denunciation, vilification, and de-platforming hasn’t stopped there. So, Propelhospitality.com has bow employed a ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ advisor who has written her first piece for the website. This person was known as Geoffrey Warren Wright for the first 65 years of his life but is now known as Gaynor Mary Warren-Wright. A married man for 37 years and father of two children, Gaynor came out as a transwoman at the age of 65, following a diagnosis of gender dysphoria by the London Transgender Clinic.

I’m going to refer to Geoffrey as ‘Gaynor’ and use female pronouns out of courtesy. What follows is my response to her article and the implications of de-platforming for freedom of speech.

Gaynor’s article chronicled her personal journey and career as a property surveyor and then she took aim at me, describing my piece as a “highly destructive and transphobic article”. Furthermore, she said she “could not believe the archaic falsehoods and misrepresentation that had been communicated to the hospitality sector by that opinion piece, contrary to all clinical and scientific knowledge available. It was wrong in every respect. I know, as I have got the badge.”

Now, leaving aside the improbable claim that Gaynor knows and understands “all clinical and scientific knowledge available”, you might expect that assertion would benefit from a little intellectual justification. But that is not how it works in Genderland. There, all you need is denunciation and vilification – you’d get more rationality from a Papal bull of excommunication.

However, helpfully, Gaynor does provide a link to a Tedtalk on Gender in which a psychologist explains that male and female are not binary categories but points on a spectrum. Apparently, where you end up on that spectrum depends on how much testosterone a male foetus is exposed to in the womb. The implication is that gender dysphoria is caused by a hormone deficiency during gestation. This paves the way for gender ideologists to argue that oestrogen administered by a doctor, plus castration, penile inversion and the surgical creation of a neo-vagina really can turn the dial and, as if by magic, a man becomes a woman. Hence the mantra ‘transwomen are women’.

I recall the testosterone argument was first aired over 50 years ago as a hypothetical explanation of male homosexuality – that homosexual males are ‘that way’ because of a hormone deficiency, that they’re not ‘real men’, perhaps even a third sex. This pseudo-scientific twaddle was exposed as nonsense years ago but here we see it being recycled to justify gender woo.

And Gaynor’s declaration that she knows I was wrong in every respect because she’s been there and “got the badge” is another expression of delusion. Suffering from gender dysphoria does not automatically make you an expert on psycho-sexual disorders, any more than getting knocked down by a car makes you an expert on road safety. What is happening here is that Gaynor has latched on to a rationalising ideology that justifies turning a clinical issue into a social justice issue.

But then Gaynor’s personal vilification of me intensifies. She writes: “We now have seen Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old trans teen, stabbed to death in an ‘extremely brutal and punishing’ attack in a park in Warrington – stabbed and murdered for being trans. That is what hostile and ill-informed articles like that one – and a climate of prejudice – can do. Remember her next time anyone suggests that we are not ‘real’ women.”

In fact, whether Brianna Ghey was killed for being trans is pure speculation, but that doesn’t stop Gaynor from stating it as fact. It is of course an atrocious crime. But the suggestion that my opinion piece, and by implication, me, are directly or indirectly responsible for that murder, that I have blood on my hands, is not only a wicked slur, but frankly, preposterous.

I rather doubt that Brianna’s murderers were avid readers of Propelhospitality.com, but if it is accepted that by criticising gender ideology you contribute to an atmosphere in which such acts are somehow permissible, that will have a chilling effect on free speech. There are already those who say if you criticise Islamic fundamentalism, you are Islamophobic and thereby contributing to racist attacks on Muslims. Once a belief system becomes above criticism because any criticism is seen as a cause of violent attacks on a vulnerable minority, we censor our own freedom of speech and accept there cannot be any debate; we surrender the contest of ideas and allow that there is only one permissible narrative.

 

Finally, Gaynor makes this point: “We see another progressive country, Spain, permitting self-identification and extending trans rights. What is wrong with the U.K.?” Well, Spain has done that. And they have also just legalised bestiality – provided the unfortunate animal involved doesn’t get injured and require the attention of a vet. My advice to Gaynor is to be rather more careful about citing Spain as an exemplar of progressiveness.

I have been denied a right of reply on Propelhospitality.com. It’s publisher is now permanently in thrall to the trans lobby and will never be able to get rid of Gaynor. This is what happens when you seek to curry favour with a noisy cult in denial of material reality.