Jonathan Kay in Quillette, reporting from Canada:
I sometimes get asked why I devote so much bandwidth to challenging the movement that I’ve described as gender cultism—a faddish ideology whose adherents (1) claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity; and (2) insist that the self-reported nature of this spirit trumps the objective reality of biological sex.
The most obvious answer is that this movement does real, observable harm, by forcing women to share prisons, rape-crisis centres, athletic leagues, locker rooms, and other vulnerable spaces with men. It also encourages children, many of them gay, autistic, or psychologically fragile due to bullying and underlying mental-health challenges, to indulge the gothic horror-movie delusion that they were “born in the wrong body,” and to embark on a lifetime regime of (dangerous and untested) drug treatments and body-disfiguring surgeries.
But there’s another factor at play, too: I don’t want to live in a society that gaslights its own citizens. The oft-repeated slogan that “trans women are women” simply isn’t true. Furthermore, everyone knows it isn’t true—including those who shout it the loudest. Like other slogans of this type, it’s an officially sanctioned lie. And once it becomes a matter of settled precedent that we can all be forced to submit to this kind of lie, many more of them are guaranteed to follow.
As a classically minded liberal, I also want to protect the wall that separates church and state. And in this sense, a “church” isn’t just a building where people gather to pray on weekends. The word stands in for any system of supernatural belief, including the deflected understanding of Christian transubstantiation by which men and women are imagined to magically change form through the recital of pronouns. People should be free to believe in whatever mystic narrative they like. But demanding that everyone else follow suit gets us into the realm of theocracy.
In many countries, thankfully, the silent majority has found its voice on this issue, and so it has become more difficult for gender cultists to pre-empt debate with accusations of transphobia. In the UK, governmental and journalistic investigations into the Tavistock gender clinic have sparked much-needed policy reforms. Sweden and Finland, likewise, have both moved to place restrictions on the ability of trans-presenting youth to access puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and “gender-affirming” (i.e., sex-changing) surgeries (with Norway apparently moving in the same direction).
All of these nations are socially progressive democracies. And so these reforms put the lie to the (again, oft-repeated) claim that criticism of gender cultism originates entirely with socially conservative political activists.
In Canada, the backlash against gender cultism took longer to gain momentum than in other western countries. But things are now accelerating....
As we saw here.
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