The Gender Criticals

When lefties stray from the reservation, and "rebels" try to rebel...

As the tectonic plates of metapolitics continue to cause baffling events on the surface, there is a new group in town: the Gender Criticals. This group opposes the recent extremes of the trans agenda.

Mostly, it comprises people who were quite happy being liberal, until one day the agenda advanced a little too far, and they naively complained. For doing so they found themselves getting “cancelled”, and realised in astonishment that they didn’t quite fit in, that they were “a bit different” from other people.

In the old days, such an experience would teach you that you had been some sort of sexual deviant all along without knowing it. Today, it teaches you that you are “Gender Critical”.

These are mostly people from the world of comedy. Since this is a political issue, one should be accurate and divide them into centrists and leftists. In the centrist branch: Andrew Doyle, Leo Kearse, Andrew Lawrence and even John Cleese. In the leftist branch: Graham Linehan, Jerry Sadowitz, Mary Bourke, James Dreyfus, Samantha Pressdee and Abi Roberts. These lists are far from exhaustive. One could also mention Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of Triggernometry, but I’d rather not.

People from outside of comedy are also involved. Examples would include the software developer Helen Staniland, the choreographer Rosie Kay and the journalist Helen Joyce. This is to say nothing, of course, of the most famous one of them all, JK Rowling. (Richard Dawkins has also been condemned as transphobic and has openly opposed the trans agenda, but he is not interested in activism.)

Those are the British names. There are many other Gender Criticals across the pond, but I will not be discussing them here.

Arty Morty, Rosie Kay, Helen Staniland and Graham Linehan

The Gender Criticals (GCs) emerged, not with the legalising of gay marriage, not with the celebrating of gay adoption, not even with the popularising of trans pronouns, but specifically when the trans issue moved from “politely tolerated” to “state-enforced”. This occurred after 2015 and was double-pronged:

• mandating that everyone use someone’s “pronouns” (not “preferred pronouns”, because that implies the person’s identity is somehow chosen)

• the incursion of trans ideology into the lives of small children, via their books, cartoons, films, local libraries and, most sinisterly, classrooms

These two developments were just too much for a lot of centrists and even leftists. They had been onboard with progressivism, some enthusiastically, some less so - but that changed in the late 2010s. Together with TERFs, these leftists and centrists make up the GCs. Let us examine the developments which brought this about, with emphasis on the leftist contingent of the GCs since that is the much more interesting story.

Trans pronouns, and the mandating thereof, is a matter of necessity given the logic of progressivism. If you really believe in progressivism, you have to yield to calling a man in a dress a woman, whether you like it or not. I think a lot of progressives (once proud and vociferous) were taken aback when this particular memo arrived from on high. They thought they just had to celebrate difference and not hate trannies; they didn’t realise they had to pretend to actually believe that the guy in a dress is a woman! But they do, and the logic is inescapable. Thus, saying “I’m not transphobic, I just don’t want to use these silly pronouns” is like someone in the 1980s saying “I’m not racist, I just want to call them darkies”.

The GCs are defeated by their own stated beliefs, since the thing they object to is an inevitable extension of those beliefs. Namely, “if you accept his right to call himself a woman, why wouldn’t you call him a woman?”

They respond to the bind they’re in by appealing to common sense moderation: “Of course I accept his right to call himself whatever he wants. I just don’t want to be forced to take part in it.” But this is like the racist who has agreed not to beat up Pakistanis, as long as his town doesn’t transform out of recognition: just not good enough.

The reasonable middle-ground that the GCs are appealing to is the kind of magic moment that can only ever last a moment. It is the transition period while one paradigm hands the reins over to its rival. That transition period was a long time ago now (the 1990s), and there are no brakes on this train so the GCs should not be as surprised as they are.

That said, even I was surprised by the second development which gave rise to the GCs. Advocating hormone treatment, puberty blockers and even surgery for children? This is sheer insanity and virtually no-one would have agreed with it in 2010. It is obvious that the claims of “gender-affirming care” cannot be true: you cannot just “pause” very complex natural processes then “unpause” them later without there being very serious consequences. It is also obvious that a child has all sorts of random ideas about his identity, what he is, what he likes, etc. and it is one of the main responsibilities of the adults around him not to take his proclamations very seriously. It is also obvious that the human species got by just fine without all of this nonsense, brainwashing and perversity. I can remember 2009. You don’t need to be a hate-monger or a fascist to remember that none of us knew much, if anything, about transgenderism back then. The idea of imposing it on children would have seemed monstrous to our grandparents, to our parents, and to us, just a decade ago.

But there is another aspect to it that is shocking.

Some people on (what is called) the far-right used to say “the Left are going to try to legitimise paedophilia, mark my words”. I was always doubtful about this. I thought “it’s simply a step too far. They can’t possibly get away with it. Parents wouldn’t stand for it.”

But that was before covid, when I learned that parents will do to their children whatever the powerful tell them is good, necessary or cool.

To be fair, the way this has been done is very sly. Rather than legitimise paedophilia itself, they have legitimised trans and said that to oppose teaching it to children is to deny trans children their identities, and therefore transphobic. In short: you have to accept paedophilic sexualising of children, or you are a transphobe.

The amazing thing about this is that virtually nobody had even heard the word “transphobe” until five years ago. But, just as they hadn’t heard the word “anti-vaxxer”, they learned it, and thoroughly. They learned it so thoroughly that families have been split apart and countless children’s lives devastated - and we are only just beginning.

Eventually there will be massive blowback from this craze. The engineers must know that, so presumably some plan is ready for handling it when it comes because nobody seems worried at all.

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In the meantime, waiting for that blowback just like we dutifully wait for the same with every appalling social trend, the GCs are attempting to fight the good fight here and now.

The problem is, they have no idea what they are doing. The centrist ones do not grasp that organised power really doesn’t care about individuals, because they are helpless against it. They also don’t understand that individualism is, in itself, a retarding element; it was individualism that made us sit back and watch while our societies were subverted. Now that the subversion is bearing hideous fruit, the appropriate response is not “more individualism”.

But with the leftist branch of the GCs, the lack of understanding is even more fundamental. It is important to grasp that, while these people have become “gender-critical”, they are still leftist in their mentality. On every other issue, they remain staunchly and avowedly progressive.

Contrast this with my becoming red-pilled on multiculturalism at the age of 19. That was the first step on “my red-pilling journey”. One issue after another collapsed because I had noticed that first crack in the wall. But for the GCs it is not like this at all. Beholding the evil of Drag Queen Story Hour does not lead them down a path of enlightenment whereby they re-think their entire understanding of the world. On the contrary, they try to crowbar this newfound objection into their current understanding.

They have seen Schindler’s List but they haven’t seen many Hollywood films about the Soviet Union, therefore the idea of Communists oppressing people is not present in their minds. So, when they see an oppressive power bossing people around, they can only liken it to Nazis. Thus:

This image is beloved by both leftist and centrists: the leftists because it decries transgender ideology as fascistic, the centrists because it decries transgender ideology as totalitarian (which for them means “leftist”). Both are pathetically mistaken.

As for the image itself, obviously it makes no sense… How did Nazis manage to attain hegemonic power in the 2010s? Why do Nazis love transgender ideology when those were the books they so famously burned? How did Nazis become enamoured of equality when they were vehemently opposed to it?

“Of course,” the GCs would reply, “we don’t mean literal Nazis”. But at the same time, unsaid, they kind of do. The Nazi is clearly the bogeyman, lurking in the recesses of their thoughts, always offering itself as an explanation for this or that evil thing since they have no alternatives, no other points of reference.

The image is representative of the stupid thinking that pervades the Gender Criticals. This thinking prevents the leftist ones from seeing that the only effective response to trans will be right-wing (eg. like Nazism), and prevents the centrist ones from seeing that the response must be organised and ideological (eg. like Nazism). So their thinking prevents them from ever defeating their enemy.

But it also prevents them from understanding how their enemy came about in the first place. Obviously, trans is in no way an extension or product of Nazism. Their “priors” lead them down absurd paths as they try to understand the rise of trans.

To truly understand this, you have to examine other issues, related to trans but distinct from it, which feed and interact with it and reinforce it. This is what the GCs, especially the leftist ones, fear to do.

Instead, they see trans as an issue that exists (and somehow thrives) in total isolation, completely separate from everything else and spontaneously emerging from nowhere. They have to see it this way because otherwise they would have to admit that the other issues, which form the ecosystem in which trans can flourish, are issues they have always been (and remain) fully behind. Indeed some of them have built their careers around pushing those other issues - atheism, feminism, gay lib... For the GCs, these are all beautiful flowers in the garden of progressivism - and trans is the one bad weed in that garden. The fact that the weed is fully integrated in mutually beneficial relationships with all of the flowers does not perturb them. (I’m afraid these are people without much curiosity.)

For them, trans is a malign tumour leeching off the overall biology, not part of the design. It’s something that wasn’t meant to happen. It’s an accident. If this accident can be explained at all, the explanation must not endanger the many things they believe. Ideally, the explanation will come from those beliefs.

This is how you arrive at the standard TERF explanation for trans: it’s sexist men doing it to harm women. Yes, this is what they really believe. They see that trans sometimes hurts women. What hurts women? Sexist men. Therefore it must be sexist men behind this thing that is hurting women.

As I said, these are people without much curiosity. But perhaps another explanation for their myopia is their age. Some of them are Millennials in their thirties, but none are Zoomers in their twenties, and most are Gen X or Boomer, in their forties, fifties and sixties. A few, like Germaine Greer, are even older, but really too old to grasp what is going on. This leaves the GCs as a set of people in middle-age, angry that the narrative has moved on without them, and in a direction they don’t like but cannot effectively oppose given their stated beliefs. They want, not to advance the discourse, but to regress it to a previous stage that they were comfortable with - the lost idyll of the early 2010s. It was so recent, yet so long ago…

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A related issue is that of “the real rebel” versus “the establishment rebel”. The latter almost always believes himself to be the former. A lot of the GCs are people with a long history of faux rebellion, delighting in “bucking the system” of conservative fascism. But it was always a charade, an indulgence the system (being neither conservative nor fascist in the slightest) allowed them to have while it utilised them to further its (Cultural Marxist) aims. Only now, when those aims conflict with their sensibility, do the GCs defy the system and become, for the first time in their lives, genuine rebels.

For some of them this brings trepidation. They have fallen out of favour with fashionable opinion. Like a model losing her looks, they do have options but it is nothing like before. Without the life-blood of connections and money and exposure that they’ve always enjoyed, some of them just give up, and some run back to the mainstream to beg forgiveness.

For others, there is excitement - “finally, I’m a real rebel!” - although even there, they don’t understand what they have wandered into. And they feel out in the wilderness, and they don’t enjoy that feeling. While they try to delight in defying convention, inside they have the fear of the person who is suddenly in unknown territory. What’s more, they lack the mettle to stray far from the familiar, still less to embrace what they find. They make a show of applauding themselves for being “cancelled”, they pretend to revel in the underdog status that is freshly theirs, but they cannot embrace the people or the ideas that would actually explain to them why they were cancelled, and why trans is even a thing.

But at the same time, there is some comfort for them in discovering that this same treatment has been meted out to others before them. They feel they have joined an underground tradition, a secret society of the cancelled, the deplatformed, the banned and the outrageous.

They take a look at what this crowd was up to before they arrived: the Brexiteering, the opposition to sexist Islam, the pro free markets. They can smile politely at some of that, and they can hobnob with the “common sense Commies” of Spiked. But they certainly don’t like the more extreme stuff they catch a whiff of.

It’s like when you discover a band via their anodyne sixth album, so you venture back through their catalogue and enjoy their fifth and fourth albums which are similarly bland, but it gets less so the farther back you go, and you really can’t stand that wild avant-garde stuff they did on their debut EP in Charlottesville. That’s just far, far, far too much. So you confine yourself to their milquetoast later material, wondering why their die-hard fans hate you and call you a phony for wearing the T-shirt.

I am one of those grizzled old-timers, watching a naive race-blind pro-gay pro-multiculti feminist calling herself a rebel for declaring “there are only two genders” - literally stunning and brave for mounting the weakest attack you possibly could against the progressive behemoth. After the slight transgression from its orthodoxy, they lose a gig somewhere and react to this by frantically changing their Twitter bio to feature the word “cancelled”.

I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe, including a 40 year-old comedienne getting a rapturous round of applause after solemnly declaring: “When I got cancelled, I promised myself I would find a husband. I’ve found something better. I’ve found an army.”

By “army”, she meant a bunch of similarly naive people who think they have achieved dissident zen by believing in two sexes, and who believe they are now going to reverse the trans phenomenon by heroically taking on The Establishment which cut them loose.

But… while they are completely oblivious to the broader truth of what is going on in society, they actually are correct that they are dissidents. Because, in our age, all it takes to be a dissident - and to get “cancelled” - is to believe what virtually everyone believed just 10 years ago.

Because I know how powerful the Establishment is, I know that the GCs are not going to trouble it much, if at all. Presumably they think being real rebels will resemble their experience of being faux rebels: you will campaign, make your voice heard, speak derisively about those who oppose you, get a few chat show appearances about the matter and maybe a book published by Simon & Schuster, voice your arguments, win the debate, and finally, after literally weeks of struggle, you will heroically effect the change that you want. Victory! Champagne all round.

But of course, that will not happen. The GCs will discover that being a real rebel is actually very hard. It is not glamorous, it is not fun, one thing doesn’t just swimmingly lead to another, people aren’t desperate to meet you, you don’t get books published to critical acclaim, Foyles don’t invite you to sign copies of the hardback and give a quirky speech to an adoring crowd, in fact you probably struggle to get a book published at all, and TV chat shows don’t invite you on to say your piece about that burning issue you’re so bravely flying the flag for. No. When you are cut out of the mainstream, you don’t get to “speak truth to power”. You get to be irrelevant. You get to be unemployed. You get to be mocked. You get to be forgotten. You get to be a punching bag for low-status drones of the Establishment who lack the talent to ever become a high-status drone like you once were, so they hate you doubly.

Once all of this sinks in with the GCs, I think a lot of them might decide that, actually, they can live with trans pronouns and Drag Queen Story Hour, and begin putting out feelers for a redemption arc.

Unlike me, for whom no such arc is conceivable, some of the GCs could re-join the mainstream, but only by publicly renouncing the dissident thinking they have strayed into. Then, that 40 year-old comedienne could have her normie gigs back and wouldn’t have to worry about finding either a husband or an army. But her disavowal would have to be very convincing. The slightest hint that she was only doing it to salvage her career would nullify the exercise entirely and bring even more seething foaming-mouthed hatred upon her from the people who once called themselves her fans.

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What the GCs are saying is very, very weak tea, but even that is highly controversial today. We should not underplay that they really will suffer for the choices they have made. They will lose friends, contracts and opportunities. Their careers will be less lucrative and successful. They will be remembered, to say the least, less fondly. For people accustomed to adulation and the red carpet, all of this is genuinely devastating.

But what makes it tragic is that they don’t understand why this has happened to them. They cannot. Their beliefs compel them to remain bewildered. Add to this the complacency of being middle-aged, and you have a toxic brew: they don’t understand, and they don’t realise they don’t understand, because they can’t conceive of the possibility that the fundamental mechanics of their society are not as they have always believed.

The Gender Criticals are a slightly more aware version of the normie. But in time, they will learn more. In time even the normies will learn more. Eventually, they will know everything we know. But it will be much too late by then.

In the meantime, if you try to help them along by dropping some red pills, these people react with the same hysteria as the SJWs whose hysteria they have taken to mocking.

But mocking the SJWs didn’t save them from irrelevance, and mocking us only keeps them there. After all, if they refuse to learn, then they will have nothing to offer. There will be no part for them to play in the discourse other than the eternal, impotent critic, who doesn’t even understand what he is criticising.

Effectively, the Gender Criticals are a group who have selected themselves out of the future meme pool.