Just before the election, Keir Starmer finally found the third way on trans issues and women’s rights. First, he was damned by J.K. Rowling, who wrote in The Times that she would “struggle to support” Labour and suggested she might …
Why Scotland’s ‘witches’ fought back
Witch hunts have long tormented Scotland. Thousands of women were tortured and executed there in the early-modern era, for the opaque crime of “witchcraft”. Over the past five years, a similarly senseless, though slightly less violent, campaign has been waged …
Why the centrists changed their trans tune
How does a public consensus come into being? The Sensible Centrists like to imagine that this is a careful, deliberative process. Ideas are debated, among people of good faith, and assessed dispassionately, on their merits, in an ongoing collective striving …
The Cass Report’s cowardly converts
On International Women’s Day in 2022, Yvette Cooper seemed unable to define a woman: “People get themselves down rabbit holes on this,” she said. “I’m avoiding going down this rabbit hole.” Attempting to distract from this inability, she called for …
The messiness of male desire
In February 2021, the writer Luc Sante was killing the lockdown dead-time by running pictures of himself through FaceApp, seeing what he might look like as a woman. The effect was powerful. Life-altering, in fact. In the app’s feminised image, …
Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study?
What happens during puberty? And what happens if we try to stop it? It’s one of the most fraught questions of our time. Given its significance and the vulnerability of the people it involves, you might be surprised to learn …
Twenty years a Terf
Twenty years ago, the slur of “Terf” had not been invented, and the concept of gender ideology was confined to university lectures on Judith Butler. Radical feminists were fighting for the rights of women, and everyone knew they didn’t have …
The secret life of gender clinicians
This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but …
The rage behind Transgender Map
Andrea James used to be a respectable, mainstream figure within the trans rights movement. A transgender woman herself, she was (and is) a film producer who carved out an important niche in the very early days of the internet: one …
Does Billy Bragg have a woman problem?
Louise Distras was once a darling of the anti-establishment Left. An underground punk singer whose hits include “Dreams From the Factory Floor”, this working-class woman is unafraid to speak her mind. Five years ago, she was being invited onstage by …
Canadian parents are sick of progressives
Last June, late one night after my kids had gone to bed, I stumbled across a Twitter Space for parents concerned about what their children are being taught at school. There were 60 or so participants, mostly from Ontario: Canadians …
Why women need to feel fear
Feminists, when I was growing up, used to encourage girls to “get loud” and rail against the social pressure to be compliant and “nice”. We were taught to push back against the idea that women need to be appealing to …
The desperate plight of trans widows
“Terrible things are happening to women and girls across my country… and the media doesn’t care. It’s only interested in the trans issue.”
Vaishnavi Sundar, an Indian feminist filmmaker, has long been furious at the way women and girls are …
Is liberal society making us ill?
As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, …
Was New Atheism a mistake?
Richard Dawkins is best known for his controversial advocacy of atheism, especially in The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006). But could the pugnacious evolutionary biologist have a romantic side? His new podcast, The Poetry of Reality, suggests …