Wokapocalypse

How No Debate zealots finally met their Waterloo over women’s rights

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Part One. So what maketh a man?

“Isla Bryson is a man”. With those 4 words, in February 2023, the SNP leadership contender, Kate Forbes, finally broke a spell that had been cast over large parts of the media and political parties for years: the dogma that Transwomen Are Women (TWAW). They aren’t of course, as she made clear by intentionally misgendering the rapist Bryson, aka Adam Graham.

Others had asserted the primacy of biological sex before Forbes - most notably JK Rowling - and been accused of bigotry by bien pensant academics and media folk for doing so. But this was the first time that a potential party leader had actually had the courage to publicly state this elemental truth. It was in defiance of the then SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, who had staked her political reputation on the progressive myth that humans can change sex by an act of the imagination. It didn’t end well for the First Minister. She was gone before the end of the month.

Culture warriors to arms

TWAW has been a major front in the so called “culture wars”. For much of the last two decades, agreeing that human beings can change sex has been a key test of whether or not you are “progressive” and “on the right side of history”. Denying this is, as the Scottish Green Party leader, Patrick Harvie, put it “the very definition of transphobia”. There was he insisted to be “No Debate”. Trans allies claimed that women (and men) have no right to debate whether trans people have a right to exist. No one was suggesting that they didn’t of course certainly not JK Rowling. As she said on Twitter, feminists are not seeking to prevent transgender people “living and loving” as they wish. But this sophistry led to a kind of omertà across the media. When Britain’s leading expert on human fertility, Professor Robert Winston, told BBC Question Time in 2021 that “humans cannot change sex” it caused outrage.

The NHS started removing references to “women” in ante-natal literature and replacing them with deeply offensive euphemisms like “menstruators” and “people with cervixes”. Curiously they didn’t stop using “man” and “men” when addressing their issues. Big companies and civil service department started urging employees to start using the “correct” pronouns to avoid misgendering anyone, not considering for a second that women might not go along with this new definition of womanhood.

Those tribunes of performative offence were not entirely silenced even when it emerged in January 2023 that a male-bodied trans rapist, Isla Bryson, had been placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. A couple of others were already there including a 6ft 5’ trans paedophile, Katie Dolatowski. The Scottish Prison Service had glugged the Kool-Aid and were allowing sex offenders to change their “social gender” after sentencing, allowing them to access the female estate. The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, was unfazed. He continued to insisted that 2023 that “of course a woman can have a penis”.

Adult Human Female

But the Bryson scandal was a turning point. It helped cause the downfall of Britain’s most “progressive” political leader, Nicola Sturgeon for a start. The climate of fear began gradually to change. Police stopped routinely harassing “gender critical women” for saying that a person with a penis is a man”. The Equality and Human Rights Commission affirmed that women have a right to single sex spaces and that biological sex is real. That may have amounted to a statement of the bleedin’ obvious - but it wasn’t so to the courts. As recently as 2019, a judge had ruled that the economics researcher, Maya Forstater’s, belief in the immutability of biological sex was “not worthy of respect in a civilised society”.

By July 2023, even the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, had finally acquired the bottle to say that “a woman is an adult human female” - a phrase that had become unsayable in most of our institutions of higher learning. He was responding belatedly to the prime minister, Rishi Sunak’s,assertion in April 2023 that “100% women cannot have penises” - a fact of human biology that, bizarrely, had denied by rhe so called “woke” intelligentsia and even his own civil service. The SNP government’s infamous Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which allows trans people to change legal sex by declaration, Self-ID, was blocked by the UK government and the Scottish government appears to have given up trying to unblock it. Not surprisingly since the law to allow 16 year olds to change sex without medical intervention is hugely unpopular amongst Scottish voters.

University of the absurd

Edinburgh University was one of the epicentres of the coercive trans doctrine. Students and activist members of staff had been allowed with impunity to ban gender critical films and harass women like the elected Rector, Ann Henderson, for refusing to genuflect towards this quasi religious belief. But change is in the air even here. The new Rector of Edinburgh University is the comedian and co-founder of Stonewall, Simon Fanshawe, a prominent supporter of women’s sex- based rights. There are of course attempts by the usual suspects to uninstall him, but as chair of the university court Fanshawe is in a strong position to end the No Debate omertà and allow proper freedom is speech and conscience. Perhaps he will even coax this addled institution into returning to Enlightment values and respect for scientific reason.

The full story of how a determined group of feminists, including politicians like the SNP MP Joanna Cherry ( who successfully challenged her blackballing by an Edinburgh Festival venue) finally exposed this ontological absurdity, is yet to be told. And their fight is not over. Male bodied murderers as still being called “women” in newspaper reports. But as feminists rightly celebrate this qualified return to sanity, we have to ask: how did we get here?

For, trans ideology is/was only an extreme version of identity politics - an ideological passion that has gripped intellectual life in the West for the last decade and a half. So how on earth did that happen? Read the next chapter of Wokapocalypse to find out.

Coming soon.