When the Mad Fringe Becomes the Centre Declan Mansfield
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/04/when-the-mad-fringe-becomes-the-centre/
‘I got turned on today watching the fear in Posie Parker’s eyes. She actually was fearing for her life’.
These are the words of a ‘transwoman’ (a biological man who identifies as a woman) commenting on the violence directed against the Let Women Speak event in Auckland. The first thought of any civilised person reading that disgraceful comment might well be that all ideologies have zealots, and that the man does not represent the mainstream of the cause he supports. This is unequivocally not the case with transgender ideology. The fringe, to be precise, is the centre. This is something that critics of transgenderism have tried to highlight since the ideology became the Left’s cause du jour.
At the heart of transgender ideology lies an impulse, a psychology, a drive, which, due to biological reality, cannot be sated. The twin delusions that your real self is unrelated to biology and that one can be ‘born in the wrong body’ expresses itself psychologically as a desperate desire to be recognised as something the trans person is not and can never be. This is the core of the profound irrationalism that characterises transgenderism and it is the source of the relentlessly extreme behaviour that manifests as an animosity towards anyone who, even in the most insignificant way, fails to affirm the fantasy of the trans person’s self-identity.
The inability of trans activists to accept the tangible, corporeal reality of their bodies while rejecting others’ entirely rational belief in biological reality are the drivers of an inchoate rage that brooks no argument, and which creates a mindset that rejects traditional concepts of decent behaviour and tolerance towards other human beings. To do so would allow the possibility that someone may not affirm the idea that the trans person is the opposite sex or, in modern parlance, the ‘gender’ they claim to be. Anything, then, that advances the trans agenda of forcing people to affirm their self-identification is allowed, no matter how ugly the behaviour or destructive the consequences. This is not true of all trans people, many of whom just want the same rights as everyone else, but it is true of the majority of transgender activists.
This, then, is the core behaviour of those advancing the ideological project that has been playing out in myriad ways across the world, especially the woke West. J.K. Rowling has said she could wallpaper her home with the death threats she receives. Every attempt to publicly protest women’s rights is met with extraordinary levels of misogyny and implicit or actual violence — the cancellation, doxing and shaming of critics; the distorted re-definition of free speech as ‘hate crime’; the push to allow children to “affirm” their gender; the use of puberty blockers, mastectomies, testosterone, etc.; the editing of classic works of literature which don’t conform to the ideology; the blanket refusal to discuss the need for a democratic debate about trans rights versus human rights and, in particular, women’s rights; drag queen story hour (why do grown men want to read to other people’s children?); the conflation of speech with violence. And then there is the most damaging consequence of them all: the corruption of science and psychology to further an ideology, which is seeing research papers rejected and their authors scorned because the results do not endorse the narrative.
Almost no tactic is off limits for trans activists, not even urging the murder of their ideological opponents. The internet is rife with transgenderists plainly stating that very desire. Not one organisation that champions trans rights, though, has made a concerted effort to criticise the behaviour cited above or called for the speed of change to be slowed because societies are still in the early stage of scientific discovery about transgender psychology and biology, as John Whitehall explains in April’s Quadrant. Normal people are apt to believe ‘I need to look at both sides of a debate to weigh up the possible harms to individuals and to society’. Nothing like this balanced perspective has been forthcoming from transgender ideologues, which should give the decent centre of politics pause for thought. This attitude is not new; we’ve seen similar frenzied, emotional movements when religious and political ideologues have imposed their beliefs on society. Transgenderism, to put it bluntly, is a modern cult. Even someone as rational as the US economist (and transwoman) Deirdre McCloskey has suggested that sex is “assigned” at birth, which is the bizarre idea that the sex of a new-born child is an arbitrary decision by medical staff and no more reasonable or objective than the toss of a coin.
The urge to censor or completely obliterate other people’s opinions on transgender issues was visible during Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s (aka Posie Parker) recent Let Women Speak tour of Australia and New Zealand. We witnessed the three main strategies of transgender activism play out in public: the idea that LGBTQ+ rights are all fairy cakes, fabulousness and Gay Pride marches – the double-speak, in other words, of transgender activism. (Another part of the subterfuge is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training at work, even though DEI is probably unconstitutional because there is no political, philosophical or religious prerequisite for employment in local or public sector in Australia); the intellectual and moral dishonesty of name calling and insults, in this instance, saying people are Nazis; and the violent extremism, carried out mainly by biological males in Auckland. One of the ironies of the current moment is that the transwomen who insist that they are actual women behave like feral men and nothing like the generalised behaviour of women. Ironically, their psychology manifests as completely male.
The fact that mainstream trans activists do not condemn the behaviour mentioned above speaks volumes. Until transgender rights organisations understand that they cannot force people to accept epistemological, metaphysical and logical premises with which they disagree, the problems of trans rights activism will become even more toxic. The simple solution to live and let live seems, alas, very far away.
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