DEBATE: Does transgender ideology threaten liberal values?

Joyce activated, issue 66

HELEN JOYCE – 2 NOVEMBER 2023 – HELENJOYCE.COM

A post-debate report on an event with Peter Tatchell and Freda Wallace; and the other, much more interesting, things I’ve been up to in the past week

Quite a lot of you have probably seen the video of the event I wrote about as forthcoming last week, at the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) with Peter Tatchell and Freda Wallace.

It was even more of a mess than I predicted in the previous issue (paywall). But overall I feel that I acquitted myself reasonably creditably, and the event certainly gave Tatchell and Wallace ample rope with which to hang themselves.

It was a really busy week, the busiest I’ve had in ages, and that’s saying something. Two days later I was at the LGB Alliance conference, and then at the Battle of Ideas all weekend. I wasn’t speaking at LGBA, just helping to staff the Sex Matters stand. I spoke twice at Battle of Ideas, once in a planned session, on the merits and otherwise of dissent, and once as a stand-in for journalist Alison Pearson, who had to cancel, on a panel about the relationship between parents and schools.

The LGBA conference felt like a coming of age for the organisation. It was the third at the QEII venue, and the programme was really strong. There was a self-confidence about it, perhaps because of the failure of the legal action taken by Mermaids and the Good Law Project to try to overturn the Charity Commission’s decision to grant LGBA charitable status. And it was the first LGBA conference with almost no protestors. Last year’s was large and threatening: when Maya Forstater and I left to go sit in a pub to kill time before an evening engagement, a breakaway group followed us and barricaded the pub. We had to call the police and get an escort to leave. 

There were lots more young people at LGBA this year, and lots more from abroad. I met young lesbians and gay men from Ireland, Sweden, Hungary and America – and no doubt other countries I’m now forgetting. I’m not really a badge person, but I wore my “I love my gay son” badge, which normally lives on my Sex Matters bag and which was given to me last year by an American who came over especially for the LGBA conference. His voice broke as he told me his own mother wore it when she went on marches with him in the 2000s.

Battle of Ideas was also really enjoyable. For the panel on dissent, I took as my theme “dissent within dissent” – that is, disagreeing within a group that is overall working together; I’ll write more about this in a future issue. I’d highly recommend getting involved in future conferences to any sixth-formers – they go free – and to young people willing to act as volunteers. I always think they get the most out of it: it’s too easy for attendees at conferences to sit on their phones and half-listen (at least I find it so), whereas the volunteers are on their feet wrangling the roving mics, and really seem to pay attention.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at LGBA and Battle of Ideas mentioned the IEA event. The overall verdict was that it was a great success for “Operation Let Them Speak” – the semi-jokey label that has emerged for forcing the “No Debate” crowd to defend their ideas in public. 

Wallace was dressed in ripped fishnets and a very short skirt; the view from the audience was off-putting. He was already pretty drunk before the event started and kept drinking right through it – to the point that Tatchell tried to stop him from drinking any more. He held forth on the joys of fucking men with his “female penis” at fetish clubs, said that it’s up to the women he sleeps with whether they define themselves as lesbians and repeatedly said I, and everyone at Sex Matters, were misogynists and anti-feminists whose goals were to harm trans people, women and children.

Tatchell, for his part, was cartoonishly sexist. He insisted that everyone has a gender identity, even if they don’t think they do, and that he could tell everyone’s gender identity by the way they dressed. He gave his nonsense spiel about how “more than 20 studies” have shown that trans people have “brain structures” more like the sex they identify as – I’ve heard him do this before, and set him right then too, but he keeps doing it. (That was the point at which I gave in and asked the moderator to pour me a glass of red – honestly, it’s depressing to have to waste time with such pathetic opponents.)

I suppose it’s inevitable that I’m now experiencing severe esprit d’escalier. When I made my opening remarks I failed to mention Wallace’s campaign of harassment against Henrietta Freeman, which I really regret – all I can say is that it’s hard remembering what to say live, especially when the people you’re up against are, let’s say, prone to talking nonsense. 

I wish I’d asked Tatchell directly if he really thought Wallace was performing “woman gender”, because to me it looked like a man with an exhibitionist fetish performing a power play, coming very close to indecent exposure. I wish I’d said to Tatchell: do you not understand that some men are nasty fetishists who get off on violating women’s boundaries, and that according to you we should be delighted to welcome them into women’s spaces? And do you understand that we can’t keep sleazeball men out of our spaces unless we can keep all men out? Please Peter, you need to understand: this is men’s rubbish, you take it back, stop dumping it on women. Sort it out among yourselves.

I wish I’d insisted that the moderator find a shawl or blanket for Wallace to cover himself up for the sake of the audience, who surely hadn’t signed up for such an unappealing eyeful. That was perhaps the moderator’s job, rather than mine. But I don’t think it’s unusual to be so gobsmacked by boundary violations that you miss the moment to intervene. The few times that as a child I got groped by men on public transport, and the once as a teenager when I witnessed a man across from me feeling up a little girl by sliding his hand under his raincoat and then under her skirt, I’m very sorry to say I did nothing. Now I’d intervene, of course – but these men tend not to do these things in front of middle-aged women, who have enough life experience to act rather than be paralysed. 

So maybe it should have been me that stepped up here: I came into the event understanding just how nasty Wallace is better than the IEA folks did. Oh well. I hope that Wallace’s behaviour means that he never gets invited to anything serious ever again – surely nobody who does their due diligence would even vaguely consider it? But if I ever end up speaking at an event with a man like Wallace, or an enabler like Tatchell, I’ll be more ready for it.

Wallace announced the following day that he is no longer working for the NHS, which is brilliant news. Less pleasingly, he says he’ll be spending more time in London, pursuing a media and artistic career. Apparently, he thinks the IEA event went really well for him, and I fell into his trap.

I don’t intend to waste any more time after this week trying to understand such a strange and nasty man’s thought processes – or feeding a narcissist’s desire for attention, whether positive or negative. But having been forced to cross paths with him, I am (briefly) intrigued. Perhaps Wallace hasn’t actually watched the video sober, and is remembering himself as having performed much better than he actually did? Or maybe he just likes chaos, or thinks “libertarianism” means “doing whatever I want”? He said a few times during the event that he was the only libertarian there. Actually, maybe he thinks “libertarian” means the same as “libertine”…

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The Witch Trial Of Miss Freda Wallace (infiltrating the Terf Reich)

2 DECEMBER 2023
This is my response to being part of a debate with Helen Joyce at the IEA on the 25.09.23 and the subsequent attacks on social media which it lead to. It was a difficult thing for me to do and I felt the effects of it for weeks after. I still maintain that l did the right thing in agreeing to do it but I would not do it again in this kind of context. This was probably the only opportunity l would ever get to speak directly to the people who had tried to directly harm me over the course of the last two years.

FRED/FREDA WALLACE APPEARS TO RUN NUMEROUS ACCOUNTS AND OPENS AND CLOSES ACCOUNTS REGULARLY. THIS PROCESS OCCURRED AGAIN AFTER THE IEA PANEL DISCUSSION IN 2023 – THE GENDER COLLECTION

• ACCOUNT AS AT 24 MAY 2024

A new authoritarianism puts truly free debate in peril

MARC GLENDENING – 1 NOVEMBER 2023 – REACTION.LIFE

Britain is experiencing a ‘silent revolution’. We are now in the early stages of a transition away from liberal democracy and towards a new type of authoritarianism. One in which our capacity to speak and hear the views of others is ever more tightly regulated by the government. The form of the political system might stay the same in terms of being formally a multi-party system but the ideological content we can give expression to will be highly compromised. In appearance we will still be living in a democracy, but not in reality.

This transition is incremental in nature and there is no clearly identifiable movement that is proud to take philosophical ownership of it. Historically, illiberal regimes and groupings, whether fascist, Marxist or the religious fundamentalist have honestly proclaimed their desire to limit freedom of expression to one belief system and party. By contrast, the latter-day authoritarians employ an Orwellian doublespeak, suggesting that their project is in some way designed to enhance liberal-sounding values such as ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’.

The innate, underlying illiberalism of this speech-prohibitionist tendency is perfectly captured by the words of the Labour MP Nadia Whittome when referring to transgenderism: “We must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act… The very act of debate… is an effective rollback of assumed equality and a foot in the door for doubt and hatred.”

The logic of Whittome’s position is that the more censorship of narratives and opinions she subjectively judges to be transgressive the more free trans people will be. The starting point of what I label the ‘Culture-Control Left’ (CCL) – though this tendency has fellow travellers in big business and among some Conservatives – is diametrically different to that of liberalism. For the new left, the entirety of our society’s culture represents a network of oppressive ‘power structures’ that marginalise members of the various identity groups they have identified.

It follows that the role of government is to bring about a transfer of cultural power between those groups defined as having ‘privilege’ and those who are said to be the oppressed. This, in turn, necessarily means restricting the right of individuals to give expression to the values the CCL see as responsible for this informal, non-verifiable asserted form of oppression. ‘Hate speech’ is the key ideological technique deployed to shut down debate and to discourage nonconformity concerning the CCL’s most sacred positions.

Incredibly, the police have awarded themselves the power to harass individuals – who they themselves admit have not committed any crime – for expressing views they allege to be motivated by some vaguely defined interpretation of incitement. Hence the sinister ‘Non-Crime Hate Incident’ database now includes tens of thousands of names that can be accessed through DBS checks. This register of non-convicted persons represents the police, together with other parts of the state machine, ceasing to have any disciplined commitment to being politically non-partisan. This is merely one indication of the proverbial slippery slope into a post-liberal society we are now on.

The drift into neo-authoritarianism now requires those of us who are political and cultural liberals, regardless of our differences on economics, foreign policy, or other issues, to come together to form a broad ranging coalition. A ‘popular front’ of the mind that asserts our natural right to express whatever opinions we desire to. Human beings can only live in a state of true civilisation if we enjoy equal rights of citizenship to one another. It is the only way in which political disputes can be peaceably resolved through the democratic process. Once a particular ideological perspective, whatever that may be, awards itself the right to terminate free debate we cross the Rubicon into a qualitatively different type of world.

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