Helen Joyce, writing at The Critic, has strung together some excellent thoughts on one of the most pressing issues of the day—women fighting for the right to speak freely in the shadow of the latest cultural-Marxist fad; trans-rights.
Her defense centers on “Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a women’s rights activist who holds rallies under the rubric Let Women Speak.” Transactivists don’t like her, so the piece is worth some time, but I’d like to focus on a few critical bits that apply more generally to the problem—using transgender rights to stifle free speech.
If you zoom out, you’ll see that those who try to silence Keen would never be placated, no matter how much she tried to police her words. In March, the inaugural conference of the Lesbian Project, a think tank set up by journalist Julie Bindel and philosopher Kathleen Stock to advocate for same-sex attracted women, was disrupted by protesters who regard it as “transphobic” to think straight men who identify as women aren’t lesbians. Among them was Sarah Jane Barker, a trans-identified man who spent 30 years in jail for kidnapping, torture and attempted murder.
Men who like to take women’s clothing off twice before sex, their own and their partners, are not lesbians. They are – to borrow the approved parlance – cisgender men in ladies’ garments. The notion that they have a right to use women’s safe spaces just because they put on a dress is absurd. But if you disagree and dare to say as much, they might have to act even less like the lady they never were and kick your bigoted ass.
Diplomacy is not an option.
People need to understand that to the political Left, the sacred middle ground is not a destination. It is that bit of distance over which they must first drag you but that, once traversed, will end with what passes for your principles wrapped unceremoniously in a shady motel carpet, sacrificed to the maw of their rhetorical volcano. If you give them even an inch, they will presume you can be convinced to sell out on anything if they push enough buttons.
It is why constitutionalists and conservatarians have such open disdain for what are colloquially referred to as RINOs. Republicans in name only. Democrat apologists pandering to the Left’s middle-ground lie. Prophets for false idols of moderation that lure unsuspecting victims toward the unyielding absolutism of Democrat socialism.
You can’t give them anything they want. Ever. It always ends badly. Look at what they did as champions of black Americans. The Democrats destroyed their families, faith, education, opportunities, and culture and increasingly trapped them in crime-riddled urban plantations. The Uncle Tom’s are not those who free themselves from the human and cultural decline of the Left; it is the people of color who call themselves Democrats that advocate for the new slavery.
And while the Left is not done with Black Americans, it has advanced a new front against women. A path that, if uninterrupted, will end women’s rights by redefining what a woman is to a state of mind, erasing all the gains for which they claimed to fight.
The Left is also at war with men, using gender ideology to castrate and emasculate them in the (not so) rhetorical crib. And there is no middle ground. There is no Be You. You will be what they say or nothing at all. But that only works if you can’t say anything of which they disapprove. So it matters little where you start in the fight. As Joyce notes in her conclusion,
“Keen, Bindel, Stock and Gaines differ a lot in politics, language and style. And yet the same people want to silence all of them. To me, this suggests there isn’t any way women who believe sex is real, binary and salient can make that message palatable to transactivists, so there’s no point trying. And so I’d like to propose an expanded version of Voltaire: I may not agree with what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it, wherever, whenever and as loudly as you like, using whatever words come naturally to you.”
No movement, no matter what its precepts, regardless of whose feelings it claims to defend, can be allowed to extinguish free speech, free thought, or free association. Your right to peacefully disagree is the highest value and must be preserved without regard to the direction from which you face it. Thou shalt not be compelled to say other people’s words, and silence is not violence.
Let’s call that the only proper middle ground and agree that if everyone defended it, no matter whose feelings got hurt, we might all be better off.
