Sex realism, cancel culture, and the Left.

We are going to have to abandon, even repudiate, the left -- and find co-existence with “the right.”

An edited version of my remarks for the Battle of Ideas festival debate – Sex Realism and the New Book Burnings - Saturday 18th October in London. Fellow panelists were Meghan Murphy, Suzanne Moore, Gillian Phillips, and Mathilda Gosling; chaired by Timandra Harkness.

If you want to push back against the current climate of censoriousness — I have what might be considered bad news for some of you.

You are going to have to abandon, even repudiate, the left. And you are going to have to find co-existence with “the right.”

I am the child of the bohemian left — my mother was a Trotskyite who met my starving poet of a father while on an SWP summer trip in the 1970’s — and I am here to tell you — if it’s not already clear — the left as we once imagined it — concerned with justice for the underdog, freedom and equal rights — is as dead as Monty Python’s parrot. And like the parrot, it is not coming back.

The left of today furiously enforces two-tier justice and has totally abandoned, in fact demonised, the working class. It protects itself from criticism by censorship and intimidation.

Historically, of course, the political left does not have a monopoly on book burning, quite the contrary. But for reasons that would take up an entire conference, not just five minutes, today we find ourselves in a reality in which authoritarianism and intolerance of real diversity, is coming from the left. This isn’t a new phenomenon: purity spirals and witch hunts go back all the way to the French Revolution

Nowhere is the clearer than the gender issue.

Political extremism is without question a problem that occurs across the political spectrum, and human aggression is older than politics itself.

But if we are to look at the origins of woke — which is, let’s face it, what is driving this current age of book burning — it is left-wing women. Reading the excellent SEEN report into the publishing industry — an industry that is dominated by university educated, middle class women — is just further evidence for this.

I recommend everyone read the report, whether you are in publishing or not. It is full of hair-raising information. For example:

“Helen Joyce received a £20,000 advance for her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which went on to sell over 23,000 physical copies in the UK and over 100,000 internationally. Munroe Bergdorf, by contrast, received a six-figure sum for Transitional, which sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the UK.”

Even though the content of that report is not a surprise, it is still a shock to read the huge discrepancies in treatment of gender critical authors versus those who write far less popular books that fit the pro-trans narrative. Powerful men cannot be blamed for this discrepancy. Capitalism cannot be blamed either. The power in this industry is held by liberal-left women, and they have wielded that power against their own. To the point where, as the brave women sitting next to me right now can attest, left wing women themselves became the targets of the raging narcissism and drive for power that the cancellation-happy sociopaths display.

It has gotten to the point where ‘neutrality’ is no longer possible. It’s time to pick a side. And that means, for now anyway, turning former political adversaries into allies, as uncomfortable as that might be at first.

From my experience, what is described by the mainstream as “the right” is actually a far more tolerant and open-minded bunch of people than the left that I grew up with. And while in the UK there has been far more pushback from the traditional left against the insanities of trans ideology, in the United States, where I lived for a long time, it has been the dreaded Trump and the MAGA movement that has moved the needle in protecting women and children from the stranglehold of the trans lobby.

I also want to address another, potentially uncomfortable, issue when it comes to sex realism and what we can and cannot say. Denial of the reality of biological sex and undoubtedly hurt women and girls who have particular vulnerabilities. But if we want to be truly fair, gender critical women need to also face up to the fact that the principles of sex realism apply to us, too. Women need private spaces, but so do men. Women have particular physical abilities, for example gestation and lactation, that men do not — and men should not be allowed to pretend they do. Men, too, have particular physical abilities — conducting warfare or physically subduing violent criminals, for example — that women should just stay out of.

Just like indulging delusional men who want access female medical spaces is a threat to women’s health and safety, allowing women to access military combat roles for which they are unfit is also a threat to life and limb. Sex realism works both ways.

As much as left-wing feminism has denied this, there is such a thing as natural sex roles, and the utopian, left-wing social engineering project that tried to get rid of them has driven the left insane. This is one of the main things that has destroyed the left for at least a generation. nd even worse, it left book burning and cancellation as their only argument.

Perhaps, in the interest of forging a new path forward for those of us in the reality-based community, the terms left and right should be abandoned altogether. But failing that, the concept of left-wing and liberal ‘goodness’ must be forcefully, openly, boldly, challenged over and over again until prestige industries such as publishing begin to get the message.