Bullying Tactics and the Gender Critical Position

Naomi Cunningham's article is titled "Why did lawyers try to cancel me over trans rights?" She ends her article on a hopeful note: bullying tactics by trans rights activists seem to be less effective of late.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been writing regularly on the seething controversies around biological sex and gender identity. I’m a barrister, specialising in discrimination and employment law and chair of the new human rights organisation Sex Matters, so I take a professional as well as a personal interest in the subject. My stance is broadly ‘gender critical’. I believe that biological sex is real, and that sometimes has consequences that matter; that there are exactly two sexes; and that although human beings are free to embrace the gendered behaviour associated with the opposite sex, and even to modify their bodies so that they look more like a member of the opposite sex, they cannot literally change sex.

These facts are obviously true, and the vast majority of people believe them. And yet they are now also bitterly contested. Many of those writing and campaigning in this area have suffered bullying, no-platforming, threats to their livelihoods, and even threats of death or rape. The attacks are disgraceful, but I became concerned that they were creating a chilling effect wider than was justified by the real risks in speaking up. So last month, I wrote my own story in a short blog, entitled 'Not Cancelled: I have suffered no serious adverse consequences from my gender-critical writing. The end.’

That’s still true – but in the last few days I have faced quite a serious attempt to cancel me from an event at which I was to speak.

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J.K. Rowling Won’t be Part of the 20th Anniversary Harry Potter Reunion

J.K. Rowling won't be part of this 20th Year Harry Potter extravaganza, presumably because her over-active imagination just got too damned carried away: She has publicly confessed that she believes in a world where real-life women exist.

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The Intellectual Perversion of the Gay Rights Movement

Andrew Sullivan Writes:

We gays emerge from a past in which the freedom to say the unsayable and unpopular — often to great public derision or anger — was almost defining of our kind. We have always been the creators, not the censors; we defend the outrageous, celebrate the subversive, and revel in shock. We have never been the puritans, or the humorless, or among those who want to shut down free expression in order to “prevent harm.”

We defend the eccentric, the unusual, the blasphemous, the offensive. We have never attempted to control anyone else’s speech — until very recently. And this is part of what gays have long brought to the world: the fresh air of freedom and creativity and boundary-pushing against the tut-tutting forces of disapproval and censorship . . .

The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.

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2021: When it was Necessary for Experts to Argue that there are Only Two Sexes.

This letter should not have been necessary. There are two, and only two, sexes. That should be the starting point for all discussions of transgender issues. Here's an excerpt from an Irish Journal of Medical Science letter titled: "The Reality of Sex":

We regard the claim that sex is neither fixed nor binary to be entirely without scientific merit—there are two sexes, male and female, and in humans, sex is immutable (disorders of sexual development are very rare and, in any event, do not result in any additional sexes). Such politically motivated policies and statements have no place in scientific journals. It is essential that impartiality be maintained in order to preserve public trust in science as a process dedicated to producing shared knowledge.

We call upon authors and editors to resist non-scientific pressures to suppress honest and accurate discussion of these matters, particularly in the field of medicine where diagnosis, prognosis and treatment can depend on a patient’s sex.

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