In response to Kathy Gyngell: Some sense at last on pick-your-own sex, Peter Evans wrote:
It’s funny how certain phrases lodge in the mind when reading an excellent and courageous article like this one by Kathy Gyngell. As I was nodding in agreement over the observations that this endless capitulation to unappeasable fanatics has been repeatedly and willingly performed by the useless Tories, the enemies of conservatism masquerading as its representatives, I found this sentence setting off the cogitations:
In these intervening years trans activist teacher groups have successfully introduced their teaching materials, while parents and children have been made to comply with this new orthodoxy – whether with respect to school uniform or modes of address.
How have a tiny number of voluble fanatics achieved this? I’ll leave aside the suspiciously generous corporate sponsorships the trans lobby has received in recent years, as I bloviated about this the other day on these very pages. In thinking, with some incredulity, about ‘how has this happened’, I found myself recalling Douglas Murray’s observation that the big clue that something truly excessive is at work in the equally-generously sponsored LGBTQ lobby doesn’t reside in the L, the G, or even the B but in the Q.
Being L, G or B isn’t a full-time job. Even being a T isn’t. Most of the people who refer to themselves in these terms seem to me to be as concerned with being able to make a living, pursue their talents and improve themselves as anyone else. But Qs are different. Being Q is a full-time job. It’s the be-all and end-all of existence. And because its mission is to ‘queer’ reality, which it redescribes as a ‘heteronormative social construct’, Queer ideology is at perpetual war with the world.
This is a war that entails the ceaseless concocting of the most periphrastic bafflegabble masquerading as intellectual critique. Here’s a sentence – a single sentence – from one of Q’s high priestesses, the reliably incomprehensible Judith Butler (of, of course, the University of California, Berkeley):
‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’
That comes from an article she wrote in 1997 for the journal Diacritics (‘Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time’). I’d recommend it for anyone who has trouble getting off to sleep; it’s so freighted with similar polysyllabic gibberish that it’ll work better than horse tranquilliser. The aim, it occurs to me, is to intimidate intelligent critical inquiry by means of a gigantic façade of fake sophistication – i.e. if you don’t understand, you must be too dim to do so, so you’re disqualified from speaking.
But the other prong in the war the Q zealots have successfully waged on the society they wish to ‘queer’ (pervert and debauch) has come not simply through their embrace of the cult of intersectionality, the original word for ‘Woke’, but through their devious deployment of the term ‘tolerance’.
In [current year], anyone who resists or questions the Q agenda, which is currently obsessively focused on T, is an intolerant bigot, a hater, a malevolently cruel tyrant who wishes to see vulnerable people live in anguish.
But toleration, it occurs to me, is not much of a virtue. In materials science, the ‘tolerance’ of a material is measured by applying increasing stress to it until it starts to disintegrate. That’s the upper ‘tolerance’ level. But humans aren’t inanimate, insentient materials. Our physiologies can keep pushing the upper tolerance level ever higher, because our biology seeks to neutralise an uncomfortable and sickness-inducing toxin. Alcoholics and drug addicts have become so tolerant of the quantities of alcohol or dopamine-arousing substances that they put into their bodies that anyone else subject to the same dosage would almost certainly suffer respiratory arrest and die.
Yet alcoholics and other addicts never start with the life-destroying dosages they end up with. They begin small, a bit at a time, until their systems ‘tolerate’ that level of ingestion. Then they need more, and more, and more to achieve a similar dopamine hit, until they’ve irretrievably ruined their health and gone to an early grave.
This is what the Q-pushers are doing with their body-mutilating, thought-policing agenda. And the Tories have, until this week, ‘tolerated’ every last scrap of the insane poison they’ve been fed and begged for more.
Progressive, eh?
