Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Just when you think the gender tide is turning, a tsunami of stupidity is dumped on sex realists, both here and overseas. The public might have caught on to the lunacy but that hasn’t stopped trans activists from digging in.
So what happened? Well, last week Irish comedy writer and valiant sex realist campaigner Graham Linehan was arrested for three comic tweets when he re-entered Britain following a complaint by a male identifying as a female.
In Australia Sall Grover is still fighting the right to have a woman-only app (Tickle v Giggle), following a complaint by a male identifying as a female while Australian courts found Kirralie Smith guilty of harassment and intimidation for calling a male soccer player identifying as female “a bloke in a frock”.
In New Zealand the Law Commission published its final report on protections in the Human Rights Act 1993 for people who claim to be transgender, non-binary or have an innate variation of sex characteristics, and it’s so bad, it might as well have been written by trans activists. It very possibly was. But the report cannot be dismissed since the elites who promote this dangerous nonsense are infested through our civil service and political system so women and sex realists must fight on.
On a smaller scale, a state-funded NGO called Netsafe informed me that my comments about male fantasy writer Caitlin Spice in one of my Gender Villains Substack posts prompted Spice to complain that he had been harmed under the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
The harm is that I ‘misgendered’ him and that he is ‘legally a female’. My argument is that I accurately sexed him and thus used the correct pronouns. In a phone call, the woman at Netsafe suggested I remove the offending words. If not, Spice could proceed with the complaint all the way to the District Court.
Since I was due to go overseas and was reluctant to fight fires while I was away, I complied. What do they say? Woman plans and God laughs? Forty-eight hours before departure, illness delayed the trip by a fortnight and caused a flurry of phone calls, insurance claims and rebooking.
During this time I watched the Linehan and Law Commission debacle from the sidelines and mentally filed away the names of the Law Commissioners who wrote the report for a future Gender Villains column.
Those of us who never bought the lie have wondered for a long time what the acolytes would say when the entire fragile construct collapsed. The smart ones got in early with a mea culpa. For instance, in 2023 Irish writer John Boyne made a heartfelt apology to Linehan for previously being critical of the Father Ted writer’s involvement in the debate.
He wrote on X:
I’ve given a lot of thought to this and realised that all I did in that piece five years ago was add to the pile-on of a decent man in a vulnerable place, when I could have used my platform to defend and support him.
I, and many others, applauded his apology which he has repeated recently. Since then he’s been photographed celebrating with JK Rowling.
Last week another well-known writer fessed up to being cowed by trans activists. That it should be Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, is more than a tad ironic given that many were predicting Linehan’s arrest was some kind of tipping point for the demise of gender ideology.
Only three years earlier Gladwell (image above) had moderated a panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference discussing the “path forward for the inclusion” of transgender athletes in sports.
The tipping point had finally come for the best selling author who said on The Real Science of Sport:
I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel because I share your position 100 per cent and I was cowed. The idea of saying anything on this issue – I was, I believe in retrospect, in a dishonest way, I was objecting in a dishonest way.
If that sounded like too little, too late to some, academic, philosopher and co-author of The Grievance Studies Affair, Peter Boghossian, cautioned against condemning Gladwell.
For those of you who can’t stop gloating about Gladwell’s recent admission, I have news for you: Enjoy the fleeting taste while it lasts. It will be among your last. Next up: “I never believe any of it.”
When someone admits they made a mistake, thank them for their honesty and courage. This is more important the more monstrously idiotic the claim about which they were mistaken. The more you ridicule people for having succumbed to moral fashions, the longer those fashions will persist.
Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger also took a generous view.
Like him or not, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential and financially successful journalists of the last 30 years. For him to say he was too scared to say men don’t belong in girls sports shows both how totalitarian the [mainstream media] is and how chicken shit MSM journalists are.
Nevertheless it’s difficult to dismiss the suspicion that Gladwell admitted his error only after sniffing the wind and detecting a change in the zeitgeist. After all, this is what the populist author specialises in. My sympathies were with JK Rowling who wrote on X:
Changing sides years late, and only after you’ve realised the non-elite opposition is winning, isn’t a mark of integrity but of arse-covering. Those whose overriding focus is remaining in good odour with the in crowd can never be trusted. Gender identity ideology has been the modern arts world’s McCarthyism, and all Gladwell’s done is reveal himself as a man who’d have named names, but felt a bit uncomfortable about it afterwards.
Also writer Douglas Murray who wrote in an article in the New York Post that Gladwell’s admission revealed an important truth about modern culture – “that even a small amount of social pressure can make grown adults say things they know to be untrue”.
Murray pointed to all the parents across America slandered for what Gladwell is now saying, and the young athletes hounded by mobs who had their reputations and sometimes their careers wrecked.
And for what? For saying something that should have required no courage to say and which should never have been controversial.
Murray reminded us that human beings respond to incentives.
If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivised, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly.
He wrote that society should celebrate brave people like Linehan who tell the truth, no matter the consequences. But it should also “express mockery and contempt for all those people in positions of power who now admit to putting their own personal comfort before any concern for truth”.
Precisely. And that is why I write Gender Villains and name those who campaign against the sex-based rights of women and children.
Title quote by Washington Irving.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
