The beginning of the end of rule by extremists?

With Boris Johnson finally saying what most people already believed on the transwomen in female sport issue, we may now see other politicians starting to break free from the trans supremacist position forced on them by Stonewall and other extremist trans lobbyists. It might one day be possible to say that trans rights should not trump all others in every situation without being called a transphobe all over social media or risking being sacked. As Hadley Freeman writes in her Unherd piece, this is ‘the week the trans spell was broken’: https://unherd.com/2022/04/the-week-the-trans-spell-was-broken/.

I believe people of all sexes, sexual preferences, genders and gender identities (did I forget any), should be free to live their lives the way they want, right up to the point where their rights start to conflict with the rights of others. When there is such a conflict, there should be a reasoned debate, not just one side making strong demands and refusing to compromise or even to hear any other viewpoint. A diverse society has very many areas where there are conflicting interests so we elect government to make sure that reasoned debate happens and then to make appropriate laws on our behalf, inevitably with some winners and losers. For the last several years our governments have shamefully abdicated that role to unelected pressure groups, which in the fields of sex and gender has led to a trans supremacist, trans narrative position that even dictates the language people must use under fear of losing their jobs. Instead of debating and lawmaking, politicians have run terrified of trans lobbyists, surrendering on every issue and often abdicating policy-making to Stonewall. We have reached the ridiculous point where male-bodied athletes can compete in women’s sports events, male-bodied sex offenders can choose to go to women’s prisons, male-bodied people are allowed to use women’s changing rooms, toilets and even refuges, and the NHS routinely uses language like ‘birthing parents’, ‘people with vaginas’ and so on, just in case some deliberately-offended trans person might claim to feel left out. Most people feel uncomfortable with this situation but are too afraid to say so in case they might be ‘cancelled’, be charged with a ‘hate crime’ or even lose their careers. Enough lunacy, enough emotional blackmail. At last a glimmer of common sense is appearing at the end of a long tunnel.

A statistic we don’t see very often is that only 2.9% of transwomen have taken any steps at all to change their bodies via surgery or hormones to look more feminine. That 2.9% carries most of the weight when it comes to justifying transwoman entry to women’s spaces. The 97.1%, most with obviously male bodies, are conveniently overlooked, as are the perverts and sex offenders seeking to take full advantage. But feminine-looking transwomen were never the problem. For decades, they used female toilets or changing rooms without objection. The problems arose because of extremist activists insisting that ‘a woman is anyone who says they are a woman’. Extremist activists forced the changes in policies that allowed large, muscular, bearded male sex offenders to go to women’s prisons, second rate male athletes to take 1st prizes in women’s sport, and any pervert who just wants to leer at naked women to go into a women’s changing room just by saying they ‘identify as a woman’. Extremist activists created the problem by making demands far beyond what could ever be considered reasonable, enabling the inevitable abuses that most people easily predicted. It is their fault that even the most feminine transwomen may now be be banned from female spaces, and that transmen might also be banned from male spaces, even though I’ve never yet heard of a single problem caused by transmen. Transphobia didn’t cause that, extremist activism did.

If Boris finally starting to do his job of representing the views of most of the electorate has marked anything (and we don’t get the all-too-frequent retraction and u-turn), it is hopefully the beginning of the end of rule by extremist activists. I can’t help wondering whether we might see others fall like dominos. Closely related to the trans issue is the broader field of identity politics, especially LGBT, BLM and critical race theory, where government has fallen for the many attractions and pitfalls of virtue signalling with its extremely divisive costs. I am (just) among the baby boomer generation that saw huge decline in racism, but BLM, CRT supporters and narcissistic, self-sanctified ‘social justice warriors’ seem to be trying their best to revive it. Here also we are starting to see the beginning of the end for the worst extremes, with reason and common sense starting to re-surface. One day, perhaps fairly soon, history, statues and culture might once again be safe from sanitisation and people of all races and creeds might be able to live peacefully together again without agonising about skin colour, quotas and privilege or being obsessed with every aspect of their identity. We might once again be judged by the content of our character rather than our skin colour or our eligibility to claim victim status. Here also, recent government statements suggest this domino is starting to wobble, slightly.

Another area where extremists have created a huge problem is in energy policy. The UK sits on over 600 years supply of fossil fuels, and is perfectly able to build nuclear power stations. We should under any sensible energy policy be totally self sufficient, and listed among the countries with the cheapest energy in the world. The EU has now accepted that gas, emitting only half the CO2 per unit as oil or coal, is a good intermediary solution to take us through to the 2050s, by which time fusion and cheap desert solar should be abundant. Thanks to our government surrendering totally to green extremists, we were on the verge of the first exploratory shale wells being concreted up instead of their owners being encouraged to accelerate progress to provide as much shale gas as possible as fast as possible. Shale gas would have been one sixth of the cost of the off-shore wind power we’re now all forced to subsidise instead. Thanks to our governments surrendering to green extremists, our economy is taking a huge hit, many poor people are having to choose between food and heating, many wild birds and bats are being slaughtered, and many hectares of prime agricultural land under British clouds will be covered in solar panels. I’m all for using solar power in sunny deserts where the same panel could make 5 or 6 times more electricity, but to use them on land that should be used to grow crops is lunacy, not only because we have to import food, but especially because we live in a world where some people still struggle to afford food and limiting food production increases prices. Under green policies, the environment and the poor always suffer. Government seems hopelessly confused on energy policy still, but at least the shale gas wells can stay for now and some nuclear stations might be built. The worst extremes of wind farm development might also be discarded.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but a few have passed recently and it might not be too optimistic to hope that we have finally passed peak stupidity across a wide range of policy areas. It will take many years to undo the consequences of many years of idiocy, but maybe we’ve taken the first step of that long walk back to common sense.