The ignorance of culture warriors

Many of today’s debates are caused by fundamental misunderstandings.

The culture war has entered its decisive final phase. The image of Donald Trump surrounded by women and girls in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday, signing an executive order that protects female sports, has received an overwhelmingly positive reception from both the right and the left. J. K. Rowling echoed the feeling of many Democrat voters when she posted the image above on X and wrote: ‘Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this’.

The statistics unequivocally confirm the point. A poll by NPR and Ispos in 2022 showed that 63% of Americans did not approve of men who identify as female competing in women’s sports. But last week, a poll by the New York Times and Ipsos put that figure at a whopping 79%. Even among Democrat voters, a significant majority (67%) supported the principle of keeping men out of the female category.

While we might put this down to a general attitudinal shift, the more likely explanation is that the public is only now grasping the problem. A poll carried out by Survation in August 2023 on behalf of Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, an Edinburgh-based policy analysis group, found that 40% of respondents misunderstood the phrase ‘trans woman’ as referring to an individual who was born female but now identifies as male. Yet this confusing language has been adopted wholesale by the media class, meaning that a significant proportion of people are supporting ideas that they would instinctively oppose.

Let’s take the example of actor Kathy Burke, who in March 2022 wrote on Twitter: ‘I love being “woke”. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.’ Does Burke genuinely support widespread censorship of debate? Does she support the mutilation and sterilisation of children for being gay or gender nonconforming? Does she support treating individuals according to the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character? Does she support the erosion of women’s rights and the shaming of gay people for their sexual orientation? These beliefs are at the core of what it means to be ‘woke’, and yet it seems unlikely that Burke is in favour of any of these reactionary ideas.

In other words, the language games played by culture warriors have gulled huge swathes of the population into supporting illiberal causes. This is why leftists are now breathing a collective sigh of relief at Trump’s executive orders. It’s why many feminists are acknowledging that the man whose locker-room boasting about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ has nonetheless enacted one of the most pro-women directives since Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments in June 1972 (prohibiting sex-based discrimination in educational institutions subject to federal funding). As one feminist artist put it on X: ‘Twice in my lifetime I have witnessed a President sign a protection of women’s sports. I was 13 the first time and am 66 now. May no other generation of girls and women have to fight again for Women’s Sports’.

Yet the fight goes on, and there are useful idiots aplenty who are willing to defend the erosion of rights for women, gay people and racial minorities in the name of ‘progress’. A couple of examples from this week will be sufficient to demonstrate the point. Let’s begin with the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who has claimed that Trump’s executive order proves that the ‘rightwing is now stronger’.

Can Oates genuinely believe that ‘transgender issues’ affect ‘virtually no one’? In sports, a report by the UN revealed that 600 female athletes have lost at least 890 medals to men identifying into their category. In prisons, over 30% of female inmates have been sexually abused and almost 60% subjected to domestic violence; yet these women are now expected to share accommodation with men. Even rape crisis centres have been open to males. This is all before we address the issue of the institutional medicalisation of predominately gay adolescents, or the confounding implications of the widespread denial of reality by those in the media and political class. Far from affecting ‘virtually no one’, it affects virtually everyone.

Also this week, the musician Azealia Banks addressed J. K. Rowling on X in a lengthy post concerning trans issues. After the first few sentences, it was apparent that Banks had never read anything that Rowling had written on the topic and was simply imagining arguments to rail against.

It goes without saying that Rowling has never complained about adults having consensual sex with anyone they choose. The tweet that is credited as being Rowling’s first foray into the trans issue even said so explicitly: ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security.’ It seems astonishing that Banks should claim that Rowling’s concerns are ‘truly just in your mind’ when she has concocted a version of Rowling that bears no relationship to the reality.

And yet this is entirely typical of those who weigh into the culture war without first attempting to grapple with the issues. The singer Billy Bragg, for instance, no doubt sincerely believes that he is supportive of the rights of women and sexual minorities, but now actively campaigns against them because of his unthinking fealty to gender identity ideology. Veteran human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has similarly acted as a cheerleader for genderism – the most anti-gay movement in living memory – yet still deceives himself into thinking that his activism is pro-gay.

Culture warriors have seized disproportionate power in a relatively short time precisely because their aims have been so widely misapprehended. They have played endless word games and engaged in deception in order to coax unsuspecting progressives into supporting regressive causes. It may seem the height of Topsyturveydom to see a Republican president signing a series of executive orders that promote the ideals once championed by the left. But this is simply a reminder that the culture warriors haven’t succeeded in their efforts to destroy a liberal consensus that broadly exists across the political spectrum. In the deranging chaos of contemporary politics, it is worth remembering that we have far more in common than the extreme identitarians on both the left and the right would have us believe.

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