2 weeks Ago By Ruth Dudley Edwards
Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Belfast News Letter, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. That’s right. My Swedish trousers were hectoring me.
I am even-tempered, but I almost shouted at them. It has been bad enough being told how to behave by people who definitely don’t know better than me (like supporters of the IRA , Hamas and extremist gender ideologues), but being assailed with propaganda by your clothes is a step too far. ‘Be Kind’ was conceived as an encouragement to put others first.
Advertisement Advertisement Unfortunately, it has become perverted by our young into a demand that since anyone who challenges any of their stupid beliefs hurts their sacred feelings they should be silenced. As Sara Morrison in this newspaper pointed out this week in an excellent article about why truth matters, and facts trump feelings, “kindness without scrutiny is dangerous”. (The web version of this article will link to her article, ‘Supreme Court ruling on gender shows that linguistic truth matters,’ Tuesday April 23) Like many others, I have had to endure young people who know nothing telling us to educate ourselves, by which they mean we must renounce our pernicious support for independent thought and free speech and accept without question the ill-informed, fanatical anti-semitic and gender ideologies of those who have become victims of what Elon Musk rightly denounces as the “woke mind virus”.
Latterly, there have been two hatreds preoccupying them: Israel and gender critics. Advertisement Advertisement Their grasp of what’s going on in the Middle East — where Israel is surrounded by hostile countries many of whose people want all Jews dead (which is what Hamas, Hezbollah and their chums mean by ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free’) — is illustrated by banners saying ‘Queers for Israel’, waved by ignoramuses who don’t know that gays are also on the Islamist death list. Their attitude to people who believe sex to be biological, that there is no place for men in women’s sports, and that safe spaces like changing rooms, refuges and hospitals are necessary to protect women against male violence is to denounce them hysterically as hateful transphobes.
Which is why I’m overjoyed this week that after four long years of being challenged, even our slow-learning prime minister who thought women could have penises, has bowed to the Supreme Court announcement that men are men and women are women. It’s something that was grasped by Adam and Eve, but then they hadn’t been indoctrinated by a Garden of Eden policed by Human Resources bullies, a captured educational establishment and cowardly politicians. Advertisement Advertisement I have always treated with respect people who are unhappy in their skin, including transvestites and transsexuals, among whom I have friends.
However, I have been appalled by the male misogynists who have poisoned debate over the past few years. Some of them are deranged autogynephilics — males whose propensity to be sexually aroused by thinking of themselves as females have consumed them with envy and hatred for all women. Their targets are particularly those they call TERFS (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) an acronym hurled at people — male and female — who think vulnerable women should be protected from dangerous and unscrupulous men.
Some of them are calling for ‘witch-burning’, and the murder of that heroine J.K. Rowling.
Unlike my trousers, my mantra is ‘Be sceptical’. And the story I think all children should be taught is The Emperor’s New Clothes..
