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Gay Shame, with Gareth Roberts
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The most peculiar aspect of 'Pride' is how it has lumped together the gay population, with the most extreme proponents of gender ideology, when the latter have arguably done more than any other group to harm the former.
Gareth Roberts has witnessed this firsthand. Gareth has fallen into commentary on gender ideology, but like previous guests of the show such as Graham Linehan and Helen Joyce, he was marvellously successful before wading into such treacherous waters.
Gareth is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on the iconic British series Doctor Who. His latest book is titled 'Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia.'
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Critical View on Pride Month
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. Well, it's that time of the year again, that magical month when companies update their LinkedIn logos, except on their Middle East pages, when churches throw away their Bibles and embrace a different religion, when rainbow flags fly high above every city, inevitably updated with a new stripe for a new oppressed category, and when the masses are expected to show reverence in hushed tones to the identitarian gods of the modern age.
00:00:58
Speaker
That's right, it's pride month.
Understanding Pride in Sexuality
00:01:00
Speaker
Now, I'm a libertarian, I couldn't care less about anyone's sexuality, but I've always found the concept of pride a tad odd. I've never understood why someone would be proud of their sexuality in the same way I wouldn't understand if they were proud of the colour of their eyes. But perhaps the most peculiar aspect of it all is how it has lumped together the gay population with the most extreme proponents of gender ideology, when the latter have arguably done more than any other group to harm the former.
00:01:33
Speaker
My guests today may agree with that observation.
Gareth Roberts on Gender Ideology and 'Gay Shame'
00:01:36
Speaker
Gareth Roberts has fallen into commentary on gender ideology, but like previous guests of the show, such as Graham Linehan and Helen Joyce, he was marvelously successful before wading into such treacherous waters. Gareth is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on the iconic British series, Doctor Who. His latest book is titled Gay Shame, The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia. Gareth, welcome to Fire at Will. Hi Will. That was a rather cynical take on Pride Month. What do you think about it? I think you'll, I can agree with you on virtually all of that. In fact, probably all of it. When I was a lad, which wasn't that long ago, Pride was one day. In London, we had a Pride March, a Gay Pride March, or Lesbian and Gay Pride March, which was one day in June, maybe early July. I went on several of these parades.
00:02:32
Speaker
um in the 80s when they were not reported at all in the news media. you know It was like it never happened. You'd go there and there were thousands of people, no reaction at all. Not on the BBC, not on ITV, not anywhere. So in a way we're full circle with that because now they just ignore the gaze in a different way. And gradually it sort of expanded and it's now a month and it has these kind of satellites um spreading all through the year, sort of stations of the cross. And and also there are there are various local pride events which happen, which seem to happen, you know, not just in the holy month, but before and after for several weeks and months, you know, you'll just be scrolling through the socials and suddenly you'll see something like, ah oh, it's Grimsby pride this weekend in like late September or something.
00:03:20
Speaker
So it just feels like it's never ending and as you say you know we have those corporate logos changing and um it's just expanded and become ridiculous and as you say it has very little to do with the original
Evolution of Pride: From Reaction to Exaggeration
00:03:34
Speaker
Gay Pride. I mean I think what you were saying about Pride in itself I mean, obviously, say if we look back at um historical religious tradition, pride is a sin. I ah think where it came from, where it originally came from, was sort of originated in 1970, 6970 and in New York, in Manhattan, as a phrase. Before that, we had all been talking about homosexual liberation, lesbian liberation.
00:04:00
Speaker
I think what happened was that people of that time were bored and annoyed at having to feel ashamed. So their reaction was, I want to feel proud. But inevitably, as things change, that leads into a problem because If you want to make the thing boring and ordinary, I mean, that's what I always thought gay liberation was heading towards. um You don't want to make it spectacular and worthy of celebration and all this celebrating and apologizing. It's like alcoholism, you know, for that. You know, that's always celebrating and apologizing.
00:04:31
Speaker
and And so you end up with this weird situation where you're thinking, well, I don't feel proud of having brown eyes. I don't feel proud of being bald. you know um And these are just things, just very ordinary human characteristics. And and so I feel proud of them. So I can understand it originally, but I do think it has, as you say, kind of outlived its semantic usefulness. And now it just seems arrogant. you know Yeah, you've hit on something that I've reflected on as I watch Pride Marches and and see some of the festivities. And that is, to your point, I think initially the goal was for it to be about promoting the fact that we're all the same fundamentally, we're all equal. Yeah. And you said that's kind of boring. And the thing that I think about now is it seems very focused on exaggerating difference and particularly some of the the more
00:05:23
Speaker
out there fringes of some of these the palm marches. where Yeah. All that sort of stuff. You go, this is very different to the mainstream. And that's not just the mainstream of heterosexual people, but mainstream homosexual people as well. yeah How have we gone from to that, to that point? I think what happens is, you you know, you organize a parade and exhibitionists will come because that's what exhibitionists
Media Representation and Reality
00:05:43
Speaker
like doing. They like parading. So with anything, you know, um you could have like a a schools carnival and the the biggest show offs in the town will be there um showing off because that's what show offs do. So when you when you set up something and say it's a parade and anyone can come and let's show show ourselves off.
00:06:00
Speaker
exhibitionists, whether they're transvestites, leather chaps, you know, pups, all that kind of thing, are going to want to because that's what they get off on. You know, they like doing things in public and people looking shocked and, you know, it's kind of, you know, the sort of the entry level of indecent exposure, basically, which is given out of their free hand. So again, this is the problem with emphasizing that difference and emphasizing oddness and oddity is because I always say you know to straight people that is it's a bit like if heterosexuality was represented generally by like ah really extreme versions of it like Kim Kardashian or or Trump or something like that you know who's quite an extreme you know or um I'm just trying to think of an example I mean in the book I talk about the brother of Gary Lineker
00:06:46
Speaker
um wayne lynneka who runs the kind of very um trashy, straight nightclub, day club in Ibiza, which is full of like these incredibly busty women and incredibly buff men. And it's like, well, you know, if if that that's the kind of person that would turn up to if there was a need for heterosexual pride. And it inevitably brings out the ridiculous, you know, the people who, you know, they love to show off, but they they haven't you know they've got They've got nothing to give, really. you know it's sort of um and then The best way of dealing with these people is to not rise to their goading, to just go, oh, that's nice, dear, and look away and ignore them and treat them just as just as you would anybody else, because that really throws them. I love to ignore them generally, but because they're so embedded in the institutions now and because they're goading all the time,
00:07:36
Speaker
It's very, very difficult to ignore them. They've got to the point where you can't, which is what they want. We will get to how that ideological capture of the institutions has taken place. I think it is a failure of the media and a failure of the public more generally. in the whole identity politics era that we pick the fringe 5% on every issue and assume that that is representative of a particular group. The yeah students on university campuses yeah protesting for Palestine at the moment is another good example. I've heard a lot of people say, oh, all young kids today are far left extremists when really it's the 2% of kids who have nothing better do with the time other than to go out and camp. Yeah, I think in a way, a similar personality type
00:08:22
Speaker
a human personality type across all these people and all these groups, kind of resentful, usually talentless, I have to say, um people that love to be sort of lifted up by something because they'd never get anywhere else, anywhere, anywhere else, and in any other way. And I think that this sort of stuff attracts them, you know, like flies in amber, it traps them and um um we have to we have to deal with them. And I think that is often the case across as I say, lots of these different issues, whether it's student protests, green stuff. With our whole cultural milieu in the 21st century in the West, it seems to be rewarding those people and encouraging those people.
00:09:03
Speaker
And there's technological reasons for that probably as well. And, um, because we live in such a crowded media marketplace, you know, where there are so many outlets, you know, where everyone is a broadcaster in a kind of weird way. People have to ah shout to get attention. And of course, again, that brings attention vampires running. Guy, I'm the perfect example of the bloke in their early thirties with an identity crisis. And so they start a podcast and you know, there are far too many people like that in the world. Yeah. But we were saying off it off air that I really like the way that you've approached Gay Shame because this conversation now has been picked up, thankfully, by a lot of very intelligent people like Graham, like Helen, Abigail Schreier. But I think you take it in a slightly different direction and that you look specifically at the relationship between the gay population and the gender ideology movement and the troubling connections within it.
00:09:59
Speaker
Before we get to genderism specifically, there was a nice quote in the in the book on the gay population, and it was, these are secrets, dirty or otherwise, the talking points about homosexual men that nobody wants to talk about or make a point of, the things we keep to ourselves, the things we all know, but nobody wants to discuss, at least in public. What are those secrets about gay men? I think what they all boil down to really, and the thing that is avoided, is that it's is basically male sexuality is obviously very different to women's sexuality, which is ah something that we've all kind of forgotten because we're all i expected to believe that we're all rational individuals acting in our own self-interest and we don't have any animal drives or evolutionary evolutionarily adapted behaviors, which obviously we do. So I think a lot of those behaviors and secrets come from the fact that when you take women out of the sex equation,
00:10:56
Speaker
men are going to behave very differently um and sometimes that's a good thing you know sometimes that's quite pleasant I mean I say in the book how the level of violence general physical violence among gay men he is really low I don't quite understand why that should be but also you know men chag like rabbits generally obviously I'm not saying all men do um or that we have no choice in the matter, or or that kind of thing.
Gender Movement and Stereotypes
00:11:25
Speaker
But evolutionarily, um we are set up to do that more often than women are. They're a different kind of system, which is provided for in a different way. So because of that, you'll get promiscuity, which is fun up to a point. um You get things like the chem sex gay scene where gay men sort of meet in residential addresses, get off their heads on drugs,
00:11:50
Speaker
and orgy about for days on end. There are still lots of men who have sex with men, as they call them, who are going on Grindr and the other apps where they used to just go to public conveniences and um truck stops and things like that to pick up men and shag them and then probably go home to their girlfriends and wives. So there's all this kind of stuff going on. There's also, obviously, There's the question of sort of bog standard behavior of men towards women. And just because men are gay, that doesn't change that. It gives it a different spin. You go into that in the book, the specific relationship between gay men and a type of misogyny, how it is in some respects representative of men, but there is also to your point that spin, what is that spin? I think what happens when you see this very clearly in things like RuPaul's Drag Race now.
00:12:39
Speaker
is that i mean I was aware from a very young age when I was first becoming aware of the sort of homosexual world, that there was a kind of sexism, misogyny, dismissive attitude towards women, a kind of revulsion and disgust and slang about women's bodies, and the general kind of you know taking women for granted, not really treating them as equal human beings that men do you know or can do. So I think what's happened is with the gender movement coming in, which is all about reinforcing sex stereotypes, you know, it's like saying, oh, I'm i'm really a woman. Well, what does that mean? You know, I mean, you you have to refer to stereotypes to to get into that. And they're usually cultural stereotypes and they're usually nonsense and glamour and femininity and all that sort of stuff. So I think what's happened particularly recently, as I say, is you get this kind of really sort of gross exaggeration of
00:13:34
Speaker
of women that feels dismissive and reductive and just nasty, you know, and patronising, condescending, all those kind of things, you know. sort of It's old because, you know. Being a man generally, it feels quite like a live wire touching this kind of stuff. because you know Feminism means so many different things now. I still find it odd when I see someone saying, oh, feminists do that and feminists say this. And I think, well, you're talking about such a huge spectrum of people. you know That is one thing that's a spectrum. You have a lot of the women's organizations, a lot of the traditional, long-standing ones who are completely signed up to genderism. And and they're still technically feminists. They're certainly calling themselves feminists.
00:14:15
Speaker
So the whole thing has turned into a sort of tangled mess and you don't really know where you stand with it. But what is clear is that, you know, as soon as you, as soon as people start, as soon as women's organizations start going, Oh, let's be nice. Let's be kind. Let's treat men as women. If they say they are on a whim, whatever that whim might be, let's not look into that. Then feminism just will blown it blown up. You know, it's just, it's just nonsense because it's a women's political movement for the liberation of women. Surely that's the sort of basic standard of it. You start getting blokes in. It's one of those things, as with all of this stuff, that is obviously plainly so crazy. And yet people are always going, ah, but, and trying to look clever and going, ah, but what about this? And oh, intersectionalism and all this. And then you think, no, this is nonsense. You know, the very idea that a human being can change sex is nonsense. It's the kind of thing that only academics could come up with initially. There's a great quote from Michael Shermer and I'm going to butcher it, but it's something along the lines of that.
00:15:16
Speaker
that intelligent people are uniquely capable of promoting bad ideas because they can use rational argument or they can rationally argue to get to an irrational position. yeah And that is for me, the case with with gender ideology. yeah But I guess to put this in context, let's speak to the person who tuned out of the gay LGBT conversation in the 1980s as we were pushing towards boring equality and have picked it up today. Because you make this interesting kindverse contrast between gay culture and LGBTQ plus and how it's transitioned from one to the other. yeah How did we get here is the question. It's a difficult one. I mean, it's as they say, it's multi-factorial. There are so many different factors and it is, boring cliche again, sorry, a perfect storm. You know, everything had to be lined up. All the little dominoes had to be lined up. There was um the explosion of social media and the change in technology, which gave voice to and empowered crazy people. There was the increase of the university academic sector across the west of like more and more people going to university, more and more of its sort of crackpot academic ideas, which were always around, but were kind of corralled safely there, bursting their banks and um ah flood flooding into the mainstream, getting more and more mainstream.
00:16:39
Speaker
You also had, and this is a very key thing I think, because it it ties in historically, I mean it's almost like day to day. But what happened, particularly in in the UK with Stonewalls, which was our main sort of lesbian and gay rights charity, it was in 2015, but this was after they'd basically won the rights for gay marriage equality before the law, all those kind of next of kin legal things, um entry into the armed forces, all the kind of discrimination that had been there, they'd kind of won.
00:17:11
Speaker
And so they had, you know, they were a massive campaigning organization with a lot of employees and a lot of money still
Stonewall's Transformation and Gender Ideology
00:17:17
Speaker
rolling in. So what do you do next in that situation? And what happened was and that the new chief executive, ah Ruth Hunt, In 2015, and she lied about this, she told loads of people face to face, I'm not going to do it, took on board transgender. And so Overnight Stonewall became an LGBTQ plus organization. And it's around that time, it's total 2013, 14, 15, when this all happens and all the dominoes go down and everything changes almost overnight. Would the majority of Stonewalls members have been supportive of that strategic move? I don't know about members. I'm not sure it's, I think it has staff rather than members and supporters, people that like chuck them the odd tenor a month or all that kind of thing. So it's ah it's a charity, technically.
00:18:05
Speaker
the the gay population perhaps more generally? Well, I think what happened was, I mean, I should use myself as an example here because I remember in about 2014 writing a text to somebody or an email or something and where I would um write LGB or gay or lesbian or whatever. I remember sort of almost automatically going to write LGBT because I'd seen it around and I thought well that must be the thing now and it's like Hayley from Coronation Street or Nadia from Big Brother and it's probably all right and I haven't really thought about it and and so let's just go with it and but this is the thing it gets slipped under the radar you don't really notice what's going on and so all these kind of things just happen because
00:18:48
Speaker
the people in charge sort of reinforced it to each other and they sort of slid in. I mean, it it's interesting, I've been reading a new book which is fantastic called The Women Who Wouldn't Wished, which is a book by a variety of Scottish women, particularly about gender, genderism, gender ideology in Scotland. And the really interesting thing about that is that some of the women who are writing the editors of the thing have been sort of aware of this since the late 90s. And they give a really good timeline of of what was happening. They were aware of it on the outskirts. It was coming closer and closer. It wasn't really getting anywhere. that People were rejecting. People weren't sure about it. and Then it gradually crept into the gay rights organizations. By the late noughties, it was getting more and more close, but people were still resisting a bit. and Then, as I say, you know in that period of the early 2010s, it all starts to fall to it. Stonewall did resist for a while, the previous CEO.
00:19:48
Speaker
and did say, well, no, we can't do this. But the pressure became just too much. So I think that's what happened, really, that as you had a kind of encroachment that nobody realized was going on. And also, if people are being nice and reasonable and it's about being kind, you don't want to be the one person going, what? You know, if everyone else seems to be okay with something and they're all going along with it and it seems okay, you know, most people are agreeable. We want to get on with people. If people are smiling and something seems okay, we go along with it. And that that's how sometimes you end up with terrible problems and bad ideas.
00:20:26
Speaker
yeah so much of the worst So many of the worst excesses of gender of identity politics are tolerated because of very good branding. i mean It's probably very ah the very idea of you know what they call anti-racism. Who could be against anti-racism? And what they've done is just create something that's just horrible and quite likely racist in a slightly different way. hows it yeah is the opposite of, you know, I'm not a progressive. I don't really believe in that kind of weak version of history. But if I was, I would hope that I would notice that DEI and anti-racism and genderism are all like not liberal progressivism at all, you know. They're strangely reactionary conservative ideologies, actually, which is is ironic. They're not in a nice way. i not like They're not like a sort of a nice reactionary ideology that sort of um um that sort of um has a kind of reason to it. It's all very odd. you know's I think Lionel Schreiber has talked about this and has got her new book about it. is There is a kind of feeling of mania about a lot of these movements, that they're that they're self-reinforcing. Again, it's coming from those same personality types who I think are empowered by social media.
00:21:41
Speaker
um that you get, you know, people who are sort of what they call cluster B, you know, borderline personality disorder, exhibitionist, neurotic, and they run wild. We spoke to Lionel recently about that book. It's one of my very favourite conversations. To oversimplify, you have the LGB bit pushing towards equality in the 70s and 80s, that boring, boring but equal piece. The T gets added. And again, It's almost taken as read that this is just a natural grouping, yeah but if you stop and think about it, these are fundamentally yeah different challenges, yeah fundamentally different lifestyles. Is the connectivity, just this crude framework of our day and age, the
00:22:29
Speaker
oppressor oppressed matrix and they're all seen as oppressed groups and so we chucked them all together. Is that what this comes down to? I think it comes down to that. I mean it's quite interesting when you look at the history that before that this stuff started creeping in very vaguely in the 90s and noughties that the relationship between what you now call the trans population and the gay population was bad. was like um I mean I was sort of um ah aware very early on that it was like oh they don't like us You know? And it kind of went the other way as well. It was like, oh, come on. You know, that kind of, you know, like I say in the book, I mean, that a lot of the old gay culture, particularly gay male culture, was was kind of just looking at things and going, come off it, you know? And thinking you're a woman was kind of like, oh, come on, come on, man. And so it was odd that the two things became linked in this, because obviously, like most things,
00:23:24
Speaker
A basic definition of homosexuality is that people are having sex but of the same sex. And if you start saying that sex is a spectrum and and people can swap about between it and it but kind and it's some sort of weird soul essence that appears in different people, whatever their bodies are. What's that got to do with homosexuality? And then it's, you know, homosexuality is a basic, real, physical, objective thing. Gender identity is like, it's like the Holy Ghost or something. It's like, or the you know, the soul. It's, it's airy nonsense.
00:24:00
Speaker
So I had to quite consider it like that, but when you when you put it that way, they are fundamentally antithetical. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it just doesn't meet together at all, which is why they had to start all this, you know, Oh, um, sex is gender identity is fluid. and Well, what is a gender identity? I've still never quite got this. It's like, I mean, you're socialized differently as boys and girls, you know, it's sort of, and that varies from culture to culture. I mean, know obviously this is stuff, bodies are different. So, you know, we think slightly differently. These are all kind of fairly obvious and now very proved things with lots of data behind them. But somehow you've got this
00:24:38
Speaker
strange idea of what you are inside that's different to what your body is. Well, you might just be a woman that's a tomboy or a boy that's just a bit camp. That doesn't make you less or more masculine or feminine or less and more of a man or woman. You can't change that. Kelly J. Keene is one of the few people that has the courage just to say very simply that gender identity is just personality. That's what we used to call it. and yeah but it's ah To your point, it's picked up this kind of pseudo-spiritual dimension yeah to it now. You've got a gendered soul and that's kind of, it's part of, it's, it's, it's, unusual it's interesting how it has that spiritual
00:25:24
Speaker
dimension yeah i mean we come back to the the well-worn sort of gk chest and thing you know or is it seriously this is one of them but that whole thing about you know when people stop believing in god they start believing in anything and we see that you know across our culture so much you know it's like a superhero movie all that kind of thing you know it's like it's like oh some new gods You know, to fill the god-shaped hole and all this nonsense um which surrounds us. You know, people finding an enormous cosmic significance in utter fluffy media trivia. You know, it's like, no. And I think gender identity is kind of part of that. You know, it's like looking for a purpose and a meaning in life and something about you that relates to you. And this has just kind of fallen into people's laps.
Identity Politics as a New Spirituality
00:26:08
Speaker
I'm an atheist, so this is something that I struggle to acknowledge, perhaps, but I acknowledge that the decline in organized religion has actually led to maybe indirectly the rise of some of these more troubling identity politics ideologies, like generism, for precisely the reason that you just mentioned. Yeah, I mean, I'm i'm an atheist too, or I lapse occasionally. um But yeah, I mean, it's just, um you know, if you're gonna take up a belief system, try and take one that has actually addressed a lot of very big questions and has a lot of thinking behind it somewhere maybe, rather than just picking one that was invented on Tumblr in 2011.
00:26:47
Speaker
So these strange bedfellows, as it were, the LGB and the T come together. And despite some of those philosophical differences, the central point of your book is that the gay population has done a lot to enable some of the worst elements of genderism. How and perhaps why have they gone along with this and enabled it? Again, I think it goes back to that. Sorry, I should, I should add not everyone, of course, but why many. yeah I think what happens is it goes back to what we were saying earlier about that personality type. that the that a lot of people in the, particularly the gay male population, a lot of the most sort of extreme gender activists, the people that have really gone for it, are that kind of neurotic, cluster B, attention seeking, exhibitionist, a bit crazy kind of people. you know People that are kind of bearable. but
00:27:39
Speaker
you know, but was sort of safely contained. I mean in the book I talk about some examples of that from pre-gender gay culture. There was Daffy the only gay in the village from Little Britain who was always, you know, enormously upset and offended by everything. There's there's a great story in one of David Sedaris' books from the 90s where he sort of writes out one of these sort of characters, sort of like aggrieved, annoyed, something's wrong and I need to make a big deal about it. And I'm i'm terribly moral and I'm going to lead the moral high ground and give me something to stand on and I will. and i'll So I think that it attracted that kind of man. And those kind of people are the people that love to work in institutions, I think. They like bossing other people around. They like to boondoggle. They're rewarded for work that is not really economically productive um or worthwhile a lot.
00:28:33
Speaker
they're kind of subsidy hounds, you know, so you see this particularly in cultural institutions, in kind of subsidised theatre and um the arts in general, all that kind of thing, you know, that's absolutely awash in Britain and I think the States with, you know, queer theatre and embodying our lived experience and all this kind of rubbish and, you know, funded to the tune of millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers and lottery money. So I think, you know, they were looking for a cause, they found a cause, and over-tied anyone that crossed them. And in a way, you know, if it had been a good cause, um it wouldn't have mattered. um Because, you know, they were there through all the those struggle for gay rights, and that was bearable. You know, they were a bit annoying, but they kind of helped, I suppose, sometimes. But when it's a bad idea, it's just terrible. It has terrible effects.
00:29:25
Speaker
And so I think that's what happened is that they got given the keys to the kingdom, basically, and, um, gradually, you know, pushed other people out or count, you know, victimize other people are very, very vindictive and intimidating and, um, made it very clear that if you objected, then you are worse than Mussolini or whatever. And that you were sleeping with Hitler basically. And, and that's what happened. I can understand how jumping on this bandwagon can be a vehicle. to attain power. That makes sense to me. yeah yeah where Where I struggle though is how you could still do that when the impacts on particularly young gay people are so awful. So Helen Joyce is memorably talked about her realization, having done a lot of research that the transitioning of young kids is effectively and disproportionately the sterilization of young gay children and often young gay and often autistic children.
00:30:23
Speaker
so i guess the the following question is sure i can understand that logic but how can they so many people still do it when the harmful effects on the population and the young gay population are so bloody awful i think what happens is that as i say it works by increments So once you've signed up to it, once you've made what I call in the book the leap, which is that anybody that says they're changing sex must be a believed and affirmed and they must be given the rights and protections of the sex they've transitioned into. I'll just jump in because I love this little quote.
00:30:58
Speaker
I think the scripture of genderism has a single leap comparable to rowdy animals are possessed by the devil, a big error of logic that everything else in the maniacal matrix follows on from. The leap's important. So just before you go on, just to explain what you mean by the leap. Well, the leap is when, is one of those tiny logical errors that underpins everything that follows. So if you acknowledge that every time somebody claims to be of the opposite sex, you must believe them, affirm them, and they must get the rights or protections of the opposite sex, then you're taking a massive leap because, you know, so much of our society in law, you know, we have equal human rights, that's why they're called human rights, but we also have divisions, particularly when it comes to women's safety and protection, because obviously there are physical differences between men and women, and men commit vastly more
00:31:53
Speaker
um sex crime and violent crime and a lot of it against women so obviously we have to bear that in mind but once you've taken the leap you can't afford to acknowledge that there's a problem with it and I think what happens is people get dragged along and then they become blind to what you were saying that the the obvious harms of the transitioning of the younger kids teenagers. I think it becomes too big a thing to for them to be be able to acknowledge and confront. I think their minds reject it. I think like we all do, you know, some things are just too big to face. And if you've played a role in propagating it further, you are culpable.
00:32:31
Speaker
I think about not just the gay population, but parents of kids who are transitioning yeah yeah and doctors who have done this. yeah yeah you know and That's a very hard thing to face. Yeah, it's a very big thing to face. And that's why I think we might see some advances. It might take a long time, but I think a lot of us won't be around when this And if this ends, I think it will be another, I think we need a whole new generation or generations to kind of finally put this to bed if it gets put to bed because there's so, there's going to be so much damage and so much, so many influential people that supported this, that
00:33:06
Speaker
It's difficult for them to acknowledge what they've done and what they've enabled because it's just too terrifying to contemplate. I mean, we're probably all doing this about something. You know, in two or three hundred years' time, people may look back on us as we do our normals every other generation and go, how could they eat meat or, you know, something that we're not even thinking about, not even that, something we don't even consider and think, well, how could they live like that? But in this case, it's pretty damn obvious, you know, to anyone that hasn't taken the leap and hasn't gone down that road. And, you know, I mean, I mean, I think people like me and my personality type and maybe like Helen and people like that as well, we have less of a filter, maybe, or less of a, and that helps us to, you know, um I don't think that makes the sort of martyrs or, you know, holy or anything. I i think it's just what people can be like. And so Graham is another one.
00:33:59
Speaker
And I think, I mean, I remember walking into, I think it was in HMV in London, you know, the big megastore music store, and seeing, just wandering over to the gay section or the LGB section of the DVDs, whatever, and then I'll just have a look and see what there is, maybe there'll be something of interest. And I saw this, I think it was a French film about ah some sort of transitioning child, and it was, I mean, this was about 2001, 2002, maybe, and I was just looking at this DVD can really get thinking, I really don't think this is good. I have a very, very strong feeling that this is wrong. But, which often happens, I had another voice saying, you must be wrong. You must be bigoted in some way. You must have got this wrong because this wouldn't happen. This wouldn't happen if there wasn't good reason for it. I mean, I remember being told about puberty blockers for the first time and thinking, hang on. And my my gut just going, whoa, no.
00:34:51
Speaker
This is homophobic madness. But then my friend who told me about it saying, well, no, because there's been a Dutch study and a Dutch protocol and it seems to work as a pause. and And you just think, well, how could this happen if it was a bad thing? how could There's so many regulations and rules about what you put into your body. There's the European Food Standards Agency, there's drugs, there's agencies, there's NICE and in the UK, there's all this stuff going on. They would surely not do this if there was a problem with it. It must be okay. because you trust in the institutions. and i mean This is one of the things that's really hard you know in in this day and age over the last few years, is the realization that so many of the institutions that you kind of rely on have been rubbish, have failed miserably.
00:35:37
Speaker
But we
Institutional Trust and Generational Shifts
00:35:38
Speaker
still need them. We need to turn them around somehow, but it's just full of nonsense. and And also because of what's happened with genderism, it starts to make you think, well, what the hell else am I not realising? And unfortunately, you get slandered as a conspiracy theorist if you start going down that that line of thinking. and There are some loopy theories out there but at the same time i think a skepticism of institutions is something which is one of the few good things of the the nothingness of the twenty twenty and what we've seen since is yeah that. But again i think a reason for that is because the institutions have got nothing.
00:36:15
Speaker
I mean, let's go there. How has it happened? How the institution's been so successfully captured by an ideology where I could say you are permanently sterilizing young, vulnerable children. It's a tough one, isn't it? I mean, it's, um, I'm tempted to say, read the book. um it but It's hard to put it in a. in a nutshell. dear listeners Dear listeners, I compel you to please go out and buy this book. It is wonderful. I normally save the plug to the end, but we'll put it in there as well. Go on. As always, it goes in increments. A little idea gets in a little bit at a time. It happens quite slowly. You know you make one concession. You make one sort of merciful decision.
00:36:56
Speaker
and then it sets a little precedence and you know I think that's happened with a lot of things and it was quite slow I mean I'm always sorry I was trying to stick to the point for once sorry but I think with genderism it happened really quite quickly it had a lot of build up of steam in the background and then suddenly it all just flipped down like a domino roll with a lot of other things You know, I was aware of that, the kind of cranky ideologies, certainly when I was a sixth foreman at university, and that was in the 80s. So I knew those things were out there, that we didn't call it politically correct or woke, it was sort of right on.
00:37:35
Speaker
Oh, so-and-so has been really right on, you know? It was like... um mean And you see that in things like the young ones with Rick, the character, you know? And um um and that general portrayal of the 80s student, you know? That didn't start really impinging in outside that world till the 2010s, I think. and In fact, at times in the 90s and 90s, it felt like it was going. much its time had passed there was a kind of maybe sometimes too extreme a kind of reaction in a way I mean the noughties it's famously a time of like you know whoa
00:38:07
Speaker
um There was a lot of, you know, people blacking up on TV. There was a lot of, um, what looks like quite real sexism now, but it was all done sort of with pantry funds or quotation marks around it. And nobody thought it was at the time. Um, I was looking at some old Bo Selecta clips of him doing Elton John the other week. And it's like, my God, this was out on channel four, you know, which is now the most spontaneously right on, you know, Joe Lice it, you know, all that sort of stuff. And it's just, you know, sort of blows your eyebrows off a bit. but But yes, I think a big thing of it is you know that Peter Turchin phrase of elite overproduction. you know We have a surplus of busybody, swatty, blue-haired creeps that came into the culture, took a you know sort not in a coordinated way, but you know just because that was the way they went. They went into publishing, the media, all those kinds of things, and into the civil service,
00:39:03
Speaker
you know, the sort of political infrastructure, all that kind of thing. So I think it was that a lot of that was coming from there, that those kind of cruddy ideologies got in through academia, and the increase in academia exploded them outwards like a zit, you know, it goes everywhere. You've got a wonderful little witticism here. You said we now this has been enabled by an executive class that is too cynical to even be cynical. What did you mean by that? I think what happens is often you get people who are just silly old fools, basically. People of my age, or even older sometimes, who are in you know managerial or executive positions in institutions, and they mistake what you were saying earlier. They mistake the two or three percent of
00:39:46
Speaker
woke ideologues and activists for young people as a whole. I mean, this has always been the case that, you know, older people mistake the loud vocal slightly more middle class young people for actual young people. I mean, that was the same when I was a kid. And so what happens is they kind of think, well, I better move with the times. i I mustn't be seen to be out of touch. I mustn't be principal Skinner. I mustn't be, you know, I mustn't be an old fuddy duddy. I must be, and also they think, you know, what I thought when I saw that DVD. Well, I must be wrong. I must have this wrong. I mean, a friend of mine who recently came out to me as a gender critical sex realist, whatever you want to call it. I mean, he said to me that for years, his reaction was my gut didn't see things wrong, but I must be wrong. My gut must be wrong. And I think that's,
00:40:34
Speaker
I think that's a lot of it as well, you know, that people second-guess themselves. So I think, yeah, what what happens is they they think they have to look cool and they don't want to be seen as out of touch. And I think that's a particular problem with people of my generation, maybe a bit younger and a bit older, that we grew up in the sort of post-Rock and Roll era, where there's a massive generation gap. which it really, I don't think there is in many ways now as much, so that we automatically assume that young people must be right, that they must a new idea must be a correct one, forgetting, of course, that you know all ideas were new ones.
00:41:15
Speaker
you know, gen and eugenics was a new idea once, you know, Nazism was a new idea once, that was the hot new thing in town. And you know, you look back at like 100 years ago, you've got George Bernard Shaw and Energy Wells going, yeah, yeah, let's all sterilize everyone. And eugenicise the world, and because that was the hot new progressive thing in town. So, you know, What these people forget is that you need to judge each claim comes on you individually and separately that they're not just friends. that they're ideas that need to be evaluated. And it's so much easier, um and we all do it, to just go, well, this seems to be the thing. You know, that awful phrase, the right side of history. Well, what they really mean is the right side of not being ostracized. You know, um I'm on the wrong side of history. ah You know, it doesn't mean that you feel, oh, there's a historical tide and i it just means you're afraid of other people.
00:42:13
Speaker
I've got that line, the wrong side of history on my list here, because it comes up repeatedly in your book. How do you think about how that way of thinking has been weaponized? It drives me bomb. It's just like ah it's like a conversation ender and a thought stopper. You know, it's just as I say, you know, it's it's just is just about you're on the wrong side of consensus opinion or apparently prevailing consensus opinion, fashionable opinion. That's what it means. It doesn't mean anything else. And and just the very idea that history is this kind of unstoppable process, a rolling wheel, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, yes, time moves forward. um That's pretty obvious. is It is a rolling wheel that cannot be stopped.
00:42:57
Speaker
But the things that happen in it can be stopped and reversed. We do we do that all the time. So I think it's just really annoying that that the idea that history has sides is so illiterate. you know it's just um It like reduces everything to like a binary, you know supposedly non-binary people. It reduces everything to this ridiculous for and against view of of really complicated things sometimes. And sometimes very simple things that complicate um sex being one of them. So probably the milestone since you released the book was the Cass review, yeah chair which I think has been a, the penny has dropped moment for a lot of people. yeah do you Do you think the tide is turning in the public conversation and in the institutions?
00:43:46
Speaker
I'm not sure yet. There seemed to be a lot of, of like you say, hues dropping. I think what was significant was then when you got Wes treating from Labour, going along with the cast and acknowledging that he'd got some things wrong. You also got Ruth Hunt saying, oh, I believe the experts and I was wrong. And when people would be literally screaming, you're wrong at the time. So you started to see a shift there. Labour slightly started generally sort of moving back from it, but it all depends on what happens with the election. of How big their majority is going to be and how many new nutters they bring in as their MPs, because God knows who they are. And it's hard to tell. I mean, just yesterday I saw the
00:44:28
Speaker
quite a ah notable detransitioner in Scotland called Sinead had been arrested and taken for questioning by the Scottish police. I bless them for malicious online communications. And it's like, well, hold on, if genderists are still using that as a kind of, as using the police as their lone little private police force and being able to exploit all that ridiculous legislation, then there's still a massive problem. I mean, we've still we've seen this year with pride that some of the companies haven't put the flag up, which is hopeful. So I think it's gonna be, I think in the same way it came in in increments, it might
Incremental Changes in Gender Ideology
00:45:06
Speaker
go out in increments. And one thing I have noticed, which I think is very significant,
00:45:10
Speaker
is that a lot of the people that were saying, no debate, trans women or women, no debate, oh, that's it, you know, and that included a lot of big politicians in the UK, Nicholas Stirk of Gistama. They've started saying things like, this debate is so toxic on both sides. Now, while that's incredibly annoying, because it's not, it's always, you know, it's coming from one side only, really, there's nothing more clear cut than that. It is a step forward, I think, because it like it begins to look as if they're saying they're acknowledging there's been a problem on the gender side, and that's a big step forward. And I think, it yeah as I say, and in this country, I think it all depends on what ah what what particular shade of majority the labour new Labour government gets and how they factor this in. Because if they've got, as everyone expects, an absolutely stonking majority and they can do whatever they
00:46:07
Speaker
want to. They're not like the Tories, they're not shy about doing things. You know, they don't wait around sending consulting and sending out reviews or reports. They just do things, the Labour Party. When they were last in government, they passed so much legislation. um It was like a conveyor belt, you know, just rubber stamping all this stuff, which we've ever since been paying for. So it all depends on what happens then, but they will face a very organised and determined opposition, from not necessarily from the Tories, who useless or from anyone else, but actual grassroots opposition. I mean, reading that book, The Women Who Wouldn't Wish, it's like these people have got a network. now that you know that
00:46:48
Speaker
that they're proper activists and they know what they're doing, and they know who to meet and consult with and to lobby. um You've got a small but very effective thing called the Gay Men's Network in Britain now, which is beginning to get contact with politicians on all sides. So I think, I mean, those laws could be shut again very quickly, but I think there is some cautious optimism, but it's so difficult to tell. Well, unfortunately, the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to hand that stonking majority to the Labour Party. Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, they're absolutely useless. I mean, I don't know if you've seen about Rishi Sunat leaving D-Day celebrations earlier. It's like, oh, yes, you know, really the most basic stuff. But to be honest,
00:47:39
Speaker
They've been so bad, I sometimes think it would be hard to tell ah tell the difference when they would get in, um because the Tories make some noises about fighting back against this stuff and then do virtually nothing. You've got Kenny Baird, who has, who's been a kind of one-woman fire wall, sort of feel-fair, because everyone else has been so useless, and it's taken us so long. to get this pasta to change this stuff and um you know that they have to go they really have to go and um we'll see the sad reality is that the Tories thoroughly deserve to lose and uh and yeah we maybe don't deserve the Labour party this is the problem with first pasta post basically which i never thought i'd say but i've come around to thinking it's a terrible thing which which really has to go because i think if if we have proportional representation of some kind
00:48:27
Speaker
The situation would look completely different. I think people would vote completely differently. And I think probably Faraj would be quite high up there against Tom. Yeah. Well, I think Matt Goodwin said it quite nicely the other day and he said Faraj may not have the answers or even the right answers, but at least he's asking the right questions. Gareth, this is a wonderful book that you have written. Thank you. It is incredibly intelligent. I was thinking the other day that I think you need to have a screenwriter and particularly a comic screenwriter write about this stuff, which is why someone like Graham also is very good at it, because this is a very dark, depressing topic, but it's also weirdly comic and and farcical in so many ways. And unless you can have someone who writes about this in a way that pulls out the cast and the humor, it gets very, very dark very quickly. and It does. You've managed to do both. It's tricky. It's tricky because it's, as you say, it's just a very mixed thing because it's sometimes you're just gobsmacked by how awful it is. um But there's always something crazy going on. And um then you're sort of pulled back to reality of, ah you know, that woman being arrested, all this kind of thing. So it's, yeah, it probably you know and it's certainly appealed to that in me, you know, just, ah just I couldn't understand why. I mean, normally when you're writing a book about a live issue, lots of other people will be too. um You'll be ah competing.
00:49:47
Speaker
no one else is doing it. You know, wrong from my angle. So that was good. It meant I could make all the jokes that nobody else was making, but quite obvious ones. You pluck them from the tree. The first thought jokes was nobody else was doing it. But yes, it's... Yeah. The obvious takeaway from that is that you were the one who had the courage to write about it. Thank you for that courage. And thank you for coming on the show today. yeah followade colin ba thank you for that and thank you for coming on the show today Thank you very much, Will.