Culture War in Britain: Part 2
Gender and Race
This is the second installment in a three-part series on the British culture wars. In the first part I discuss its origins and its chilling effect on free speech. Today I take on gender and race.
Transgender self-identification versus the well-being of the young
On the gender front, there’s plenty of reason to doubt the intellectual coherence of transgender-self-identification. When a biological male believes that his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being ‘female’ is? I’m still waiting for someone to persuade me that this doesn’t trade on gender stereotypes that feminists rightly taught us to throw overboard decades ago.
Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers.
There’s even more reason to doubt that the well-being of young people is well served by taking their asserted genders at face value and allowing them to align their bodies by making irrevocable physical changes. According to Hannan Barnes’ shocking chronicle of the scandal at the Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS) at the Tavistock Institute here in London, there was widespread doubt among clinicians about young people’s claims of “an inborn ‘trans’ nature”, awareness that these were sometimes correlated with eating disorders and self-harm, and suspicion that they might be caused by abuse or trauma. Furthermore, the long-term effects of using puberty-blockers were “largely unknown”, there was considerable uncertainty about which patients would benefit from them, and the health of some young patients actually seemed to worsen while on them.
Notwithstanding all this, “the clinical team ... never discussed as a group what it even understood by the word ‘transgender’”, clinicians “never dream[t] of telling a young person that they weren’t trans”, and they always prescribed puberty-blockers unless the patient actively refused them. What’s more, expressions of doubt by staff were discouraged. “Someone would raise concerns, and someone else would move in to shut it down”, writes Barnes. “Those who persisted in asking difficult questions were not received well… those who spoke out were labelled troublemakers. [According to one witness,] ‘There were always scapegoats … and they were always driven out one way or another’”. “Junior staff looked on and learnt”.
Note the chilling effect.
Barnes’ book bears the title, Time to Think, because she identifies the general problem at GIDS as that of “not stopping to think”. That, of course, raises the question, Why? Barnes gives several reasons. One was the fact that the GIDS was propping up the Tavistock financially and that senior managers had a material interest in not disturbing its assumptions. Another was the unwillingness to offend transgender lobby groups such as Mermaids for “fear of a backlash”. But, most important of all was concern for the ‘progressive’ reputation of the management. According to David Bell, consultant adult psychiatrist at the Trust and whistleblower, “The senior management regarded [GIDS] as a star in our crown, because they saw it as a way of showing that we weren’t crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge. That was very important to the management to show we were like that”. Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers. Not for the first time, the basic narcissism of progressive virtue-signaling is exposed.
So, what’s at stake in the culture war over trans-gender self-identification? Among other things, these two: first, the genuine mental and physical well-being of disturbed, vulnerable young people; and second, the freedom of transgender sceptics to give lawful expression to important and reasonable doubts, without suffering damage to their careers or the loss of their jobs at the hands of noisy, aggressive activists who want to stop us thinking, lest we see the truth.
‘Anti-racism’ versus the effective correction of ethnic disadvantage
Instead of words of doubt and criticism, they react with the fist of repression, filling the air with abuse and threat, desperate to freeze thought with fear.
The discrepancy between ‘progressive’ virtue-signaling and the effective relief of human suffering—which Peter Sutton clocked fifteen years ago in his prophetic book about Aboriginal disadvantage, The Politics of Suffering—is also evident on the racial front of the present Culture Wars in Britain. In Beyond Grievance: What the Left gets wrong about ethnic minorities (2023), Rakib Ehsan points to evidence that Britain today is remarkably lacking in racial prejudice. This includes the 2018 report of the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, Being Black in the EU, which showed that racial discrimination was least prevalent in Britain among all EU member states. Ehsan also observes what the ‘Sewell’ Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities reported in March 2021, namely, that average outcomes vary significantly between different ethnic groups, with Chinese and Indian Britons usually outperforming West Africans, West Africans outperforming Caribbean Britons, and all non-white groups outperforming poor whites.
These data simply do not support the claim of ‘anti-racist’ activists that Black and Ethnic Minority (‘BAME’) people in Britain are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons—that ‘systemic racism’ is the cause of the problem. They also suggest that some ethnic minorities tend to perform better than others because of internal cultural factors—not least, strong families and high educational aspirations. By the same token, it suggests that the cause of relative disadvantage often lies in culture, not racism. “Family dynamics and internal cultural attitudes”, Ehsan writes, “can have a very real impact on the life trajectory of people living in Britain’s competitive society”.
Yet, Ehsan notes, in defiance of the empirical data, the Labour Party has given itself over to the Black Lives Matter movement, “brainlessly” importing racially polarising identity politics from the US. This holds, as a matter of political dogma, that we may speak of ‘BAME’ people are if they are a single homogenous body, united in their common disadvantage, which is simply attributable to a systemic racism rooted in every white person’s ‘privilege’. Commenting, Ehsan writes that “modern left ‘academivists’ … often prioritise the aggressive promotion of their regressive politics over rigorous academic investigation”. Moreover, he thinks that “the identitarian left would love nothing more than to psychologically imprison all of Britain’s ethnic and racial minorities in a hopeless state of grievance”, so as to preserve “their precious white-privilege narratives and their perception of Britain as a hellish island of rampant institutional racism”.
All of which raises the question, why are such narratives and perception so ‘precious’ to the ‘progressive’ Left? People who really care to correct unjust economic and social disadvantages are eager to understand the causes correctly, since accurate diagnosis is requisite for effective remedy. So, when presented with evidence that their wonted diagnosis—say, systemic racism—simply doesn’t stand up empirically, they react with keen curiosity, albeit with scepticism. That’s because what matters above all else to them is solving the real problems of human distress and injustice.
Yet that is not how the ‘progressive’ Left react. Instead of words of doubt and criticism, they react with the fist of repression, filling the air with abuse and threat, desperate to freeze thought with fear. So, what do they really care about? Ehsan suggests that money is one thing, writing that “the financial health of bad-faith actors ultimately rests on the peddling of fundamentally warped interpretations of British society and its institutions”. And then, of course, there are ‘anti-racist’ political careers built upon carefully fashioned personas, which attract social status and power.
But there is more to it than that. It is notable that members of the Cultural Left are determined to think the very worst of their own country. It is important to them that Britain is, and remains, a “hellish island of rampant racism”. They don’t need to believe this. Indeed, the hard evidence says that they shouldn’t. But they do so, regardless. Why? What’s going on here psychologically, even spiritually?
One plausible candidate is the operation of a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint is distinguished as the one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner he really is. There is considerable virtue in this, of course, for it tempers self-righteousness with compassion for fellow sinners, forbidding the righteous to cast the unrighteous beyond the human pale.
Yet, like all virtue, it is vulnerable to vice. For it can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou, signalling one’s personal virtue by inflating the collective vice of one’s people. The Jesuit-educated French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, captured this when writing of contemporary, post-imperial Europe in the Tyranny of Guilt:
This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.… Barbarity is Europe’s great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility).
Again, there is a self-obsessive quality about this. While the rhetoric claims the mantle of the oppressed, the action completely ignores them:
[B]y erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others … In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras.
So, what’s at stake in the Culture War over race? First, an accurate diagnosis of the causes of unfair disadvantages suffered by particular ethnic groups or social classes, which is the prerequisite for effective relief. And second, the avoidance of a demoralising, polarising politics that excites groundless, Manichaean antagonism between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’.