You can’t cancel the truth

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.

Those who want me canceled should probably admit that their efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. I have been banned from Twitter for speaking about the impact of gender-identity legislation on women’s rights, but I haven’t been silenced.

Long before I began on trans issues, I’d already fallen into disfavor among those who claim progress as their own, on account of my opposition to the sex trade. The New New Left, for those not in the know, believes the invisible hand of the market will regulate the global sex trade, mysteriously transforming one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the world into something ethical, despite all evidence to the contrary. I offended this sensibility by insisting that most women and girls do not enjoy servicing dozens of strange men, day in and day out, while handing over all their earnings to a madam or pimp, and that most women in prostitution are not your friend Kayla who lives in her parents’ million-dollar loft and shares nudes with her Tinder matches but only in exchange for the good blow.

It was in large part because of this position that a group of Toronto leftists campaigned to have me fired from my editing job at a small Canadian progressive website, and removed as a contributor. They circulated a petition to pressure my employer (who was funded primarily by labor unions) into no-platforming me, a socialist feminist, because my vision of women’s liberation differed from Hugh Hefner’s.

Today, I’m still told that I am responsible for the deaths of countless ‘sex workers’ and trans-identified people. Which is weird, because I’ve never killed anyone. But what fun is it to blame perpetrators of violence or those who profit from the suffering of others when you could rally against me — a writer from a working-class background, with no institutional, political or financial power? It is dazzlingly paradoxical that those who claim to ‘fight the power’ go after the least powerful, picking off independent thinkers, rather than attacking corporations or systems.

My Twitter ban came about because I referred to a male as ‘he’, and has yet to be reversed. The ban is now used as ‘proof’ that this ongoing witch hunt is deserved. Silicon Valley has said I am guilty; I must be so.

I have yet to solve the mystery of how a small minority of largely irrelevant activists have such a chokehold. Most of us assumed a pervert with a personality disorder wouldn’t command the kind of power one would need to convince the media to start referring to penises as ‘female’. We were wrong.

Never mind that the vast majority of the population agrees biological sex exists. In a matter of years, a small group has seized control of not only our institutions but our minds. People I know who definitely know how babies are made refuse to say in public that only women can give birth. Disagreeing will see you canceled, unless you grovel, as we saw recently when Star Wars actor Mark Hamill dared to ‘like’ a tweet from J.K. Rowling, which said women should not be fired for knowing that biological sex is real. Twitter user @artinventcr, with fewer than 2,000 followers, questioned Hamill’s transgression, and the actor apologized, claiming ‘ignorance’.

Luckily for me, I am not bothered by the opinions of 20-year-old social-media users who believe that adults will grovel at their feet if they list off certain transgressions. I would have been just as witless as them, had Twitter existed when I was a young know-it-all, full of misdirected rage and vodka, so I know better than to pay heed to a bunch of tantrum-y babies who think ‘Fuck you, pay me!’ is a call to political action, though it appears I am in the minority. No amount of bullying will convince me to lie so that some creep who wants to normalize his fetishes by legislating his right to access women’s and girls’ locker rooms can gaslight the whole world.

The reason I have not yet been fully canceled, much to the chagrin of those who insist I am a menace, is because, deep down, everyone knows I am right and that my continued refusal to be silenced is justified. We all know that men and women are real, that it is insane to force women to compete against men in sports, that males cannot become pregnant, and that a female beautician should not have to wax a man’s scrotum because he adds ‘she/ her’ to his Twitter bio.

Scream all you like, pound your virtual fists, submit that ‘Gendered Hetero (doxx)y: How Queering Cisnormative Fashion Binaries Decolonizes Cisborders’ thesis. At some point, we will all tire of looking at the emperor’s flaccid penis. When the fuss is over, all these people will have left is an ‘ask me about my pronouns’ pin that no one cares to ask about.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.