Doctoring the character of Doctor Who

 

Russell T Davies, the long-time writer and showrunner for Doctor Who, has concisely explained why it’s so popular amongst gay people: here was a man travelling with a beautiful woman but showing no interest in her, in a programme that because of its low budget used a lot of glitter and silly outfits to portray sci-fi settings.

              The more recent series (post-Tennant) have been progressively more superficially ‘progressive’, explicitly demonstrating diversity and ticking minority boxes. We have had ethnic minority companions, supposedly disabled travellers, a female doctor, a sexless drag villain and now we have a gay, dark-skinned doctor.

              Yet for all this apparent forward-thinkingness the programme has been surprisingly conformist and conservative, along a very different axis. Sometimes when you add detail and remove ambiguity you take something away.

             

              The areas in which we stand out are always most important to us; the constant friction with the rest of the world makes us permanently aware of our differences. Our areas of normality can be taken for granted; this is the definition of privilege.

              Gay boys a few decades ago treasured the Doctor because he was a man (a hero, no less) whose plotlines were not intimately entwined with being intimate with women. He had friends, often called companions, about whom he cared deeply, as friends. He also tended not to win through action and violence, which appealed to gay boys who often, for a variety of reasons, were not actively sporty and physical themselves.

              The Doctor was an intellectual hero with principles, friends, knowledge and wisdom. Romance was not central to his life, nor to saving the world. For decades there has also been fan fiction of Doctor romances.

              It’s only natural for those gay people to think it celebrates the Doctor by making him an overtly gay man, keen on romance with men; it brings out to the open what he has, for them, always been.

              They have the privilege of not even realising how conformist many of the plotlines over the years have been, exacerbated by the declining quality of the writing. The Doctor, for me, was a hero because he was an intellectual, driven primarily by his mind. Here was someone with self-control who could nonetheless find meaningful friendships. A man who wasn’t a gibbering dotard except to deceive his enemies.

              I enjoyed plots in which things happened, or bad things were prevented by doing the right thing and a very clever thing. I liked to see intelligence triumphing, rather than being portrayed as a disability that makes someone a laughing stock, or as a narrow, technical expertise that only people who are lesser in most other ways can have.

              I like to think of myself as intelligent and principled, but even if I’m not as much as I’d like to be, they certainly are things I value. It was nice to see a hero who wouldn’t kill because he thought it wrong; who would risk his life to give his probable enemies a chance not to be evil. The driving force of those events were his deep commitment not to specific people, but to his principles. Where gay boys saw a nerdy gay I saw a principled intellectual. The two interpretations remained possible for a while; the character was not too explicitly narrowed down, and appealed to a broad audience.

              Even the Doctor’s love for Rose Tyler wasn’t too troublesome for the gay audience; mostly they interacted as friends, and the tragedy was that they didn’t acknowledge their love until it was too late. It wasn’t overtly lustful.

              More recent series have deviated from what I enjoyed about the show. We have seen repeated plots about the power of love; aliens have a dastardly plan but their technology or plans cannot handle the power of human love which is a convenient deus ex machina that saves the world. Amy and Rory had whole plot arcs about how their devotion was an all-powerful force; Kylie Minogue had a gloriously heroic appearance in a mere one-off Christmas special episode as someone who sacrificed herself because it was the right thing to do. A unifying feature of the Tennant era was the willingness of the good people with whom the Doctor surrounded himself to sacrifice themselves for good, leaving him behind as the apparent beneficiary and cause of their death.

              This, for me, is meaningful drama. I don’t want to see someone desperately saving the world because someone they love is in jeopardy and love drives people to heroism. I want to see someone saving the world because it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s probably a better implicit message for the children who are the supposed audience; ‘do the right thing and have principles even when it’s hard’ is more important than ‘fall in love and if you never let it go you’ll be a hero’.

              I’m not asexual but my life, dreams and hopes do not revolve around romance. Doctor Who was a wonderful escape from usual fictional fare which believes that everything has to be entangled in romance. Although it’s science fiction, it was far more realistic in depicting greed, selfishness and outright evil being overcome with intelligence, brilliance and principles rather than through the miraculous confluence of love interest with the general good.

              I suspect that the Daily Mail remains a supporter of recent Doctor Who, despite its obvious diversity, because underneath that superficial diversity is the conservative conformism that says that the best thing in life is to love a partner and self-sacrifice for children; that emotion is the greatest thing humanity has to offer. Doctor Who is now trying to say that these minorities can take part in this conservative ideal; whereas before it was portraying a different way of life, driven by principles and intelligence, which are anathema to the Daily Mail.

             

              I want to see a man who is in control of himself; a man of amazing intelligence and knowledge who isn’t reduced to a babbling wreck by awkward situations but whose mind allows him either to continue to think and plan while babbling, or who sees such emotional outbursts for the waste of time that they are (in an urgent life-threatening situation anyway).

              The Doctor’s famed garrulousness wasn’t someone out of his depth; a precocious thief who is actually just an ‘everyman’ who is lost and in need of rescue. That portrayal that has emerged at times, especially for the female doctor, is a horrific betrayal of what I think is the key to the character. The character is evocative because of his legitimate authority. He might hate the military, hierarchy and authority, but people end up listening to and obeying him because he deserves it. The name ‘Doctor’ is a title of people outside of formal hierarchies of generals or CEOs but which nonetheless implies knowledge and expertise. It’s a name that says ‘respect and authority should come from who a person is, not the position they occupy’. We give the title to the most learned, and medics specifically help others; all these considerations make the Doctor’s name an unsubtle reminder of who the character should be.

             

              How do we give the audience a sense of jeopardy when the main character doesn’t break down in fear? Three ways: we can rely on the audience to understand the situation; we have companion(s) who can be less self-controlled; and we can have actors act with subtlety and writers write with subtlety, making the firmness or shortness of a command reflect the urgency of a situation without having someone bawl or cry.

              I know it’s a children’s show, and people think that children need everything overacted, but I think we misjudge children. They might be tolerant of hyperemotive behaviour, helped along by Tik-Tok and social media in which inane gurning seems to be the way to get clicks and views, but they still understand more intelligent behaviour. Given the obsession with teaching children and showing them good role models, such as through diversity, it makes more sense for children’s television to depict less uncontrolled, self-indulgent behaviour.

              How come we want our heroes to model good values when it comes to being gay or dark-skinned, but showing a hero babbling incoherently when standing on a landmine is fine; a way to connect with the everyman? Do we want a protagonist to be an everyman, which nowadays seems to mean being devoid of virtue or appeal; or do we want him to be a role model?

              Much of modern media seems to want to depict people from all backgrounds as protagonists, but not to depict those protagonists as worth following. Why have a role model who models bad behaviour? Do we want gay ethnic children thinking ‘oh, now I know that I too can break down in stressful situations rather than dealing with them’?

              I want a character whose wisdom and virtue stand out: a protagonist whose intelligence and knowledge define the plots, rather than a hero who has an intelligent friend who helps him out while he does the important stuff of action and wooing a woman. I love action films; I would also appreciate this alternative. I loved it when every bit of babbling the Doctor did turned out to serve a purpose; when he had a final argument or act to do if people were not persuaded by his verbiage. When he could pull a lever after grandstanding for a minute or two, and shrug; his begging and expostulating were genuine, but not his only option. They were the option he chose first to avoid more drastic action.

              If I could daydream about being Optimus Prime, a giant shape-changing robot from outer space, I doubt other children need protagonists who look exactly like them. What we need is a variety of protagonists demonstrating different virtues. There can always be the plain power fantasies of being Superman without his kindness or self-sacrifice. But it’s the actual characters that draw children in, and the Doctor’s character, and that of the show in general, is being assassinated.

Going the full monty on the gender agenda

 

https://www.libdemvoice.org/liberal-democrats-adopt-definition-of-transphobia-65868.html

‘‘Trans’ is an umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth.’

WTF is gender? This is some sort of social construct that has never been part of my life or my use of language. The words ‘he’ and ‘she’ refer to sex, as determined visually at birth. I can understand how within the huge range of sexualities some people fantasise about being the other sex. But what makes this different from me feeling like a handsome man trapped in an ugly body? Or a young man trapped in an old man’s body? Do I have a disorder and a claim on shared national resources for plastic surgery? Do I have a right to anti-ageing treatment? Is it my right for others to treat me as if I were handsome*; and to label them phobic and discriminatory if they do not wish to have their behaviour controlled?

*We should acknowledge that treating people differently is the source of unfairness and bigotry, and that mostly men, women, handsome, ugly, young and old should be treated the same, as all humans have the same moral worth. Pronoun campaigners do not pursue this ideal; they acknowledge the reality that people from different categories are treated differently, and they want to be free to choose which sex-based discrimination they prefer. They do not mention choosing other forms of discrimination.

‘Where accidental offence or harm has been caused the most appropriate course of action will generally be an apology, retraction or similar.’

What sort of harm can be caused by being misunderstood? I suppose if someone is able to take actions that affect others in objective ways, and through misunderstanding does just that, then an apology might be necessary: that’s negligent use of power. But speech alone must surely be judged by intent. The hearer does not have the right to define what language means and overrule what the speaker intended. The hidden assumption in this statement is that other people are responsible for your own internal emotional states: the offence that they couldn’t have predicted is nonetheless their fault. It is the philosophical proposition of consequentialism applied to communication, and there are plenty of reasonable arguments against consequentialism as a defining feature of morality.

But questioning these assertions is itself offensive to the listeners: it casts doubt on their identities, which are tied up with their moral beliefs. And to the extent that their identities are so unwilling to examine their own foundations, I am indeed their opponent. The unexamined life is not worth living, and offence is not a reasonable substitute for justification. And if they’re going to call that ‘phobic’, based on fear, rather than, say, ‘amphibolic’ (meaning doubt), then in their unsupported little bubbles that’s what I will have to be. I don’t feel very fearful, though. I am disgusted, but by their philosophy, not their sexuality.

Gender identity is a personal construction and a self-image with no basis in language. Forcing others to speak and act in a way that conforms with your own self-perception is not a right; it’s oppressive. I can insist that everyone calls me ‘super-handsome’ instead of ‘Dr.’, but this would be recognised as ludicrous. I certainly am unlikely to get plastic surgery paid for by the public to make me handsome. And yet mentioning the obvious equivalence between such demands is itself a hate crime: questioning the assumptions behind these beliefs is no longer regarded as legitimate debate. Hence ‘dismissal of new names and pronouns and the identity they reflect. This often takes the form of inappropriate comparisons (‘people will be defining themselves as Muppets and Wombles next’)’ being an example of transphobia. People defining themselves as muppets is a ‘reductio ad absurdum’, which is a valid style of argument. It might be that you think it misses something; that the principle people think opens the way to such self-evidently ludicrous conclusions is a misunderstanding of the one being espoused. The solution, then, is to enunciate the correct principle, not to accuse someone of hatred.

 

What is gender?

              The core of modern trans campaigning seems to be a concept of gender which is worth examining. We should start with what I know, so that those who have thought carefully about the issue can more readily spot where our thoughts have diverged, and those who haven’t can catch up. And then we will gradually reach what seem like obvious conclusions.

              Gender is a grammatical term; it is a property of words in some languages to be either ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, ‘neuter’ or possibly more categories. English got rid of this pointless property about a millenium ago when immigrants/conquerors couldn’t be bothered to learn the detail of a new language.

              Gender has also been used loosely as a synonym for sex, which is a way to describe which set of dimorphic characteristics a person has; either a male body or a female one. It has not always had this meaning; 50 years ago the only entry in the dictionary was for its grammatical meaning.

              One’s sex has always been determined by physical characteristics. Mediaeval Europeans thought that women were men whose genitals had not descended (a fact I picked up from a book about transgender attitudes but which seems less helpful to its thesis than the author supposed). Sex was, apparently, determined by physical characteristics.

              People behaved, and behave, in a range of ways, rather than fitting perfectly into a binary classification of masculine or feminine behaviour. One’s behaviour and character has always been linked to one’s sex, both through biology and upbringing, and judged accordingly, but is not one’s sex.

              Some rare people do not develop into a man or a woman, but show traits of both. This does not change the fact that the population is overwhelmingly dimorphic.

              Gender, recently, has come to be used to describe a mental state; an identity. For an identity to be male or female we must first define certain mental attributes as masculine or feminine. For example, if we say that women are nice and men are nasty, then I would identify as a woman; but if we agree that men can be nice, then the fact that I regard myself as a nice person has no bearing on whether I am a man or a woman. The same will hold true for every other trait, from aggression to sensitivity. If men and women have access to the full range of human mental characteristics then one’s mental state does not affect whether one is a man or woman.

              This is the core point that Germaine Greer made many years ago before she was exiled from the radical feminist community for being ‘anti-trans’. Either you support the idea that men and woman are equally governed by rules of civility and ethics with no distinction made because of their sex; or you believe that there is a divide in behaviour with some characters being male or female.

              If you think the latter, then one way to remain egalitarian rather than oppressive is to decree that people can choose to be men or women. This way people still get to be themselves; they simply might be ‘men’ in women’s bodies or ‘women’ in men’s. Or, for people who have characters that don’t fit either of these two bigoted moulds, some new gender such as ‘they/them’.

              This is a very contorted way of allowing people the freedom to be whatever character suits them when feminists had already, after decades of campaigning, got society to admit that men and women could be whatever character they chose. It steps back from this achievement and regresses to the bigotry that there are mental identities that only men or women can have; and then tries to make good this mistake by claiming that people can choose to be a man or a woman.

              People can indeed choose their mental identity; believe and behave as they decide. They can be wrong, but they still get to choose. This neither makes them man nor woman. This classification is determined by physical characteristics. It is independent of someone’s sense of self.

 

              Our understanding of biology has improved over the years. A pope once decreed that life begins with the first breath, echoing an ancient belief in the breath of life. For Catholics, the first breath was the moment the holy spirit injected a soul into the waiting body; a physical manifestation of the soul entering the body.

              We now know that the foetus gradually develops, with a heartbeat at 4 months or so and brain activity at 5-6 months, although whether that is coherent consciousness is a different question. Breath is irrelevant to life; the foetus ‘breathes’ through the placenta. Life begins when there is a separate sentience, which begins some time after 5 months of development.

              Our understanding of sex has evolved too. We know about the internal organs and their development; we know about genetics and x and y chromosomes. We have identified many errors in development and genetic abnormalities, which are great ways to enhance our knowledge, as we learn what genes do when their absence causes specific problems. These absences remain abnormal. I emphasise this because it is commonly argued that intersex people make the language of sexual dimorphism invalid. There are indeed people whom it is harder to classify as either man or woman, but the population as a whole is very much bimodally distributed. Having language to describe these two groups, which have been important for most of history, and remain important to many people, is not pointless just because a few very rare people have developed abnormally.

              On the other side, it’s important to recognise that a common argument that sex is genetic is also wrong. For most of history humanity had no knowledge of genetics. Heritable traits were often said to be ‘in the blood’; and men and women both have blood. Sex was firmly a physical thing and if physical reality could be changed, then so would one’s sex. There are XY people who develop as women.

              Eunuchs were said to have been emasculated. If sex were either genetic or mental, this would not be true.

              This is how I, and many others, have always understood the labels ‘man’ and ‘woman’. It is weird that our language makes this such a central part of speech, but this is, like so much of our lives, determined by historical context. I got over it when I was a young child and my mother agreed that it was odd but that it’s just the way it is, like calling black people black when mostly they are brown.

              People are not the other sex because they choose to be; but should they undergo surgery and take the relevant supplements then they most definitely are.

 

              Those 2,600 words define me as a TERF; hated by the left for not accepting their unjustifiable doctrine, and by the right for, well, the same. If you haven’t given up in disgust yet, I commend your patience or curiosity. Let me test your limits by insulting both of these sides.

              The right believes that men and women have pre-ordained roles in life; and that being a man or woman is a core part of your essence; and that your sex is not something you choose. Deviations from these roles might be tolerated if they are mild, and if the deviant acknowledges their deviancy and broadly supports the general approach of societal oppression of free-thinking and freedom. For example, an aggressive woman can be forgiven if she accepts that she is an exception and that women should be oppressed into passivity in general. An emotional man can be tolerated if he accepts that he is weak and men should in general be repressed to point of isolation and mental illness.

              This is sick and twisted. It is also simple and takes away the uncertainty of freedom. People’s roles in life are clear. There is no complexity to navigate, and many people enjoy that comfort of being free from uncertainty. There is guaranteed status and acceptance from conformity, whereas freedom gives the freedom to lose everything. They want to be ruled, and right-wing idealogues and their beneficiaries are very happy to oblige. It doesn’t matter that the defining feature of humanity is our intelligence; this is for day-to-day problems, not big issues, which have happily been decided by priests, the rich and the powerful.

 

              The left believes that men and women are equal, that there are no differences between them and yet also that there are traits so fundamental to the two sexes that one must choose a different sex (sorry, gender) if one wants to display them. The left claims to believe in social freedom, rational thought and progress, but regressed from the position of equality hard-won by earlier feminists. It is riddled by hypocrisy; whilst despising the religious bigotry of the right, left-wingers refuse to contemplate counter-arguments and leap straight into decrying heresy like the worst fundamentalists. The left claims to want progress, but the progress being promoted is merely a different doctrine of oppression; the promotion of a different set of niche interests. The anarchic tumult of ideas on the left hasn’t promoted rational prioritisation of the most important issues of climate change and inequality; instead it is clear that people want the immediate pleasure of self-righteousness without the hard work of accumulating wisdom and virtue. People do not want to do the hard self-sacrifice of working towards a distant great shared goal but instead want to achieve personal status by putting others down.

 

              This is how the other side sees you. It’s partly because each part of the political spectrum contains a lot of people, each of whom has their own ideas and approach, rather than all being identical and consistent. You might be honest and decent, but not all your political allies are, and we all love to judge our enemies by the worst amongst them.

 

              There remain further questions about this issue. What is transgender feeling? Should we acquiesce to demands anyway to spare people’s feelings?

              Transgender rights campaigners have obviously got considerable emotional investment in the use of pronouns in the way that they believe is right. I can’t deny that people can use language amongst themselves however they choose. Families, couples and friends form their own in-jokes or linguistic quirks. If people wish to use the wrong pronoun with each other and get enjoyment or comfort out of it this should be no problem to anyone else at all.

              It is the requirement for others to obey this linguistic rule that crosses a line. If language has rules that everyone must obey then pronouns refer to one’s physical sex, since that is how English has worked for centuries. If language’s rules are mutable and language belongs to no-one then people can choose to misuse pronouns; but they must accept that others are equally free to use them in the historically consistent way. And, should a historian somehow show that there is historical precedent for the less usual version, some historical precedent does not mean that we must all universally convert to one of many established uses.

              Language is about communication; it is best when people share the same meanings and rules for its use. Any divergent understanding harms communication. Language might be a playground for some, in some contexts. It’s harmless to create new words or meanings for yourself or others. For example, my father referred to his children as ‘wocks’ (derived from the Jabberwocky, a manxome monster); and my mother called the deep sigh our dog made when settling down or shifting positions a ‘grunge’, which we came to use of certain human noises as well. But I would never demand that others refer to children as wocks; nor would I expect the world to find a new name for grunge music because ‘grunge’ means to me a (slightly) different type of sound.

              I believe that no-one has a right to demand a change in an entire language. I also think that smaller demands of the people immediately around you are nonetheless demands. Trans campaigners have undeniable emotional investment in the use of pronouns their way. If it matters so much to them, wouldn’t any reasonable person obey just to make them happy?

              This is a whole new subject. The question, without its specifics, is whether principles should be sacrificed for emotion.

              When I was a child I had a small ‘business’ lending money to fellow pupils at school. I had cash as part of my sweet-selling business and sometimes people wanted sweets on credit, or just wanted cash. Cash borrowers were typically disorganised, whimsical and untrustworthy; organised, self-controlled children rarely had urgent needs for extra cash. I charged interest that a loan shark would be proud of, and one such transaction was a loan of £1, with £1.10 to be paid the next day. Young master Argent (yes, really his very ironic name) never paid me back; he justified himself by saying “It’s only a pound! Why bother chasing me about it? It doesn’t matter.”

              My answer was, and is, twofold: firstly, it’s my £1.10, and I am the only one who can decide whether it matters or not; and secondly, when he was begging me to give him a pound, it seemed to matter quite a lot.

              Right and wrong don’t change based on the size of the debt; there is no way you can borrow £1m and claim that each of the million pounds is individually insignificant and therefore should be written off. The debt is owed. The same applies in other areas of right and wrong: you can’t order a stranger on the street to satisfy your whims (or you can, but the stranger can refuse, and should probably also refer you to a mental health clinic or the police), in exactly the same way that you can’t enslave another person. One is only one request; the other requests continuing throughout life. One is smaller, but still wrong.

              It might be a small thing to remember to use the wrong pronouns for a certain individual, but it remains a demand that no-one can make of you. And if someone reserves the right to judge you harshly for refusing, he falls into the category of the would-be slave-owner who resents his slave’s desire for freedom. Everyone, at all times, has the right to think as they please, to judge others and to choose with whom they associate. But those judgements can be wrong; outrageously, horrifically, wrong. If you want to make unreasonable demands of people you meet, based on arbitrary or faulty beliefs, you are free to do so; and free not to meet again anyone who refuses to accede to those demands.

              But when those demands stray into the wider public realm: into demands on lawmakers, voting decisions or just public-facing businesses; or even social pressure on other people and whose books they choose to read (for example) then I am obliged by both self-interest and any sort of duty to society that might exist to fight these demands. The more that trans campaigners vilify any disagreement and throw insults, the more I cannot stomach their identities. Not because of anything trans-related, but because the sort of person who prefers mob rule and debate by social pressure; who cites their identity as sacrosanct and thinks that whoever takes offence wins any debate; is an awful person who should not be indulged.

              My political, economic and philosophical opinions come from a devotion to truth and reason. My beliefs are closest to what we call left-wing. Trans campaigners typically hold a lot of similar beliefs and ought to be my allies. But they seem to get to their position through an entirely different mechanism that involves no debate, no striving for truth and a lot of social interaction that seems more focussed on winning a social battle, not an argument.

              In this sense the apparently unjustifiable doctrine represents all that I despise most in modern society. Truth, justice, liberty, fraternity… these all build on each other. You need justice for any sort of good society. You can’t have justice without truth. Truth is the most basic foundation for anything good. If we fail to question our beliefs and trust in doctrine then we open ourselves to manipulation and injustice. Lies are malleable; truth is hard. It doesn’t always fit neatly into your ideas if you form them first. But if we use truth as a foundation, the ideas cannot fall.

              I was bullied a lot as a child. It taught me a lot; including thinking carefully about exactly what fair boundaries are. I was stronger than most or all of my ‘peers’, just unpopular and increasingly socially inept through lack of social interaction. I thought very carefully about what was merely rude and what was definitely wrong. I learned to ignore insults as a lot of sound and fury signifying only the speakers’ mental incapacity. But if someone hit me; if someone tried to trip me up; if someone took my property, whether a pencil or a whole bag; these were unacceptable, and I reacted accordingly. Most of my peers never understood the difference. To them my sudden violence was random and scary. Their behaviour was, for them, a gentle escalation of their sadism and getting beaten was an unpredictable outcome.

              There are rules and principles, and they matter. This is how what one person calls ‘a simple, little thing’ can engender such spirited resistance at least equal to how hard it is being pushed. If something is wrong, it is wrong. Little things add up to big ones, as we are told in calculus: infinitesimal slices sum to real differences. Or, if you prefer a different aphorism, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.

              Demanding a change in pronouns is an inch too far. It crosses the line, and no matter how much people protest that they have no intention of taking more than one inch, someone (perhaps a different person) usually does. If we return to the level of emotional investment a transgender person or campaigner has in this issue, it might be extreme, but that’s irrelevant. Truth and morality do not bend with emotion. Lies are malleable; truth is not. I have as great an emotional commitment to the truth as any emotional commitment you can possibly have to a lie. I can be wrong, as everyone is from time to time, and it hurts, and I learn.

              Is my emotional commitment to truth just sophistry intended to undermine the campaign for linguistic change? No. But even if it were, it would be a useful point about involving emotion in determining what is right and wrong, which is that we cannot determine emotion. We can all claim to be fully emotionally committed to whatever is our self-interest and there is no way to determine what is more right except the logic of each position or to doubt the reported lived experience of one side. If you doubt my commitment to truth, I doubt that others truly base their self-identity on linguistic quirks.

              You might also suggest that I have a very unusual background in being willing to take a principled stand over small issues. You would be right; for most people morality is more like karma in which small things, both right and wrong, are ignored and self-forgiven, especially if good deeds are done elsewhere. But I see no allowance made in social discourse for my approach. Trans campaigners do not query others’ use of correct pronouns and forgive those of us who can justify our position as one of principle. We are all judged to be bigots without investigation or debate.

              It is very much like people who have valid criticisms of Israel’s foreign policy being dismissed as anti-semitic. There are many anti-semites in the world who take any opportunity to criticise anything linked to Judaism. ‘Many’ is not ‘all’, and if you do not give someone enough rope to hang himself, you are the bigot.

              If you don’t want to take the time to find out, then you must accept the uncertainty of not knowing if that person is a bigot or not. Bigotry is irrational; truth can not be bigoted (hence why allegations of fatphobia in ‘the medical establishment’ ring hollow: the truth is that being fat is unhealthy, affects the whole body and is a leading cause of morbidity and death). I am laying out rational argument here about trans ‘rights’. I am trying to be reasonable; the correct response is to point out the flaws or to accept the reasoning. Fighting truth with insults is not persuasive.

 

              What is transgender feeling? I don’t know; I am comfortable with my sex. I have wondered what it is like to be a woman but out of curiosity, as I have also wondered what it would be like to be a dog, a lion, a bear or literally a fly on the wall: with no desire to be permanently transformed. But there is, apparently, a feeling out there in some people that their bodies are wrong.

              I have that feeling too. I have grey hairs. I am a handsome young man trapped in an ugly old body. I loathe ageing with every fibre of my being; it haunts me every day. No-one has yet offered me funded medical treatment to amend my body to be youthful once again; nor does anyone offer to treat me like a handsome man as befits my self-image. When I express a hope that anti-ageing treatments could be invented, people scoff and tell me that ageing is normal and that I should embrace oncoming death. People genuinely expect me to be happy with death but do not expect others to accept the bodies they were born with!

              There are people out there with body dysmorphia who believe that their own body parts are not their own and want to remove them: people who want to cut off a hand because their brains do not recognise the hand as part of their bodies. We treat these people for mental illness: their body is their body, and wanting to mutilate oneself is believed to be insane.

              What is the difference between feeling like another sex and each of these examples? I don’t know. Popular discourse has never explained, and raising the questions is treated as offensive. Is there some specific type of body dysmorphia in which someone’s brain genuinely fails to recognise the external sexually dimorphic body parts as their own? Why does this present itself as wanting to change sex rather than simply cut them off?

              If there is more to being the other sex, what is it? Is it about conforming to sexual stereotypes: about enacting a set of prescribed behaviours? Because as I have mentioned already we should not believe in such tripe. There might be some characters and behaviours that are more common in one sex, but these correlations do not define the sex, and either sex is free to behave as they choose within the law and whatever rules of politeness one adheres to.

              This was a short section; it boils down to a simple question of whether this feeling is any different from any other fantasy that people entertain about their bodies; and whether any feeling that does not relate to the body is different from bog-standard sex stereotypes.

 

              It is also worth pondering why people feel the need to invoke their identity; to make this cause a sacred part of their lives. Why is it offensive to question it? Why does it engender such emotion?

              The point about taboos in society is not so much how horrific any behaviour is. There are many awful things we regard as standard crimes, such as hosting parties while ordering the country to isolate themselves to prevent viral spread; or such as cars whizzing over a junction when the lights have turned red because the drivers prefer to hold others up than wait their turn. Compared to these behaviours, saying a rude word, or questioning a belief, ought to be nothing. People are directly and measurably affected in the former, which are also genuine criminal offences.

              But the emotional reaction comes from puncturing the bubble of conformity and power. Taboos are a way for people to show togetherness by sharing rules; or perhaps, more nastily, for people to feel less small and worthless by exercising social power over others. I’ve never understood the concept of ‘atmosphere’ at big events. People talk about the ‘atmos.’ like some measurable psychic anomaly, but I lack whatever telepathic abilities the rest of humanity enjoys. ‘Atmosphere’ seems to correlate with oppressive noise and crowds.

              But I acknowledge that most people have some sort of joy from conformism, just as most people have a bit of a bully in them and enjoy power over others. Taboos satisfy both these itches. In mediaeval times there were whole village-wide enthusiasms, and emotions were regarded as social events, not individual experiences. The obsession with any particular taboo, be it trying to discuss gender as a concept or using an unacceptable word, even as a concept rather than an insult, cannot possibly be because these things cause genuine harm to a person, surely? There must be more: something about social bonds and rules being broken.

              But what if these things do cause harm? What emotional harm is caused by a concept or a word? Why do we have trigger warnings and what do they protect people from?

              No-one has deigned to explain to me; the assumption is that if someone else claims suffering then we must all rearrange our lives to prevent it. I have been abused and manipulated enough in my life to have a powerful negative reaction to being required to rearrange my life just because of someone else’s demand unproven claim.

              The greatest pain I have ever felt was the death of my mother, with whom I was very close, and who helped and supported me through a relatively isolated childhood with few friends and many unpleasantnesses. It was far worse than when I had worn the skin off the entire soles of my feet in the wilderness and had to walk miles on swollen, red and raw fleshbags. That hurt, but grief and mental pain is worse.

              What support do we give people for death? Well, people can choose to have counselling; we give people a two to five days off work for immediate family members (or most organisations choose to; it’s not a legal requirement); and we offer condolences and sympathy. Do the dead ever rise? No. Does the pain of loss ever die? No. It gets buried by new events in life, but it’s always there, ready to bubble to the surface if you get jolted the wrong way.

              That’s the closest I can imagine to why people need trigger warnings for other things. I struggle to imagine that anything can be as bad as death; no traumatic event can compare. But I am unaware of trigger warnings for death. It’s part of life and it’s my job, as someone who has experienced family death when most people my age have only had grandparents die, to deal with it myself. And if I can’t, one can only hope that I have some friends and family for support, or enough money to buy a friend – a counsellor. It’s not the problem of random strangers or colleagues.

              This is how we expect people to deal with death. How does this compare with other forms of emotional reaction? People who hate to hear certain words, such as n***er or re***d, believe that their emotions are so important that we must all control our behaviour to avoid causing them mental anguish!

              If you hate being insulted, that’s fair. It’s rude to insult someone, whether it’s using a sneering tone in a sentence that might otherwise be innocent, or swearing. But if I want to discuss the nature of offence; to enquire rationally why the fact that re***d came to be used as an insult by schoolchildren now means that no-one can ever say it again; then I am not insulting anyone. The only insult is the breaking of the prohibition on saying or writing it; or some sort of direct mental anguish someone feels from the very sound itself.

              A prohibition without a reason deserves to be broken; in so far as that’s why people get offended, they deserve all the anguish I can give. No-one else should get to control my behaviour just to make them feel unified with me. Unity for its own sake is repulsive.

              That leaves mental anguish from the sound itself. Clearly the sound is not some sort of magic spell that has supernatural power. The anguish is a trained response that someone has learned. I doubt that most people who display offence genuinely feel bad, but I am willing to assume that some have learned to feel genuinely upset. Perhaps the word was used in bad situations and they now have a Pavlovian response to the word itself because of its long association. For example, my father would describe hiccups as ‘sheer agony’, and I now feel the urge to chuckle whenever someone uses the word ‘agony’ because it reminds me of his hilarious over-acting, even though laughing is usually grossly inappropriate.

              I know perfectly well that it’s my own private association, so I control my urge, ignore the feeling and respond appropriately to the message the speaker intends. This is the correct and reasonable thing to do. It remains so when the speaker uses a taboo word or concept but not as an insult. For example, a person might use the word ‘reta*d’ in a summary of a conversation from the 1990s. Relaying this conversation is not an offensive act. Or someone might use it when trying to discuss the nature of offence without directly insulting anyone. Again, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain that the word is not being used as an insult.

              We can discuss insult and offence another time; whether using a negative trait some people are born with as an insult is reasonable; and whether insults can be deserved. The point here is that a key feature of an insult is the intention to offend, or a failed duty to take more care (claiming ignorance of rules or sensitivities isn’t good enough, just as ignorance of the law doesn’t make criminal acts legal). Is there a duty to be aware of, and then avoid triggering, sensitivities?

              No. Humans aren’t mind-readers, and we’re responsible for coping with our own emotions. There is no way to be aware of all sensitivities, and once made aware, no obligation to obey the implied demand. However, it is civil to respect reasonable requests, which brings us back to understanding how, and how deeply, someone can be so deeply invested in not hearing certain words or ideas. Is it a reasonable request? Forming such attachments seems to me to be an irrational problem that a person should try to overcome, not a whim that others should indulge. And being unable to hear specific ideas or concepts is itself a disgraceful attitude. Hearing them doesn’t mean agreeing with them, although it might lead to learning something: hearing new, persuasive arguments. Facing up to the fact that others think differently, whether or not their position is valid, is facing up to the truth. ‘Truth hurts’ is an established maxim, but so is ‘the truth will set you free’. If you want to avoid harsh reality, your desire is unworthy and you need either to get a grip on yourself or go to a mental asylum.

              That’s a bit bombastic, of course. People like to invoke their identity, and claim that someone is denying their very personhood. It’s understandable to be offended if someone says that you do not exist, that you are mentally ill, or that you deserve no rights. Some people are mentally ill, and it is one of the sad tasks of friends, medical staff and police to deal with their often misguided self-image as sane and reasonable.

              But more often than this, people can be wrong. And a person claiming that you are wrong is not necessarily denying your rights or personhood, nor being bigoted, even if actually wrong himself. If you make a claim about having certain rights, and someone cogently argues against that claim, it’s not necessarily an offensive categorisation of you as sub-human; it’s a rebuttal of an argument.                  This happens every time we discuss rights. I might make the claim that I had the right to peaceful, undisturbed occupation of a flat that I rented; whereas my neighbours a few years ago did make the claim that their right to stamp around for hours in the middle of the night outweighed any right I have to live a decent life. I was angry; they had so little regard for my rights or my life that they were happy to steal my life away (because when you lose one to four hours of sleep every night you don’t live very well the rest of the time either) to satisfy some weird lifestyle that was grossly inappropriate for their location. One might say that they denied my personhood. Were they bigots? No, they were selfish, thoughtless and/or stupid. I had an identity of someone who deserved a full night’s sleep; they disagreed. If we discuss this conflict of assumed rights it makes far more sense to consider the arguments rather than complain that they were offensively denying my personhood. The same holds true when discussing other identities and situations.

             

              People seem very fond of linking their opinions to their identity. We are a tribal species, and politics has once again become dominated by tribal affiliations rather than principled beliefs. Political parties tell their supporters to find a local issue that will resonate and then campaign about that; yet this is ludicrous. What is there to support if the issues are not decided? A party ought to be a group of people sharing common policies and ideals, and these are what I want to campaign about should I ever help with campaigning.

              But for many people the group comes first, and then the opinions; the opinions are what one adopts as part of an identity. Opinions are not coherent and logical conclusions from knowledge gained, open to refinement by further reasoning or greater knowledge; they are doctrine that define an identity. Therefore questioning a belief is, in this perverse and irrational approach to life, undermining a person’s very identity.

              This is the only way I can understand some of the weird assertions I read about in the media and I might be wrong. But if I am right, such an identity deserves to be questioned, and any emotional trauma needs to be faced. The truth is a far greater cause than individuals’ desire for comfortable ignorance. We can impart truth harshly and meanly, or carefully and gently, so I am not excusing every bit of bullying or propaganda done in the name of truth, but I also have no time for people whose main response to any discussion, harsh, unemotional or gentle, is to claim that it is emotional abuse.

 

              People are also very keen on status, and for many the way to achieve status is to put others down, especially enemies. You get a reputation as a virtuous crusader for justice the more you crusade, just as in mediaeval times, and you get that reputation because people observe you crusading, not because they know that your target is evil, again very much like mediaeval crusaders, who were often more brutish than the moors they fought.

              For many modern crusaders the purpose seems to be not so much a keenness for truth or justice, but to be crusading and to feel righteous. The craving to feel righteous, and part of the superior group, is more important than careful judgement of a situation, act or person; more important than mercy or condign punishment; and more important than the cause itself, which is a means to a personal end.

              This is an easy way to dismiss a person, and I don’t think that the above criticism should be the first response to any disagreement. The whole problem is that this attitude of a ‘crusade’ attacks people and is revealed by a refusal to discuss the points at hand. If we all attack arguments, not people, then any moral righteousness will be achieved by demonstrating the correct opinion, which seems justified, rather than by insulting and belittling an opponent whilst not demonstrating the rightness of one’s side, which is not righteous at all.

 

              The question of whether we should accede to campaigners’ demands just to make them happier deserved a longer answer than the original question about sex; possibly an even longer one than is here. Philosophers have long considered the problem of whether it is better to live in a false utopia or an unpleasant reality (starting with whether it would be bad if a devil were to enchant you to permanently dream a nice dream; and more recently whether AI-driven artificial reality or drug-induced euphoria are preferable to real life). I am firmly on the side of reality and truth; knowing that your life, experiences and beliefs are true and real brings incomparable contentment. We all search for meaning in life, and hard to find though it is, there is none in falsehood.

              You might disagree; you might think that ignorance is bliss. My local drug dealer would like to hear from you, as would the Conservative party. But out here, in the real world, I will conduct my own crusade. If you get in the way; if your pathetic struggles for emotional affirmation conflict with logic and reason; then I will fight as stubbornly as you for the most important cause of all and the most affirming thing one can ever possess: the truth.

 

              I don’t do this out of a sadistic desire to hurt my enemies. That is a common desire in the right wing; to conquer others, to be superior and to exercise power, whether over foreigners or lefties. I don’t think that the generosity and empathy that superficially characterises lefty campaigning is misguided because I fear that any and all kindness is weakness which will be abused. That seems to be the right-wing attitude: a sort of hatred of being nice because it might help others have nice lives, and others need have worse lives than right-wingers (or worse than people right-wingers aspire to be!).

              I think that generosity is wonderful and right-wing mean-spiritedness goes far enough to be outright sadistic and damaging to humanity. But I agree with the implicit mistrust of comprehensive and thoughtless kindness, being a candle blowing in other people’s whims, abused and scammed until you need to beg for kindness yourself. That sort of unmeasured, ungoverned, unprincipled interdependence sounds nice to hopelessly naïve anarchists, but inevitably leads to abuse and unfairness. The way to make room for kindness, safely and freely, is to have boundaries. Firm, unbreakable boundaries. If enough pleading for special cases makes you break a rule, it’s not a rule.

              I don’t think we should throw money away on pandemic loans to anyone who asks without even basic checks, as the Conservatives did. I don’t think we should throw money away on the homeless or the jobless without checking that they are those things, as the Conservatives fear we do (but did themselves with pandemic furlough benefits); nor should we throw money away on the jobless just because they claim poverty without checking how they compare to the wider population, as the Conservatives do with pensioners. Checks, regulation, enforcement… these are principles that currently seem to be neither left-wing nor right-wing, with both major parties focussing more on vote buying from interest groups than on careful governance.

Sometimes - in fact, most of the time – being principled is in conflict with being nice. Being nice means making compromises, trying to calm people down and avoid negative emotions by giving people what they want. Being principled means knowing what is right and wrong and sticking with what is right no matter what forces you encounter, including the desire to mollify other people. The more angry and offended they get doesn’t matter: the point is that no amount of emotion can override a principle.

We apply this when dealing with right-wing bigots (or we ought); their emotional repugnance at immigration, cultural difference or basic fairness in society doesn’t mean that they have a point. We might accept that they have power and we must bow to that power to some extent, but they remain wrong.
This differs from some people’s approach to morality based on intuition, which is the emotional feeling of what is right. When your morality is just achieving the nicest emotions, then others’ offence will be a major part of how you make what you think are balanced decisions, because it will feel nasty to leave them so upset. They in turn assume that they are right and that you agree with them.

 

             

              If you think I’m wrong, I need to know why. I hate being wrong; it’s hard to be immediately welcoming of criticism. But days, weeks or maybe months later I will be grateful, and your opinions and arguments will be mine. If you can’t tell me why, if you can only cobble together a few insults, quibbles and fallacies, then you need to take a long look at yourself and wonder why you are engaging with this issue, and whether it’s the right thing to do. Perhaps you should bite back your anger and, in time, be grateful for being exposed to better beliefs.