Social media used to silence the debate on women’s civil rights

One would think such a book would be fitting in an era where wider society is becoming conscious of the dangers of big pharma’s hold over our lives. Through the construction of non-illnesses, big pharma creates the economic lifeline of an industry on the hunt for lifelong clients. Despite that, Rooney has been accused of peddling “terrorist propaganda” and has been the focus of a rather vicious social media attack since the book’s release last Autumn.

Rooney is only latest victim in what can only be described as string of orchestrated attacks by a political lobby that tenaciously embraces a tenor of regressive anti-democratic and misogynist politics. It is no exaggeration to state that any woman, journalist or children’s author who speaks to the importance of empirical scientific evidence in discussing the human body and the reality of sex in relation to sex-based oppression is reduced to a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and likened to the KKK. This just keeps happening.

References to racism, membership to the KKK and other anti-racist tropes are regularly used by the transgender lobby, which is largely white and male. They have launched a full-out war on women, where recycled tropes linking a belief in biology to horrible racists of yore gain support. The recent string of no-platforming and protests against women who speak in opposition to gender ideology is a wide-spread practice rampant throughout the English-speaking world today.

Yet, to anyone who has spent five seconds looking at the snail-like progress of civil rights in the US, for instance, the transgender movement’s accumulation of funds and power from North America to the UK and Australia has happened at breakneck speed. Last week, Labour MPs in the UK came under fire for making anti-science claims. They asserted that babies are born without a sex and that male rapists should be moved to women’s prisons even as feminist activists are accused of bigotry for stating that sex is a physical reality with contiguous social and political repercussions.

While this debate goes back many years, it has had recent, remarkable shifts and turns within the medical, educational and legal fields. These have been hotly debated on social media since 2013, with the transgender lobby underscoring that anyone who undertakes feminist arguments on this issue is a “bigot” by definition. The political landscape in the UK, however, has shifted radically in recent months with more and more people speaking out about what very much resembles compelled speech and forced religious orthodoxy in the form of gender ideology.

Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert, a doula who left Doula UK last year over differences about what can be said about transgender identity, has eloquently explained why we cannot live in a democratic society while insisting that people hold certain beliefs that are contrary to science, to include the belief in gender. Doctors working in transgender healthcare are facing callouts being labelled “transphobic” and “bigots” while many more are fearful of speaking out about current healthcare practices notes Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and ex-governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.

Over the past eight years, the battlefield of gender has largely played out on Twitter and Facebook with the public slowly becoming schooled in the art of flexing one’s misogyny. In fact, this battlefield has shifted the valences of left and right entirely: No more can we securely state that the left holds progressive ideals for women or that the right is regressive on women’s rights. Social media has demonstrated how much disdain the left has for women and how the neoliberal drum banging of the left’s identity politics simply mirrors Jesse Helms’ insistence in the 1980s that art can be considered “obscene” or “indecent” (because he said so).

Some thirty years after the culture wars in the US and the UK, many self-declared leftist voices on Twitter inform us that “sex is on a spectrum.” If you don’t agree, the lefty logic goes, then chances are you are told to “die in a fire,” or are reported to Twitter for account suspension. In fact, the general public has become educated the art of dissing women, by calling them names like TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist).

Most of the people critiquing gender are not radical feminists, and don’t see how the very notion of exclusion is not alien to human cogitation (eg. we exclude when we decide what to eat, who to kiss, what to purchase). They dispense with rational discussion or dialogue and prefer to hurl epithets while harassing others online.

Social media has given us far more than a language of insults that closet misogynists can hurl at women. It has served as a vehicle for sexists and homophobes to contact women’s employers, besmirch members of the community, and even call the police for “wrong pronoun” usage. The harassment of women—especially of feminists—has been a social media norm for the past seven years, at least since I have been writing about the pervasive and regressive issues endemic to the concept of “gender identity.”

Yet, 2019 has ushered in a change where the masses are starting to understand that self-ID in the UK, Canada and the US has left a blackhole in legal protections for women and girls. Groups like Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women have been working to address this in public forums about politics, sports, privacy and safety. Feminist stalwarts like Julia Long addressed this issue long before the social media debates which erupted in 2013.

Stephanie Davies-Arai, Founder and Director of Transgender Trend, has worked tirelessly since 2015 to “encourage the widest possible public debate and engagement on the ethical issues of medical transition of children and the teaching of unscientific ‘innate gender identity’ ideology to children.” Davies-Arai has much to add on the impact that social media has had on her organization and Rooney’s book which it published, stating:

Rachel Rooney is a very well-respected children’s poet and teacher and she has written the most joyful and inspiring book for children. The fact that a book that challenges sex stereotypes while encouraging children to feel comfortable in their own skin has been characterized as “terrorist propaganda” is revealing of the aims of a movement that has specifically targeted children. Why would you not want a child to feel good about their own body? Transgender Trend has been subject to a high level of this kind of harassment and defamation over the years but we will continue to centre the welfare of children and young people in our work. To recognize and respond to children as children is not bigotry.

“Harassment has had a big impact on free speech on social media,” Davies-Arai says. “When even icons such as Martina Navratilova are accused of transphobia for speaking out on women’s sport, it sends a clear message to others to keep quiet.”

Nonetheless, it would be an understatement to say that 2019 has been a turning point on the medicalization of gender in children and the voters have spoken back. Before last December’s election in the UK, it was confirmed that the Liberal Democrats accepted donations from a puberty-blocker drug company. This calls into question the way that transgender ideology has been trafficked as a lobby into contemporary politics.

Last fall, the British Medical Journal confirmed that there are ethical concerns about children’s ability to make medical decisions that will have a lifelong effect on their bodies and reproductive ability.

“Gender dysphoric children and teens are experiencing a crisis of identity,” wrote Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. “Young people generally struggle to think about the long term consequences of life choices.” They conclude that “unsurprisingly, questions are asked about the ability of these young people to make decisions with informed consent.”

Central to this discussion is how big pharma, service providers and health services are responding to what many refer to as a social contagion. The study affirms “the greater issue [is] how commissioners, service providers, and research institutions have failed this vulnerable group of people who deserve equitable standards of research.”

Where research and medical institutions are buttressing a neoliberal approach to medicine, this throws a wrench into the works forcing us to question which sorts of research ought to be funded and why. Where hormone treatments for adults are already highly debated, it seems that the support for the medicalization of children for what is widely understood as a social contagion, it is imperative that debate around this issue be allowed and not hijacked by those on social media, to include the to membership in these social media forums. Or that everything related to medical access is defined in either having access to a or having enough woke points to access purity politics.