Why the centrists changed their trans tune
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Truth was sacrificed for status.
How does a public consensus come into being? The Sensible Centrists like to imagine that this is a careful, deliberative process. Ideas are debated, among people of good faith, and assessed dispassionately, on their merits, in an ongoing collective striving for truth.
But this is nonsense. As we’ve seen in the wake of the Cass Report, what actually happens is a mixture of magical thinking, conformism and moral grandstanding coalesces under a thin veneer of rational objectivity — and everyone except the most stubbornly reality-oriented falls obediently into line. And amid the chaos of frantic back-pedalling and rewriting of history, this consensus can form and re-form in real time without its basic structure ever changing, or lessons ever being learned.
Most egregiously of all, Ruth Hunt, former CEO of Stonewall, denied to the Times that on her watch Stonewall fostered a stifling climate of “no debate” on gender ideology. On the contrary, she said: “I’m absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that, as the Times points out, under Hunt’s leadership Stonewall called for schools to “shred” the only schools guidance on gender even remotely in line with Cass recommendations. Let’s ignore the testimony of veteran gay rights activist and one-time Stonewall spokeswoman Anya Palmer, who reports that Hunt promised her Stonewall would never embrace trans activism, before pivoting to focus on almost nothing else. Let’s instead consider, for a moment, what it actually means to “build consensus”, in the Hunt sense.
Read also: The Cass Review is not the end by Josephine Bartosch, Artillery Row
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