Living in the Upside-Down
And what it will take to get out
When I started thinking about sex and gender, I used to say to myself, and occasionally other people, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore”. It expressed my sense that the world had suddenly changed, and my confusion and disorientation at no longer understanding the rules.
More often now, I say I feel like I’m living in the upside-down. The Oz that Dorothy landed in was certainly confusing and disorienting. But it was also fascinating and magical. What I’m feeling now isn’t fascinating and magical at all—and my bewilderment isn’t caused by speedy change or unfamiliarity; it’s the result of a wholesale reversal. It’s even worse than losing respect for people and institutions I used to admire: they haven’t just fallen, they’ve gone over to the dark side. It goes beyond institutions being captured, that is, abandoning their mission and acting instead to promote private interests: many institutions are now doing precisely the opposite of what they were set up to do.
As I said in my book: “That support for self-ID has led self-proclaimed feminists to abandon the most vulnerable women is remarkable enough. Even more remarkably, it has led organisations right across civil society not only to abandon their core principles, but to actively work against them.”
Among the examples I gave were groups set up to protect and campaign for women, gay people and children. American National Women’s Law Center, which was instrumental in using civil-rights law to strengthen women’s sports, now endorses gender self-ID, which would destroy them. Gay-rights groups now characterise desiring only people of your own same sex as “genital fetishism”; Nancy Kelley, Stonewall’s CEO, calls lesbians “sexual racists”. The NSPCC, the UK’s most important children’s charity, provides training in child-safeguarding principles. But it now campaigns for self-ID, up to and including putting children and teenagers of one sex in the other sex’s sleeping quarters.
Similar reversals have happened at organisations that used to be dedicated to defending free speech. In 2020 the Scottish brand of the global anti-censorship group PEN refused to support Scottish writers who were no-platformed for supporting sex-based rights. The ACLU, which in 1978 famously defended neo-Nazis’ right to march through a Chicago suburb where Holocaust survivors lived, now says that “speech that denigrates [marginalised] groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress towards equality”.
To these examples I’d now add the Tavistock’s GIDS clinic, an organisation that was literally set up to support gender-distressed children in their path to becoming healthy and happy adults, but which is now complicit in turning such children into lifelong medical patients. Victoria Smith’s review of Hannah Barnes’s book “Time to Think” in the Critic is well worth reading in this regard. “It’s easy to dismiss those who ignored what was happening as having been brainwashed,” Smith writes. “Barnes shows the situation to be more complex, stating that GIDS ‘has not…generally been staffed by ideologues’.” And yet those non-ideologues, who presumably went into their jobs to help children, ended up harming them, in some cases irrevocably.
“There were moments reading this book when I felt ‘but honestly, all of this — every last bit — is insane,’” Smith continues. “I would be overcome with frustration at the idea that we should be considering the particulars of child safeguarding or data tracking whilst ignoring the elephant in the room, namely that human beings cannot change sex and the most vulnerable children should not be encouraged to believe that they can.”
I think Smith gets at a really important factor here which helps explain my persistent feeling of living in the upside-down. GIDS, as an institution, is mission-driven, meaning that when its mission was corrupted it didn’t just wander off course, it reversed course entirely. It was set up to help children who had the counter-factual belief that they were, or were meant to be, “really” members of the other sex. As a result, once it accepted the activist message that those children’s beliefs should be taken as fact, its motive force turned the entire organisation through 180 degrees and started to propel it in precisely the opposite direction.
The same happened with women’s organisations set up to advocate for women experiencing sexism, to protect women from male violence or to advocate for women’s particular biological needs. When these organisations swallow the lie that “trans women are women” they don’t merely lose focus: they start to outright advocate for men.
Obviously I don’t think that most men mean women harm, or that men are automatically bad. But these organisations were set up to protect women from the men who discriminate against women, or ignore women when designing products or public policies, or who beat and rape women. In other words, as far as their missions are concerned, men are generally the problem.
And now these organisations are still thinking about the same things: anti-discrimination laws and practices; inclusive products and policies; protections against violence. But now they’re doing all this on behalf of men. And because they call those men women, they don’t admit that’s what they are doing. And so women who call them out become the enemy. These organisations have become MRAs (men’s-rights activists) and not in the benign literal sense, but in the sense of anti-women.
Or take PEN, which exists for just one reason, namely to counter censorship. That is why its staff go to work each day. They are thinking all the time about what people want to say, and when they should be supported in speaking in the face of opposition. When they take a lie to be the truth they don’t stop thinking about speech and silencing; they continue to think about it but draw the exactly wrong conclusions.
This 180-degree reversal is particularly dangerous when it comes to institutions that set standards and enforce regulations. When their mission is perverted it damages an entire sector. Here are two pertinent examples: therapy and child protection.
On therapy, this article in the Free Press by the excellent Lisa Selin Davis lays out with terrifying clarity just how its practice and purpose have been corrupted by seeing race and sex/gender through a “social justice” lens.
The case study Lisa starts with is of a gender non-conforming lesbian who has been made so miserable by being a “cis white woman” and therefore a multiple oppressor that she identifies as non-binary and seeks therapy from a black therapist to work on her racial guilt. But the endless obsessing about race and gender makes her mental state worse, not better, and when she tries to say this the therapist breaks off the relationship.
This sort of “therapy” doesn’t just fail to relieve mental distress: it causes mental distress. Lisa quotes a psychotherapist as saying “Woke therapy weakens the individual.” In other words, the next generation of therapists is being taught to make clients sicker.
And yet this is precisely the approach that is increasingly mandated by the professional bodies that regulate counselling and therapy. A professional who tosses it all out of the window risks serious consequences. Lisa says on her Substack: “This article began with someone writing me from an anonymous account on Twitter, telling me she’d shared something I wrote and had been threatened with expulsion from her masters’ program because of it.”
To pick just one example in the field of child safeguarding, the Scottish Care Inspectorate, which sets standards for professionals who work in health and social care, children’s services and so on, and which oversees 14,000 registered care services, recently brought out a guide to transition for children in care. It says that children of all ages should be accommodated according to their gender identity—which means children in care being housed in mixed-sex accommodation. Among the partner institutions acknowledged is LGBT Youth Scotland, which recently self-referred to the police over abuse allegations. This isn’t merely a failure to safeguard children; it’s a massive safeguarding risk.
In one respect, I feel quite bleak about all this, because these institutions are central to the way liberal democracies work: to the famous “checks and balances” and the rule of law. But there is a flipside. We cannot resolve this situation school by school, care home by care home, doctor’s surgery by doctor’s surgery. There are too many of them, it would take too long, and there’s what economists call a “collective-action problem”—a situation where everyone would benefit from a change, but the costs of acting if others don’t is prohibitive. Regulators are far fewer, and far more influential. If they can be regained for sanity they change the incentives for everyone else, and become part of the solution.