Surviving a pile-on
How to cope when social media turns feral
First, apologies for this being late – I’ve been so snowed under that every day has come to an end before I’ve managed to settle down to write. But some of what’s kept me busy has been great news. There was a lightning trip to Edinburgh for a lovely one-day conference to celebrate the first anniversary of the opening of Beira’s Place, the female-only rape crisis centre funded by J.K. Rowling. Then came the court decision upholding the Section 35 order that blocks self-ID in Scotland, at least for now. And finally, Kemi Badenoch gave enormous comfort to people on my side of the gender wars, not once, but twice.
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Kemi’s first intervention came in a barnstorming performance in the House of Commons, using the occasion of announcing an updated “overseas list” (countries where gender recognition follows broadly similar lines to the UK, and whose gender-recognition certificates can thus be converted speedily into UK ones – since the most recent revision of the list, many countries that were on it have shifted to self-ID) to say a whole load of things that have never been said before in Parliament: here’s a thread.
Things that @KemiBadenoch talked about today in Parliament.
1. The disgraceful way that Rosie Duffield has been treatedhttps://t.co/BRHxEEzYWW— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) December 6, 2023
And then, some days later, Kemi was hauled before the Women and Equalities Select Committee – which consists of some of the worst gender-peddlers in Parliament. She was not, let us say, in a mood to take any of their nonsense. (The woman questioning her in the clip below is Labour MP Kate Osborne, absolutely not her party’s finest.)
Apologies out of the way, I’ve continued to think about what can be learned from occasions when a person or organisation says or does something that causes sustained controversy. I discussed the need for “crisis comms” planning to limit the immediate fallout two issues ago, but this time I’m thinking more about why such controversies arise and what they mean. It’s happened to me four times, and each time was different. But each time was instructive.
The first was when I was called antisemitic for saying that the trans lobby is an astroturf movement, rather than a grassroots one, giving examples of three big donors. Then critics said I had deliberately selected those particular examples because they were Jewish. It’s the only time I’ve bothered to rebut a false accusation – not that it stopped the lies, but it felt necessary.
Sometimes you know you’re risking controversy, and that malicious people will deliberately misread you – I certainly thought that was a possibility when I drew an analogy in my book between the way paedophiles infiltrated the gay-liberation movement and the new opening offered to them by transactivists requiring that men can demand to be treated in every respect as if they are women. I wrote that section so carefully that, to my knowledge, I’ve never been criticised for it.
But it didn’t even occur to me that anyone would think that by “top down” I meant “Zionist conspiracy”, or that anyone would care about the religion of the three big funders – it certainly didn’t occur to me to check, and one of them, it transpired, isn’t even Jewish. The main thing I learnt from that episode is that I am up against people with no scruples and no morals – incredibly, the revelation that one of the “three Jewish billionaires” isn’t even Jewish inspired, in some quarters, the claim that I must have thought he was, because he “sounded Jewish”. (And I’m supposed to be the antisemite?!)
The other episodes were more informative. And although it’s hard to learn from vitriol, or from good-faith and bad-faith points interwoven, it’s worth it. I’m not going to discuss them in chronological order, because I’ve written different amounts on each previously, and one of them feels quite different from the other two.
The two that are similar seem to me to have pressed on a sore point for people who are broadly “on my side”. One was the months’-long internecine ructions caused when Maya Forstater and I went to Kellie-Jay Keen’s rally in Brighton in September 2022. Keen is a divisive character within the opposition to gender-identity ideology, and I’ve written quite a bit already about this in previous newsletters, and in my column in the Critic (see here, here, here and here).
The other concerned the use of “preferred pronouns”, on which I expressed myself trenchantly at the Genspect conference in Killarney earlier this year. It was an extremely interesting panel – one of those where people had a wide range of opinions, and I thought they all made good points. But it was my intervention that got me into trouble – in part because I said I “hate” the “pronoun police”, and used impolitic and impolite language.
I wrote about this in detail at the time, so don’t need to go into it all again – I’ve just re-read that issue, and think it stands up well. I’ve also looked back at one of the earliest issues of this newsletter, in which I lay out my own position on pronouns in detail – and honestly, the idea that I’m some sort of closet sex-denialist is just absurd! I think it’s (even) more annoying being at the rough end of a pile-on when you are almost as hardline as it’s possible to be on an issue, and the pile-on is all about trying to move you that very last half-inch.
But I’ve had a couple of additional thoughts about what happened since then. One is that some people whom I don’t even know felt very disappointed in me because they feel quite close to me, even though we’ve never met. This sort of one-sided relationship is called “parasocial”, and it’s a hallmark of social media, and most especially of podcasts and long-form video interviews – of which I’ve done more than a few. I wrote a bit about this in the Critic, back in August, in an article about “How to survive Twitter”.
I don’t know what to say to this. I like it that what I say connects with people, and I hope I’m helpful in offering phrases and arguments that others can use themselves. I do my best to say clearly what I think, and I’m lucky enough that neither my financial nor my personal situation gags me. But I’m just one ordinary person; I’m not a figurehead or chief executive or starring actress. And I’m also not a mouthpiece. If other people want me to say something different they’ve got to convince me I’m wrong; they can’t just insist that because we’re on the same side, I must.
Another further thought since those episodes is that some of the criticism levelled at me was a kind of displacement activity. Anyone who was genuinely trying to direct their efforts against trans ideology to where they might do the most good really wouldn’t be bothering about my ever-so-slightly nuanced but almost entirely opposed position on “preferred pronouns” – there’s so much worse happening out there, and so many more meaningful targets. Children are being given powerful, experimental drugs on a false promise; rapists are being housed with female prisoners; and I’m doing everything I possibly can to stop these atrocities. I’m one of the more effective of the people trying, too. So surely – surely! – there are other, more suitable targets for anger and activism?
When I try to see it from their point of view, I suppose it’s that they’re desperate. Especially those who really, really aren’t in a position to do anything publicly – and I happen to know the personal situations of a couple of the people who’ve been extremely publicly nasty about me, and it inspires my deepest pity. People whose children have laid down ultimatums, and who are on their last warning at work… they’re pretty much literally being driven mad by a combination of anger and grief. And so they treat me, and other people who are in a position to fight publicly, as if we’re their avatars. They then become furious and despairing when, in their opinion, we screw up – and lash out.
On top of that, they know I’m a safe target. I’m not in a position to ruin their relationship with their child, or lose them their job, and even if I was in such a position I would never do such a thing. It reminds me a bit of the policing at women’s rallies, actually. The police look one way and see a bunch of law-abiding middle-aged women saying sensible things about the importance of same-sex care for elderly women and not lying to troubled children. When they look the other way they see aggressive young men wearing masks, waving anarchist flags and screaming obscenities and threats. I don’t think it’s fair that they often decide to “keep the peace” by trying to shut the women up, but I know why they do it.
The most important thing I learned from both incidents, however, was that among the shouting, exaggerations and bad faith there were also good points I hadn’t considered and gained a lot from. Nestled among the silly remarks about pronouns were some nuggets about child safeguarding, for example – a subject I keep learning more about, and increasingly think is key to sorting this whole mess out.
The Brighton rally led to an event at UnHerd with Julie Bindel, which I hope helped, at least a little, to bring some of those with different viewpoints closer together; it certainly strengthened my own commitment to free speech as my guiding principle. I’ve continued to think since about what it means to dissent on principle from an orthodoxy – not merely once and also not in a way that descends into reflexive contrarianism, but as an ongoing commitment to constantly challenge my reasons for believing and acting as I do, and to learn from other’s positions.
The final time (so far) that my words caused a major kerfuffle was quite different from both of these. The grief mostly came from people on the opposing side of the trans debate, for one thing. For another, it probably provided my epitaph. In one way, I wish I hadn’t said those words; it would have been easy to phrase my thoughts differently. But in another I’m glad I did – what I learned from that occasion was that sometimes, a furious reaction means that you are right over the target.
Those words were “a huge problem in a sane world”. I have so many thoughts on them, the reaction and the way they have followed me ever since that I’ll leave them for a separate post, which will come before Christmas. Before then I’ll also finish pulling together a list of all my appearances this year – I didn’t realise until I checked that I hadn’t updated the page where I link to them since, gulp, October 2022.
Wow, time flies when you're busy – which is a great segue into explaining the picture at the top of this post. I, and the rest of the team at Sex Matters, got one each to hold our Secret Santa presents for our Christmas party. They seemed appropriate.
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