What should I ask Richard Dawkins?
Plus: what went down at the LGBA conference and Battle of Ideas.
I feel like I say this every issue, but it’s been an incredibly busy patch. The biggest news is that I’m interviewing Richard Dawkins on-stage in early November – in Salford, Manchester, as part of his farewell tour.
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Dawkins is an intellectual hero of mine, and I’ve had the good fortune to meet him twice already. The first time was for lunch, with my colleague Maya Forstater, in Oxford, after which we recorded an episode of his podcast. The second time the pair of us spoke to parliamentarians about the reality and policy salience of the two sexes.
He was also one of the first couple of people to provide a blurb for my book, and one of the endorsements that meant the most to me. Before I found my current agent I was in conversation with another, who dumped me after reading the detailed proposal and belatedly realised that I had meant it when I warned her that it would be controversial. She had asked me which book I would model mine on, leaving aside all questions of topic and indeed my writing ability, and I answered “The Selfish Gene”. Driven by one big idea that proves hugely explanatory in multiple areas and beautifully written – it’s still one of my favourite books.
They say don’t meet your heroes, but he’s as clever, acerbic and insightful as you might imagine. Being asked to interview him is bittersweet for me, though, because the person who would have been most excited (apart from me) is my father, who was also a huge Dawkins fan and who was also enormously proud of my book. It was he who came up with the original subtitle – when ideology meets reality – and when my editor messaged me to tell me about the Dawkins endorsement – on a Sunday morning, if I recall correctly – it was my dad I rang to tell first. I wish more than I can say that I could bring dad to the show. But he now has dementia, and wouldn’t have any idea what was going on. He no longer remembers anyone.
Well, I’ll be thinking of him on the night, all the same. He would have been very proud. And enough of being maudlin. I’m keen to hear what people think I should ask him about. Of course we’ll discuss the sex/gender issue – but this is primarily a retrospective of a stellar career as a scientist and communicator of the scientific method and mindset, and the wonders of evolution. I’m not a scientist, and I’m nervous! What do you think I should ask?
Adding to the busy-ness, October is conference month in UK GenderWorld. Normally it’s three events – LGBA, FiLiA and Battle of Ideas. This year there’s no FiLiA – there’ll be a bumper one next year, the tenth anniversary. But for the first time Sex Matters was involved in the three party conferences. And alongside that has been applying to intervene in support of the petitioners in the For Women Scotland case, which will be heard in the Supreme Court in late November – we have been granted permission, which is an extraordinary achievement for a tiny non-profit that gained charitable status only six months ago.
You may have seen the disruption caused by young transactivists at the LGBA conference who released thousands of crickets in the lecture theatre.
Parents must be so proud…..
“What did you get up to today girls…?”
“We released insects on gay people at #LGBAlliance2024”.
As people are sent to prison for tweets - I hope @metpoliceuk will be investigating this hate crime.
pic.twitter.com/WChtVHaGHs— John James (@JohnJamesNI) October 11, 2024
I have nothing to share from personal experience – I was chatting to someone in the lobby area when it happened, and paying no attention to what was going on. But what I have learned since is that there were six young people – we think all minors – who brought the crickets into the event during the lunch break, when for reasons unclear the airport-style security at the entrance was just waving through people wearing lanyards that had been picked up earlier. (I know this for certain because I had to leave the venue in the morning, bringing my backpack – and when I came back and approached the luggage scanner I was directed to walk around it.)
These young people are desperately in need of deradicalisation and safeguarding. At the most basic level, they should have been in school. But beyond that, they have dangerous, limiting beliefs about the world, and about other people’s attitudes to them. Their self-conception is as deeply vulnerable, even hated. They think the world is against them.
They seem to sincerely believe that their lives, and the lives of other young people who identify as trans or non-binary, are at risk from a bunch of gay people, middle-aged women and anyone else who talks about the biological reality of sex. Jamie Reed, whose talk was just about to get under way as the crickets were released, is a particular hate figure: she worked in a gender clinic before realising she was doing grave harm and became a whistleblower (her wife, who until recently identified as a man, is now detransitioning). They think she is in the business of mass slaughter of “trans kids”.
This interview from a year ago with Jamie on Gender: A Wider Lens is well worth listening to.
The action at LGBA has been claimed by Trans Kids Deserve Better, a group of youngsters who staged sleep-ins outside the Department of Health and Department for Education over the summer. This was a safeguarding nightmare. One young person free-climbed on the front of the building; the kids put out calls on social media asking for unrelated adults to come and watch over them while they were sleeping (what were their parents thinking? Where were they?! I really hope the police and social services are asking these questions.)
There are surely adults involved behind the scenes, and I’m pretty sure at least some of the kids’ parents know what is going on – not least because the LGBA conference was on a school day. The group has smart-looking, well-written press releases. It has raised a lot of money in a short time – though fundraising platforms have taken down several fundraisers after complaints. Good Law Project, which recently said it would be pulling back from funding trans-related legal cases and that it would be putting money into trans-led groups, tweets about and retweets it.
They’ll be coming down at 4pm today – read more here: https://t.co/EueDlo991i
— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) July 2, 2024
We were worried that there would be further disruption at the Battle of Ideas. It’s a much larger event and in a much more porous venue, and Freda Wallace (he of the ripped fishnets) and a troubled young man who seems to spend all his social life with Wallace who seems to go by Sophie or Tarquin were known to be planning to attend. (I’m actually not sure if “Tarquin” is an in-joke among attendees at Let Women Speak events in London, which he often tries to disrupt – his accent is very posh.)
In the event there wasn’t an insect attack or anything similar, but Wallace and sidekick did disrupt a panel on the gender wars. Sidekick prowled the room taking up-close photographs of audience members until he got kicked out.
Look at this utter bellend, who incidentally was waiting with Fred at the end of the day to harass women (including me). Wankers. pic.twitter.com/2pv5Zl8ZOQ
— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) October 22, 2024
Wallace then insisted on being given the microphone. He had nothing useful to say – just, I am a trans woman, if you want to talk to a trans person, talk to me – and then he stalked out.
More Tarquin footage from the weekend. pic.twitter.com/v42X306fmx
— Graham Linehan 🎗️ (@Glinner) October 22, 2024
The pair spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the area – visiting the building where LGBA has its offices and dumping plastic cockroaches on the doorstep to take a picture to post on social media.
The steps of 55 Tufton street today pic.twitter.com/tAPAmgtfzl
— Miss Freda Wallace (@Stopphoningme) October 20, 2024
The pair are deeply unpleasant and known troublemakers, and I strongly feel they should have been excluded from the event. I appreciate that the organisers have a commitment to free speech, but in this instance I think they have fallen for something similar to the common error of classifying heckling as free speech – as with the heckler’s veto, which aims at shutting down free speech by drowning it out, Wallace and Sidekick didn’t take part in the conversation, they disrupted it.
In nicer news, something happened that I’d never experienced before: two young women – I’d say late teens – approached me separately to say that my appearances on podcasts and suchlike had helped them to desist from trans identification. Neither had taken drugs or had surgeries, though I suppose they might have bound their breasts for some time.
It was the nicest thing that has happened to me in ages. One very sweetly gave me a little crocheted envelope-style container she had made in Suffragette colours to store things in. Both seemed really well.
I know that not all stories end happily like this, and I don’t share the story to suggest they do, still less to suggest that I personally have found some sort of magic recipe. I’m sure they had listened to other people who resonated with them too (one attended the Battle of Ideas with her mother, who told me that they had had intense discussions about many things I and others had said). I share it simply as a sign that the epidemic is moving on to a new phase, one in which growing numbers are recovering – and, we can hope, will have acquired immunity.
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PS: I attended this event live; Jenny Lindsay’s book “Hounded” is great, and I can honestly say she and Kate Clanchy are two of the best speakers I’ve ever seen on any topic (Matthew Hamilton was also very engaging – it’s just that he was there more to comment on the publishing industry; Jenny and Kate were telling the stories of their houndings.) The recording is well worth a watch.