Intolerance is the drug of choice for the ‘tolerant’ in today’s culture wars.
Tomiwa Owolade
I
f you want to show what a wonderfully tolerant person you are in today’s febrile political climate, there are two things you must do. The first is to accuse anyone who disagrees with you on a sensitive subject of being on the wrong side of history. The second is to accuse them of stoking a culture war.
There are now, in some circles, approved positions on everything from race to gender. But there’s a flaw within their dogmatism that is pure poison for modern, liberal Britain.
Let’s take a look at some of these approved positions. On race it is that Britain is a white supremacy, we need to decolonise the curriculum by removing white and male authors in favour of writers from marginalised backgrounds, and we need to get rid of statues of anyone implicated in imperialism or the slave trade.
On gender, those views state that trans women are women, and gender self-identity is all that matters. Biological sex is completely irrelevant. If anyone vocally objects to any of these positions, they are on the wrong side of history. They are stoking a culture war.
This is the current strategy of the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. She has repeatedly accused Rishi Sunak’s government of stoking a culture war because it has blocked the Scottish government’s new Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Ultimately, this bill allows anyone over 16 to legally change their gender.
Many feminists — from JK Rowling to the campaigner Julie Bindel, from the columnist Sonia Sodha to the Labour MP Rosie Duffield — believe this bill undermines the sex-based protections enshrined in the 2010 Equality Act. In other words, they argue that recognising biological sex is crucial to protecting the rights of women, and gender self-identification in practice means anyone can identify as a different sex to the one in which they were born. Sex-segregated spaces like women’s prisons and refuges are thus vulnerable to exploitation by men. For these feminists, it’s not a question of trans rights. It is a question of women’s rights.You might passionately disagree with this view. You might think it’s an exaggerated concern. That it is wrong. But to dismiss anyone who expresses it as stoking a culture war, to assume that they are doing so simply out of bad faith, is to display a level of arrogance completely contrary to the principles that underpin a plural society.
We need to hash things out when sincerely held perspectives clash with each other. But there is now a particular kind of liberal or progressive commentator who had hitherto been an ostrich sticking his head in the sand on the “culture wars”, but is now exclaiming with a kind of weary frustration, “why can’t these women get over these issues?” Evening Standard.
