Resisting the outrage brigade

The Prime Minister deserves credit this week for his refusal to buckle to demands to dis-endorse Katherine Deves as the Liberal candidate for Warringah. By Nick Cater.

The purging of professional people who offend the sensitivities of social justice campaigners follows a dreary pattern.

First comes the accusation that something that has been written or said is problematic, inappropriate or offensive.

The accuser does not need to lodge any kind of formal complaint or insure the cost of a stamp.  An anonymous post on social media will usually suffice.

The accused’s boss cannot immediately see the error in the offending statement, but fearful of the risk of reputational damage agrees to inquire further. Typically, this may result in the issuing of an apology of sorts: the accused is a person held in high regard and had no intention of offending. Any offence unintentionally caused is regretted both by the accused and the institution.

By now, however, a single spark of outrage has become a small bushfire. The original complaint has been circulated, and others have added their own to build a rising tide of revulsion. Few are prepared to consider that the offence might have been unintentional, fewer still that words can be misinterpreted. The target has been judged to be a heartless person harbouring longstanding prejudice and heedless to the lives of others.

In no time at all, the object of abhorrence has changed from the statement itself to the person who made it. He or she is irredeemably racist, misogynistic or transphobic and should immediately be purged from the company. They should be granted the stigma of a disgraced person deprived of any hope of rehabilitation.

Those in command of the besieged institution are panicking, beset with the fear that the cost of saving the accused’s reputation may be to damage their own.

To pardon an unpardonable moral crime turns the pardoner into a criminal, and those above the accused sense an acute risk to their own reputation and livelihoods.

At this point of the cycle of outrage, the temptation is to appease.  A powerful social dynamic is at work that is old as humankind: purge the community of the apostate, lest you yourself be purged.

That is why the Prime Minister deserves credit this week for his refusal to buckle to demands to dis-endorse Katherine Deves as the Liberal candidate for Warringah. In the heat of an election campaign, the temptation to purge would have been intense. Regardless of the merits of Deves’s arguments, which are indeed meritorious, a day or three of distraction from a party’s core message could cost government. Some within Scott Morrison’s own party were publicly urging him to change his mind. Yet, as Robert Menzies constantly reminded us, some things matter more that winning an election.

Deves was wise to express regret for language that struck some as inflammatory in comments made before she became a candidate and in a different context. Her rhetoric is tame compared to accusers, but that is in the nature of things. Those who challenge a prevailing view are obliged to moderate their language if they want to be heard, while those who proclaim the conventional wisdom can employ unmeasured vituperation, as John Stuart Mill famously lamented.

In a sign of weakness, Deves’s noisy opponents have failed to take on the substance of her case crossing instead to attack her as a person. Deves simply upholds upon a fundamental principle: that womanhood and girlhood are exclusive clubs for female humans, and no amount of diversity training can change a fact that was universally acknowledged until 10 minutes ago.

Conflation is an important tool for social justice engineers. To discriminate between people on the grounds of biology when ruling who should be allowed to enter female change rooms or compete in women’s sporting competitions is conflated with discrimination between people on the grounds of race. To assign someone to a separate category like transgender is conflated with hatred, prejudice and the denial of rights, even though this has been common practice across a broad range of societies as far back as history extends.

A duty to respect every individual equally is hard-wired into liberal philosophy since, as Menzies said, we cannot deny that everyone is equal in the eyes of God. Hence it should come as no surprise that Liberal governments have driven almost all of the social justice reforms since the party’s creation, like the 1967 referendum giving equal status as citizens to indigenous citizens, the scrapping of the white Australia policy and the Howard government’s reforms driven by Warren Entsch that granted same sex couples legal equality.

Transgender activists, however, are not content with equality of respect. Their oft-repeated slogan, “Trans Women are women”, states their true intention to redefine the definition of a woman from a matter of biology to one of identity. They remain heedless to the practical problems this may cause, the discomfort to biological women or the unfairness of matching biological men against women in sports competitions.

These are not inconsiderable matters, yet they only scratch the surface of the harm that transgender ideology is causing as it is pushed to the extreme.

Once biological barriers are removed and identity as male or female is a matter of self-affirmation, the idea sets in that to challenge a person’s affirmed identity is a hurtful act.

This had led to the scandalous practice of affirmative psychiatry and affirmative surgery. In many parts of the western world, including in Victoria, a psychiatrist, priest or teacher who encourages a teenager to think again about their assumed gender identity is committing a crime.

The damage caused by this twisted thinking, and the amount of distress and regret it causes later in life, is only just beginning to be reported.

This has doubtless been a torrid fortnight for Deves who has come from relative obscurity to be subjected to disgraceful attacks not just on Twitter but in mainstream media. There are fewer risks these days than publicly affirming common sense, particularly for conservative women, as the retiring MP for Boothby, Nicolle Flint, will tell you. Tellingly, some of Deves’s most obsessive critics were media adversaries of Flint.

Yet were Deves to fail to win Warringah, which we ardently hope she won’t, she will have achieved more than many MPs manage to do in their parliamentary careers by drawing attention to a dangerous delusion many recognise is wrong but few are prepared to talk about.

Despite making very few public comments, Deves has helped turn transgender activism into the barbecue stopping debate of the election so far. The more people feel empowered to enter this debate, the greater the chance the common sense will prevail.