The Social World

Tag: trans

  • ‘Gender-affirming care’ is never justified

    ‘Gender-affirming care’ is never justified

    Even now, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans just assume that there is a vast and vulnerable cohort of kids who are born “trans” and need so-called “gender-affirming care.” They look at the protests and listen to progressive politicians and assume that there must be at least some evidence that pediatric medical transition helps children in distress.

    It would be unthinkable to have put children through all this for nothing, and for American medics to have gone along with it all. But the awful truth is that there is no evidence that allowing children to transition actually works in any meaningful sense. An analysis recently published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy has finally cut through the noise with a simple but devastating tool: a calculator.

    And as you read the evidence and absorb its implications, consider also that the European Commission is about to propose new legislation that would allow any European citizen, of any age, to legally change gender without consulting a physician or getting their parents’ permission and support. And under the proposed legislation, any nation that objects would be subject to having all its EU funding cut off.

    The paper, by my colleague, Lauren Schwartz, a senior fellow at the non-profit Do No Harm, and M. Lal, uses the medical establishment’s own numbers to check its work. The conclusion is disturbing, suggesting that a medical scandal is unfolding on a scale that has been dangerously underappreciated.

    In short, the article shows that, even according to the standards of those who would help children to transition, there is simply no justification for the mass medicalization of healthy children under the guise of “gender-affirming care.”

    The harms are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility

    The authors’ method is simple. First, they establish a clear baseline for the number of adolescents who meet gender activists’ own “clinical” criteria for gender dysphoria. They do this by synthesizing three major reviews co-authored by ten of the key figures behind the most recent World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards of care – the very guidelines cited by proponents of medical transition. These WPATH-aligned professionals estimate the prevalence of the clinical population to be around 4.6 to 7.5 per 100,000 individuals.

    Next, the authors compare these numbers with recent data on how many adolescents are actually being diagnosed and treated. They cite a study from this year in the journal JAMA Pediatrics which found that approximately 100 out of every 100,000 American adolescents received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones between 2018 and 2022.

    The discrepancy between the clinical population and those receiving treatment is staggering – a gap greater than one order of magnitude. According to the field’s own standards, more than 92 percent of kids receiving these interventions fall outside the clinical threshold for severe gender-related distress. Yet these are also vulnerable, confused kids, often struggling with a multitude of behavioral health challenges.

    Lisa Littman was among the first researchers to observe such a troubling trend beyond baseline prevalence: a surge of adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender despite no earlier signs of gender-related distress.

    In 2018, she published a study based on parent reports, introducing the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Rather than sparking thoughtful inquiry within the field, her work was met with intense backlash.

    But Littman was on to something. Her early observations pointed to a powerful influence: the role of social contagion and online communities. These platforms often amplify certain narratives, contributing to a surge in self-identification that far exceeds the true clinical population.

    Moreover, this troubling trend isn’t just confined to the United States. Britain has seen a similar phenomenon with a rapid rise in diagnoses beyond any prior prediction. Another study from this year found a 50-fold increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses in UK primary care for children and young people between 2011 and 2021.

    The Schwartz and Lal analysis provides the chilling answer to what this really means: a profound shift from treating a small, well-defined clinical group to medicalizing a much larger, overwhelmingly non-clinical population. It’s no longer a vague feeling that “too many kids are being medicalized.” It is a specific, quantifiable crisis.

    Yet even among the minority of children who do fall within the clinical population, puberty blockers and hormones aren’t the answer. Multiple systematic reviews reveal no reliable evidence of benefit. The harms, however, are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility – to name just a few.

    What these struggling kids need is psychosocial support and psychotherapy. In that regard, countries such as England, Finland and Sweden are now leading the way in restricting medicalization and focusing on psychological and psychiatric care, while around them many in the EU double down.

    Simply put, subjecting children to dangerous medical interventions in the name of “gender-affirming care” is never justified.

    The scale of the problem is no longer a matter of opinion; it’s a number. We now have the data to demand accountability and we must do just that. We must use this new evidence to ensure that we protect vulnerable children by returning to a standard of care that is cautious, ethical and, above all, evidence-based.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable – and should stay that way

    The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable – and should stay that way

    For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organization whose storm troops comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head around that.

    In 2024, a trove of intra-organizational emails exposed the recklessness of WPATH’s indiscriminate promotion of “gender-affirming care” (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors. These susceptible children suffer disproportionately from other mental health problems and do not, as WPATH members freely admitted among themselves, possess the competence to give informed consent to life-altering medical treatments. The ignominious emails were published and analyzed in a report entitled The WPATH Files, written by Mia Hughes and widely publicized by the American journalist Michael Shellenberger.

    WPATH stages big, rowdy annual conferences celebrating self-poisoning and genital mutilation all around the world. In recent years, a doughty counter-organization called Genspect has staged conferences in the same city as WPATH’s, to call attention to the copious harms that the past 15 years of cultural intoxication with transgenderism have wrought among families, children and adults who’ve fallen under the sway of gender ideology, and “detransitioners” who’ve woken to the reality that changing sex is neither possible nor desirable but who are often left permanently mangled and emotionally scarred. Last weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was one of Genspect’s speakers. Of necessity, security precautions were ferocious.

    After two days of presentations by young people brutalized by this generational fetish, physicians horrified by its medical consequences, therapists appalled by the complicity of their colleagues and journalists decrying the purposeful bewilderment of schoolchildren, it’s a tough call whether the cumulative effect was depressing or encouraging. Obviously, this ludicrous fashion for pretending to change sex ever having taken such hold is depressing; as fads go, this one is far more destructive than the crazes for pet rocks or razor scooters. Yet the hundreds of determinedly dissenting attendees, including many desolate parents who had lost children to the trans cult, and the dozens of professionals who are risking their reputations to resist the capitulation to gender ideology in their fields, were collectively encouraging.

    The audience and presenters concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal

    The audience and presenters both roughly concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal. Especially thanks to a handful of courageous women such as the Brits Maya Forstater and J.K. Rowling and American investigative reporter Abigail Shrier, it’s now possible to speak aloud what five years ago would have been career-ending heresies. As I’m neither a medical expert nor a parent of a trans child, my utility was primarily hortatory. Set in a fictional near past in which the notion has seized the western world that people are all equally intelligent and that discrimination against dumb people is “the last great civil rights fight,” my most recent novel, Mania,aims to illustrate human vulnerability to ideological contagion. Of the social hysterias that have swept the West since about 2012 – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid lockdowns, climate catastrophism, rabid vituperation against Israel – my “Mental Parity Movement” most resembles the West’s abrupt infatuation with transgenderism.

    Such as there is one, the lesson the novel imparts is the disheartening truism that people will believe anything. Specifically, most people will believe whatever everyone else appears to believe, if only because everyone else appears to believe it. Fortunately, exceptions abound. Mania’s disgusted protagonist represents the minority: skeptics almost genetically immune to psychic pandemics. Yet in a crowd, our species naturally manifests a hive mind whose irrational or even deranged conceits now buzz through the globe’s fiber-optic cables in seconds.

    Thus the thrust of my recent event ran: never relinquish your incredulity. While we skeptics may be constitutionally resistant to deranged popular dogma, we’re still adaptive. We may not believe just anything, but we can get used to anything. So it’s vital to refresh our astonishment at the widespread adoption of a practice that 20 years ago would have been exclusively pursued by a few lost, misguided mental patients.

    The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable and should stay that way. This movement gleefully defies biological reality. Sex is not in the mind but is written in our every cell. “Some people are born in the wrong body” is an absurd, medieval fiction. Because it’s impossible to change sex, transgenderism is merely a psychically, socially and financially expensive form of play-acting. Cynical, fanatical or criminally naive, its doctors impede and corrupt adolescents’ natural development into adulthood, butcher and amputate healthy body parts, destroy erotic function and sterilize young people. Yet for at least a solid decade anyone objecting to this modern-day voodoo has courted infamy, ostracism and unemployment.

    A Genspect montage: one mother asked me to write about her son, who detransitioned, was shunned by the trans “community” and took his own life. Self-described as effeminate from childhood, another detransitioner testified onstage to having been duped by doctors who convinced him he’d have an easier time as a gay man if he lived as a woman. His trans medication halted his growth in adolescence. After emerging from this nightmare, the 22-year-old, originally informed that without pharmaceutical intervention he’d likely grow to between 6ft and 6ft 2in, is now permanently stunted at 5ft 8in. All this tragedy is both utterly unnecessary and deliberate. Never relinquish your incredulity.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • J.K. Rowling’s brutal takedown of Emma Watson

    J.K. Rowling’s brutal takedown of Emma Watson

    J.K. Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I was Ms. Watson I would lie low for a few months. In fact I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read.

    Watson is the actress who gained fame and riches from playing Hermione in the Harry Potter films. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn of the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles. She fell in with the Black Lives Matter contagion, ostentatiously confessing that she had “benefited” from “white supremacy”. (Hilariously, she got flak for putting a white border around the black square she posted on Instagram for BLM’s Blackout Tuesday in June 2020. The color white? On a day for blacks? Demon!)

    She thinks Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Of course she does – the invites to cultural soirées dry up quicksmart for those who refuse to partake of the Israel-bashing that has become the moral glue of the chattering classes. And she is a faithful servant of the most lunatic luxury belief of all: that “trans women are women”. Translation: men are women. Hearty supping from the Kool-Aid of gender insanity is a must for anyone wishing to maintain their position in the starry firmament of high-status ideology.

    It was this latter wacky belief that brought Ms. Watson and the other overgrown brats of the Harry Potter franchise into conflict with the author of their fame. Because, of course, Rowling is a witch to correct-thinkers for her quaint belief that people with penises are men. Over the years, Watson and her fellow Potter alumni made sly swipes at Rowling and her heretical belief in biological fact. Rowling, being more classy, said nothing. Until now.

    Her 600-word X post about Watson is a masterwork of critical demolition. It is cool, restrained and cataclysmic. She dismisses the conciliatory remarks Watson made in an interview last week, when she said she still “treasured” her relationship with Rowling. “Adults can’t expect to cozy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love”, she said. Oof.

    She reveals that in 2022 Watson asked someone to pass her a handwritten note that said: “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through”. This was when “the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak”, says Rowling. Watson had “publicly poured more petrol on the flames” of this hatred, Rowling writes – not least in a speech she had recently given – and yet she thought a “one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness”.

    This is as brutal a calling out of unsisterly behavior as I have seen. In shining a light on the moral chasm between Watson’s public “petrol pouring” and her private utterance of a fleeting, paltry sympathy, Rowling exposes the failures of feminism more broadly in the post-truth era of trans. Many high-status women have giddily sacrificed solidarity with their own sex at the altar of validating the delusional identities of men in dresses. They betrayed womankind so that they might gain access to the rarefied realm of elite opinion – moral treachery masquerading as progressivism.

    But it is Rowling’s calm assault on Watson’s class privilege that hits hardest. “Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is”, she writes. It’s easy, she says, for the affluent to parrot such luxury lunacy as “trans women are women” because they will never have to face the social consequences of this unhinged dismantling of the truth of sex and the rights of women.

    A virtue-hoarder like Ms. Watson can afford to be blasé about the linguistic destruction of the reality of womanhood because “she’ll never need a homeless shelter”, says Rowling. “She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward.” Watson’s “public bathroom” is “single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door”, Rowling writes. It is only – whisper it – women poorer than Ms. Watson who will find themselves on a crammed ward alongside a huge man or in a bathroom that’s seen better days in which a strange man is doing his make-up.

    Rowling has nailed it. The purveyors of luxury beliefs rarely have to live with the fallout of their cranky ideologies. Rich celebs bow to Black Lives Matter with nary a thought for the impact that BLM’s psycho cry of “Defund the police” has had on poor black communities in the United States. Britain’s bourgeois leftists luxuriously rail against “Islamophobia” and seem not to care that it was officialdom’s very fear of being called Islamophobic that abandoned so many white working-class girls to the scarce mercy of those “grooming gangs”. And pious celebs can cavalierly say “Trans women are women” because they will never be that poor girl who just wants to go swimming without being flashed at by a man putting on a bikini.

    Luxury beliefs benefit the rich but they are lethal for everyone else. Preach, Joanne.

  • The truth about the trans school shooter

    The truth about the trans school shooter

    True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit “I Don’t Like Mondays.” But that was a long time ago. Since then, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in an attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after “Robin” Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis in late August, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how “she” came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.

    This grotesque incident was, as usual, pointless – and as a longtime commentator on such shootings, I despair there are so few, if any, productive observations to advance. While still exhibiting the classic, seemingly antithetical traits of grandiosity and self-loathing, this killer was, to me, uniquely repulsive. Craving distraction, then, I’ve idly kept track of which media outlets have perversely and pugnaciously referred to Robin (né Robert) Westman as female.

    Naturally, for the New York Times the transgender killer is “she” or “Ms. Westman.” The BBC has also followed its guidelines to “generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question” – even if the “person in question” committed suicide on site and is no longer in a position to have preferences of any kind.

    When Senator Amy Klobuchar bewailed that “this horrific offender… that he… it was all-purpose hate, right?” and called Westman “a madman,” the interviewer from America’s National Public Radio appended: “And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as ‘he’. Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.” Yet the shooter having been born male had already been retrieved from the public record. The sheep-in-conservative-clothing commentator on the PBS Newshour, David Brooks, repeatedly referred to Westman as female – no big surprise. But when a Wall Street Journal editorial also reported Westman had “changed her name from Robert,” my jaw dropped. Even Fox News reported the killer “had their name legally changed.” (All italics mine.) I’ve begrudging regard for ABC’s militant neutrality. In fastidiously citing “a person,” “Westman” with no title, “the shooter” and “the suspect,” the network boycotted pronouns altogether. That takes semantic discipline. But the right-of-center New York Post’s flat-out “he,” “him” and “gunman” is more courageous, not to mention more factually informative. At long last, the Daily Telegraph in London dared to identify Westman as male – though for years it referred even to preposterous, manipulative fake-female criminals such as “Isla” Bryson as “she.”

    The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged

    For journalists to take a trans-mollycoddling stand in the pronoun wars isn’t merely to default to niceness. Misidentifying the biological sex of figures in news stories is an implicit declaration of support for an incoherent, unhinged ideology. This grammatical loyalty to progressive dogma apparently trumps journalistic integrity – the obligation to report the truth – and even decency. Chronicling the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting, the New York Times and the BBC are pandering to the tender feelings of someone who’s 1) a would-be mass murderer (the successful kind, by a rather arbitrary definition, kills four or more); 2) insane; and 3) dead. We alive people resent once-reputable news outlets choosing the occasion of two murdered children and at least 18 seriously injured people to propagandize and yet again defy biological reality.

    Media kowtowing to trans orthodoxy alienates their mainstream audience. Incorrect pronouns drive news consumers nuts.  Alluding to a burly guy in a pink wig with a five o’clock shadow as “she” makes journalists seem like fools and readers and viewers feel mocked. Even the wussy middle course of calling trans people “they” leads to grammatical confusion. Also late last month, the Telegraph reported that another (male) transgender killer, “Joanna” Rowland-Stuart, “stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword.” The following para refers to Joanna’s attack in “their Brighton home.” Does that mean the couple’s home, or only Joanna’s?

    In that case, the court has deemed the killer Joanna “unfit to plead,” meaning he’s bonkers. Is a pattern developing? Despite multiple cases of trans murderers whose sanity was dubious, I’d not claim, as some conservative pundits do, that trans people are grossly overrepresented in the depressingly long roster of American mass murderers. Yet people who are mentally ill in other respects are consistently the most susceptible to deciding they were “born in the wrong body.” The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged.

    We’ve turned confusion about which sex you are into a reasonable, dare I say normal, source of distress that demands redress, not by curing a delusion but encouraging it. Declaring you’re trans is a moment of self-discovery that we celebrate for its “authenticity” and “bravery.” In the olden days of Psycho, a man wearing women’s clothing sent an ominous signal that there’s something off about them.

    Yet Westman’s transgenderism was so socially acceptable that it functioned as disguise – cloaking a manic mishmash of malice toward Jews, children, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Donald Trump, doubtless everyone else and, not to forget, himself. Rather than signal there’s something wrong here, Westman’s dressing as a woman actually camouflaged the warning signs that the young man was out of his tiny mind. The seminal mistake in the progression of this demented transgender movement was no longer recognizing gender dysphoria as a mental disorder.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15 2025 World edition.

  • Why Trump should impose a trans gun ban

    Why Trump should impose a trans gun ban

    As President Trump’s Department of Justice deliberates over a gun ban on transgender people, we must stop and reflect on the environment we have created for our children and ask whether we are truly protecting them.

    Whenever tragedy strikes, progressives rush to the microphones to declare that the problem is “guns.” They insist that if only we banned this weapon or restricted that accessory, shootings would stop. They blame inanimate objects instead of focusing on the people who actually pull the trigger. The recent shootings in Nashville (2023) and Minneapolis (2025) should force us to confront uncomfortable truths – not about firearms, but about what is happening inside our culture and what our leaders are pushing on the next generation.

    On March 27, 2023, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who identified as transgender, entered the Covenant School in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. Hale had meticulously planned the attack, leaving behind writings showing an obsession with violence and a hatred of self. Police ultimately stopped the rampage, but not before families were destroyed forever.

    Two years later, on August 27, 2025, 23-year-old Robin Westman, a transgender woman and former student, opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during a back-to-school Mass. She killed two children, injured 17 more, and ultimately took her own life. Like Hale, Westman had left behind videos and a manifesto showing a disturbing fascination with mass shooters and a desire for infamy.

    In both cases, the evidence shows that the shooters were motivated not by their identity alone, but by a toxic blend of mental instability and self-loathing. The common thread is clear: both individuals were deeply troubled, and both had access to firearms despite glaring warning signs.

    Progressives scream “gun control” after each tragedy, but they refuse to address the elephant in the room: the mental state of those who commit mass shootings. The uncomfortable truth is that individuals struggling with deep identity conflicts, fueled by hormone treatments or rapid social transitions, are often at greater risk of instability. Pretending otherwise is reckless.

    New York Governor Kathy Hochul pushed through the so-called “ERA” amendment that enshrines the right for minors to undergo sex changes – without parental consent – into the state constitution. Hochul also banned body armor and raised the age for legal gun purchases after the Buffalo shooting. Yet she refuses to fix New York’s “Raise the Age” law, which effectively removes accountability for minors who possess or even use illegal guns.

    This trend extends well beyond New York. Across the US, “leaders” from both are implementing conflicting policies that reveal deep hypocrisy.

    So ask yourself: how is it logical to remove consequences for teenagers carrying illegal firearms, while simultaneously giving those same teens the ability to permanently alter their bodies with hormones and surgeries they cannot possibly understand? Progressives call it “compassion,” but the outcome is confusion, instability, and is leading to tragedy and violence.

    The question that no Democrat seems willing to answer is why they are so determined to push radical gender ideology onto children. Why the obsession with chemically and physically altering kids who are still developing, who are vulnerable, and who are easily influenced?

    These are irreversible decisions that can scar someone for life. Instead of helping children develop resilience, coping skills, and a healthy sense of self, progressives are telling them that their bodies are the enemy – and offering hormones and surgeries as the “solution.” For some, this sets the stage for severe mental health consequences. And when mental instability meets an obsession with notoriety and easy access to illegal firearms, tragedies like Nashville and Minneapolis become more likely.

    The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Democrats slammed President Trump when he banned transgender individuals from military service, claiming it was discriminatory. Yet these same leaders claim their top priority is “preventing gun violence.” How does it make sense to place individuals undergoing major hormone treatments – who may be struggling with identity or mental health – in positions where they are armed, trained for combat, and placed in volatile international environments? That’s not compassion; that’s recklessness.

    Progressives want to ban average Americans from owning body armor. They want to restrict legal gun ownership for law-abiding citizens. But they’re simultaneously handing confused kids hormones, protecting minors who carry illegal guns from accountability, and pushing for transgender inclusion in the armed forces. These contradictions are completely illogical and are flat out dangerous.

    The Nashville and Minneapolis shootings were not just random tragedies. They are warnings. They show what can happen when identity crises, untreated mental illness, and a culture of victimhood collide with a political movement more concerned with ideology than with reality.

    Instead of scapegoating firearms, lawmakers must confront the uncomfortable truth: our society is destabilizing children by stripping parents of authority, pushing radical ideology and fueling confusion with irreversible medical interventions. Add to this a justice system that coddles young offenders, and we are setting the stage for disaster.

    The solution isn’t simply more bans on law-abiding citizens. It’s accountability, honesty, and a serious national conversation about what we are doing to our kids. If we don’t stop pushing confused children down a path of irreversible harm, we should not be surprised when some of them end up in crisis – with tragic consequences for innocent families and communities.

    Until this self-inflicted crisis is resolved everyone in a bipartisan fashion should support ending the double standard where law-abiding, stable citizens face restrictions, policymakers ignore minors with illegal weapons or gloss over ideological factors that may contribute to instability and seriously consider the President’s idea to ban transgenders from obtaining deadly weapons.






  • Father Ted and Havel’s Greengrocer

    A softer version of totalitarianism has been gnawing its way through the British body politic like a cancer for many years now. With the Graham Linehan (creator of the classic sitcom Father Ted) arrest at London’s Heathrow Airport this week, it seems to have metastasized into something entirely malignant. If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be?

    A decade ago, living in the US at the dawn of the Great Awokening, I began hearing from older people who had fled to America from the Soviet bloc, seeking freedom. They were telling me that the things they were starting to see in their adopted country reminded them of what they had left behind. 

    They spoke of people having to watch their words for fear that they would step on an invisible land mine, and put their jobs and businesses at risk. They talked about the abandonment of classical liberal values, and the adoption of “social justice” norms that judged people based on group identity. They witnessed ideological mobs intimidating people into silence, and institutional elites changing language to fit a utopian leftist paradigm.

    I found this hard to grasp at first. If this was totalitarianism, where were the gulags? Where was Big Brother? This was precisely the problem, I came to understand. The fact that relative to life in the Soviet bloc, the West remained free and prosperous helped conceal the totalitarian threat. That, and the fact that this new ideology presented itself in largely therapeutic terms: as a program not only for achieving social justice, but of easing the burden of groups suffering the pain of marginalization.

    Yet the more conversations I had with these people, the more I experienced their anger at the inability of Americans to comprehend what was happening. Said one professor in the Midwest, “I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated.”

    Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift even further back in time: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

    “I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

    My conceptual breakthrough happened when I realized that growing up during the Cold War, I had come to imagine totalitarianism according to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, the emerging therapeutic totalitarianism in the West today is far more like Aldous Huxley’s model in Brave New World. The outcome is the same: the gradual erosion of liberty and individuality, and the seizing of power by ideological fanatics who asserted the power to alter reality. By the time the book I wrote about this phenomenon, Live Not By Lies, was published in 2020, wokeness had conquered US institutions, and one could be sent to the unemployment line for refusing, say, to agree that men could be women. 

    For all the madness that ensued, no American had to fear arrest for stating anti-woke opinions, because we have a constitutional right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is why the fate of Graham Linehan, like the fate of so many lesser known UK dissidents from the ruling ideology, could not happen in America. But it can happen in Britain, and is happening. The spectacle of English patriots being taken into custody for flying the Union Jack, on grounds that it might cause distress to foreigners, many of whom came into the country illegally, reveals the absolute state of the tyranny now reigning in once-free Britain.

    Yet if the Soviet bloc emigres reveal to us the truth of what was and is overtaking the West, those who stayed behind tell us how to resist and overcome it. In researching Live Not By Lies – the title is taken from a Solzhenitsyn communique to his Soviet followers, on the eve of his exile – I traveled through the former communist lands to ask ex-dissidents for their advice.

    The core lesson: you must be willing to suffer for the sake of the truth. Those in power count on a population cowed by fear. Nearly everyone is willing to live under the yoke of ideological lies, because they are understandably afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t. Those brave souls who dare to tell the truth, and who are willing to suffer for it, hold the key to society’s liberation.

    Czech dissident leader Vaclav Havel explained why in his famous Parable of the Greengrocer, from his 1977 book-length essay, The Power Of The Powerless. Imagine, he said, a simple greengrocer in a communist city, in whose shop window hangs a sign saying, “Workers Of The World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it, nor do any of the other shopkeepers who display the same sign. They do it out of fearful conformity.

    One day, the shopkeeper decides he won’t lie anymore. He removes the sign. What happens next? He is arrested. The state confiscates his business. He must endure punishment, including loss of privileges, and becoming a social pariah to his former friends. He pays a significant price.

    But what does he gain? For one, he gains self-respect, for having defending his own integrity. For another, he demonstrates to society that it is possible to live in truth, provided you are willing to suffer for it. If enough people within that oppressed society take courage from his example, and accept the challenge of suffering for truth, then eventually the entire system built on lies will crumble.

    Solzhenitsyn said something similar in his 1974 “Live Not By Lies” message. It is not possible to go to Red Square and shout, “Down with communism!” he said. But that does not mean ordinary people are without means of resistance. He recommended practical everyday means of refusing to cooperate with the official lies. 

    “Our way must be: never knowingly support lies!” he wrote. You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

    Graham Linehan is a comedian and actor, but he is also Havel’s Greengrocer. So is J.K. Rowling – and though it must be conceded that it’s easier to live not by lies if you are sitting on a mountain of cash from book sales, she has nevertheless become a total pariah to many of her peers and admirers, because she would not bow her head to the misogynistic lies of gender ideology.

    The British people are being put through an extraordinary test now by their government, their media, and all the institutions of the ruling class. They are being forced to endure humiliation, criminality, displacement, and the virtual expropriation of their land, with its ancient liberties, by an ideologically captured ruling class. 

    Earlier this year, I was in London for a screening of the documentary film series Angel Studios made from Live Not By Lies. I had seen the film many times before, but watching it in the British capital, it struck me how many of the people in the documentary are British people, talking about actual existing tyranny in Britain today. 

    They are people like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the Christian pro-life campaigner shown on camera being arrested for praying inside her head near an abortion clinic. Vaughan-Spruce is also Havel’s Greengrocer – a brave person who possessed enough self-respect and love of truth to suffer arrest, multiple times, for thoughtcrime.

    The older men and women of Eastern Europe know what the British are suffering. The fact that British totalitarianism is softer than its Soviet antecedent makes it no less totalitarian in spirit. A former Soviet citizen now living in America told me what is coming for us if we don’t derail the totalitarian train now.

    “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow,” she warned. “You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works.”

    Then as now, there remains only one sure antidote to it: ordinary citizens realizing that enough is enough, and at personal risk to themselves, choosing to live not by lies. This is the hope that Solzhenitsyn offered to his people in 1974 – and the challenge.