The Olympian Arrogance of Matthew Parris
The columnist's decision to flick contemptuous insults about the gender wars, highlights the failure of prominent gay men to take this issue seriously. Why do these gay men fail to care?
Another gay man fails to get it.
In the Times on Saturday Matthew Parris claimed the argument about gender ideology is "confected", and the people pushing extreme trans demands are just a "gaggle of pointless dons and dizzy undergraduates and a handful of self-appointed spokespersons whose names escape us.”.
Yes, all these LGBTQ+ organisations, many publicly funded, who influence policy in all our major institutions from the NHS to schools and the civil service, are really nobodies. So are their followers and champions who influence decision-making in the Arts Council, sports bodies, local councils, devolved administrations, the BBC. I could go on. And I will. The Church of England? Coca Cola? Google?
Joe Biden, technically the most powerful person in the world (when he’s not asleep or falling over), invited the creepy trans activist Dylan Mulvaney to the White House to televise a celebration of his 220th (or was it 221st) day of “being a girl”. In many Western countries rapists get placed in women’s prisons. Here, young lesbians get told they are unkind not to consider sleeping with men who say they are women. Yet according to Parris this is all “confected”?
There are countless other pettier examples of the intrusion of gender identity ideology into everyday life, being forced on people from above. Pronouns at work. Trans flags in hospital wards Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera as Yul Brynner likes to say in ‘The King and I’.
There was a whiff of the paternalistic but authoritarian monarch of Siam in Parris’s column. On the one hand he acknowledged children are being seriously harmed by the promotion of the notion that kids can be “born in the wrong body”.
“Be in no doubt, too, that real children have been chemically and physically mutilated, real young heads turned, by the flaring of a dangerous fashion for an idea that had to be confronted.”, he intoned.
But what was Parris’s response to this scandal of children being “chemically and physically mutilated”? Should we picket the clinics? March against this outrage? Write to our MPs even? No.
Instead, Parris’s suggested we …“stop thinking about it, stop talking about it”. According to one of the smartest observers of British politics, the debate about gender identity, “will finally go away, and later generations will wonder what came over us.”
On the other hand maybe it won’t. So what gives? Why are so many prominent gay men unwilling to take a stance on one of the biggest controversies of our day? And when they do, they choose to side with the bullies and the doctors who cheerfully turn up to work every day to castrate adolescents, many of whom are gay.
I used to think it was cowardice.