There was an article by David Aaronowitch in The Times last month which raised this:
'Assaults on free speech are led by the left: The growing tendency of lobby groups to shut down debates they disagree with affects everyone, whatever their politics'
(extract)
"Let’s start small and then go big. This week the writer Lionel Shriver was turfed off the judging panel of a women’s short-story competition. The reason for her ejection was that she had written something disobliging for The Spectator magazine about a major publisher’s diversity strategy. Shriver is a vivid writer and her views were expressed vividly. Her arguments were a variation on the usual concerns that many people have about the practical application of positive discrimination.
To the organisers of the prize, Mslexia magazine, the expression of this opinion amounted to what we used to call “gross moral turpitude” — sufficient grounds in itself for termination. Mslexia tweeted that “Although we welcome open debate, Shriver’s comments are not consistent with Mslexia’s ethos”. Face palm, as the youngsters say. To paraphrase Orwell, open debate means being able to say stuff inconsistent with ethoses. Or it is not open debate.
Shriver’s a survivor and she can probably do without any more judging (or being judged). But Mslexia’s formulation gave perfect shape to the problem that I’d been thinking about in these past few months as chairman of Index on Censorship, the free speech advocacy organisation. Why is it that some of the people who should be most protective of free speech and actual open debate are now almost hostile to it in practice?
So I’ll take a much less amusing example. Last year the government promised changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) which
would, among other things, give legal status to the gender choice of an individual, rather than to the biological sex that they were born with, without the need for lengthy psychiatric assessment.
Needless to say, such a change would be welcome for many trans people, who would no longer have to prove that they suffered from a nebulous condition dubbed “gender dysphoria”. But you don’t have to be a tabloid leader writer to see that there are some big problems to be dealt with here, some practical, some anthropological, some philosophical. “What,” my sportiest daughter asked, “about women’s sports?” People born biologically male are physically bigger, stronger and faster than biological women. So what about places designed to protect women from the possible consequences of that physical difference? Do we really want to say that we will not see the difference in experience between, crudely, someone with a womb and someone with a willy?
Maybe you do. Maybe I agree. But wouldn’t you also say that if ever there was a case for an “open debate” this was it? You can’t just make a change like this without arguing it through and hearing the other side. Yet that seems to be exactly what many people, largely on the left, want to do.
In my salad days feminists were some of the most admirable people I knew. The cause of women’s equality was not even a quarter won with the suffragettes and it is far from won even now. In the 1970s and 1980s these women were mocked as bra-burners, women’s-libbers, dungaree-wearing dykes and nagging termagants. Now some of these very same people are being ejected Shriver-style from the debate on the GRA for having views inconsistent with the ethos of the New Left." (continues)
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/assaults-on-free-speech-are-led-by-the-left-l2r8t9t9p
threads:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3277408-David-Aaronovitch-comment-in-Times
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3277496-lionel-shriver-groups-of-women