The Second Discourseman
At the Edinburgh Waverley temporary toilets, a man has the job of letting travellers know when the next cubicle is free. There is one door leading to both the Ladies’ and the Gentlemen’s, so this man must look down the queue and beckon the next man or woman as appropriate. As I waited, I wondered how long it would be before some student (less reactionary than myself, of course) decided to get this bloke fired for misgendering him or her.
These toilets are some distance away from the front line of the culture wars; away from the crass hand grenades lobbed out of Downing Street to bring down the Red Wall, away from the massed ranks of progressive academics who trample over sacred ground and then wave flags of peace in the faces of anyone who confronts them. But unless the fighting stops somewhere along the way, it must reach these Lothian loos, and I suspect that this is the kind of battleground where today’s progressive movement will finally grind to a halt.
With their fixation on transgender ideology, the Left have come up against a concrete barrier. It has the solidity of the self-evident, biological truth that men and women exist and are different, as well as the depth of the experience of that fundamental fact in people’s lives. That man in Edinburgh has probably never thought twice about the distinctions he’s making; more importantly, there will be women in the queue who know from experience the importance of single-sex spaces. This barrier is broad, too, reaching into everyday practicalities: if I’m bursting for the loo, I’m going to have little patience for anything but the most efficient, no-nonsense queuing system.
There are much more serious arguments against trans-activism, but my point is that the nitty-gritty of ordinary life is where progressivism will face its sternest tests, if it hurtles on with its uncompromising imposition of ludicrous ideas. Oxbridge academics may dream up solutions consisting of lavish gender expression funds and behavioural workshops to fill their leisurely days, but to put it bluntly, the working classes have neither the time nor the money for such things.
I hope I am right, but even if I am then the halt of progressivism would result in no more than an attritional entrenching of the gulf between rich and poor, between woke and populist, between the Oxbridge student and the Edinburgh toilet worker. Obviously I lean heavily towards the conservative position, but I do not think the fire would be one-way; there is a compassion and tolerance which, whether or not it is present in progressivism, is often absent in populism. If progressives insist on charging headlong into the concrete wall of biological sex, then whether it crumbles or stands, the culture wars will just get uglier.
The Four Discoursemen 