After Cancel Culture

Notes from Nina: Week of April 8th, 2024

This week, Britain saw the release of the Cass Report, authored by Dr. Hilary Cass, chair of the independent review of gender-identity services for children and young people. The document contains little that is new to anyone who has been following the discussions around “gender” for the past few years. Still, it is clear from the report that the medicalization of young people, the neglect of other circumstances surrounding their distress, and the way certain clinicians have been behaving in recent years—are all deeply wrong. Great harm has been done to young people in the name of lies and profit. 

Compact contributor Julie Bindel calls for a punitive response: “Clinicians who, at private clinics, handed out puberty blockers without adequate tests or examinations ought to be investigated. Class actions need to be taken against psychiatrists and doctors who set children on an irreversible pathway.” She argues that MPs and teachers who supported this ideology—many of whom have attacked their colleagues who refused to submit—should be fired. She argues that trans charities and other institutions that promoted puberty blockers should be stripped of funding. She suggests that parents who “trans” their children should be investigated.

I agree with Bindel. She makes it clear that this is not about vengeance, but about truth. Children cannot change sex—neither can adults. Absolutely no one should be telling them that they can. Fixed ideas about what the sexes look like and the interests supposedly “appropriate” to them is no kind of basis for changing individuals. We should not operate on or give powerful and dangerous drugs to children, destroying their health and fertility, on the basis of a lie. Bindel suggests that there needs to be a formal, legal response to what is, after all, child abuse, but also because “some of these gender ideologues follow the mantra as though it is a fundamentalist religion.”

This last point is an important one: It is not just institutions that have fallen prey to a cult, but many individuals too have taken it upon themselves to punish other citizens because of a belief that their cause is right and just, and that anyone who opposes it must be punished in every way possible. Thus for years, many of us who have, however mildly, expressed criticism or questioned trans ideology have experienced one or more of: violent threats, physical protest, anonymous open letters, defamation, campaign groups devoted to wrecking your life, social ostracism, economic punishment in the form of job losses, and so on, and so on. Being cancelled often comes in waves, and sometimes when you think it’s over, another round begins.

All of this activity takes place in a strange grey area: One doubts these people are being paid to behave in this way towards fellow citizens—they do it of their own accord, for their own gratification, while pretending they’re doing something noble and moral. One learns that a very small number of extremely dedicated people can do extraordinary harm, particularly if they don’t have to work for a living and can devote all their time to, say, emailing anyone who works with you. Many, many people at this point have experienced one version of this or another. If we see the institutions in the dock, what will we do—if anything—with all these people who used “trans activism” as an opportunity to screw with the lives of strangers—all because the latter held a view that was, at the time, unpopular.

I don’t know whether naming my (and many other people’s) tormentors is the right thing to do—when all this started, in my case in 2018, the phrase “cancel culture” didn’t yet exist. While I doubt we’ve yet seen the end of what came to be called “wokeness,” not least because it still has a long way to travel in and out of many h.r. departments, we might (let us hope!) be seeing the end of cancel culture: or at least, a temporary cessation, as more and more people (a) have an unjust experience of it, (b) people come to learn and disapprove of the tactics used by “activists,” and (c) those who went crazy for it this time around might feel compelled to take a step back and hopefully engage in some introspection.

All of which leads me nicely to my recommendation of the week: Julius Taranto’s sublimely assured first novel How I Won A Nobel Prize (Picador). I picked this up at random in a bookshop, partly because of a Jonathan Lethem recommendation, and because it’s about a billionaire-funded university that takes in cancelled academics. Taranto manages to achieve what I would not have thought possible, namely a humane and hilarious account of cancel culture, which brilliantly manages to pose several questions at once, the greatest perhaps being, what do we do with exceptional people who, for whatever reason, don’t know how to comport themselves socially? What if genius comes at a cost—often for others? With great subtlety, Taranto includes in his group of cancelees those who really have behaved badly alongside those unfairly scapegoated by editorial boards, for example, or who sent a badly-received tweet: Thus does he capture well the complete lack of proportion of many cancellations, where men who simply came across as a bit “creepy,” for example, were listed alongside convicted rapists in the #MeToo panic, and mothers concerned that their gender-nonconforming children weren’t pathologized were compared to Nazis.

By setting Cancelled Campus on a remote island, which comes across like a cross between Epstein’s lair and the village in The Prisoner populated by mad scientists, lecherous English professors, and random graduate students prepared to run the gauntlet of hanging out with social outcasts, Taranto creates the perfect imaginary conditions for an experimental world without social disapproval, without the puritan impulse (though the protests are never far away). Picking as his protagonists a pair of Millennials—Helen, a theoretical-physics genius and her increasingly politicized husband, Hew—Taranto picks apart with great wit tensions between complicity and morality; between being good and doing good; between the old world and the new. It had the extraordinary effect of putting my own cancellation into comic relief—I’m genuinely grateful to Taranto, and even if you haven’t given a talk while people stand outside handing out leaflets explaining why you’re a Nazi, you’ll likely enjoy this novel a great deal.

Latest pieces in Compact

This week, we published Johan Gärdebo on European Farmers’ struggles. Placing current unrest in historical context, Gärdebo argues that “historical peasant revolts are important, then, because they illustrate how a host of disjointed constituencies may coalesce into a popular uprising. This is why the spectre of protesting farmers is such a nightmare to Eurocrat centrists. If ‘agrarian populism’ is harnessed by extreme right parties, it can tilt the balance of power in Brussels, effectively stopping the European Green Deal in its tracks.”

Gladden Pappin analyzed the current geopolitical context, arguing that a multipolar strategy, as opposed to a bipolar one involving China and the United States, America “would focus on returning to a position of industrial strength without demanding that other countries decouple or ‘de-risk’ their international trade positions.” 

Next, Darel E. Paul analyzed Trump’s moderate position on abortion, noting his “public embrace of federalism” and arguing that “pro-life Americans need to recognize that a very large number of their fellow citizens are dominated by desire, not so much for sexual pleasure as for the triumph of the individual will.”

I described a phenomena I first noticed when my local bank closed down and offered to meet people in the library instead—but without providing any of the actual services we generally associate with banks. I then realized this was something of a trend among institutions and corporations: “Organizations of all kinds are forgetting their original purpose and replacing it with another, in some kind of large-scale exercise in productive procrastination, culminating in mass displacement activity.”

Finally, for the weekend, we have Compact Managing Editor, Geoff Shullenberger on “Nietzsche Contra Social Democracy,” asking: “How, then, did Nietzsche come to be seen as a mostly apolitical advocate of self-improvement or as a useful adjunct to left-coded cultural iconoclasm?” Read Geoff and find out!

Until next week—Nina