My speech at the Battle of Ideas party

I was invited to deliver a few words at the Battle of Ideas party being held tonight. here is the full text of what I hope is a short speech.

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It was my first time attending the battle of ideas this year so it’s a particular honour to be asked to speak. Before anything else, I’d like to say how grateful I am to Claire and her team for the opportunity.

One of the central themes of this event is the benefit we might find in cross pollination with other disciplines, if you could ever call comedy writing and posting on Twitter a “discipline”. It shows us the value of escaping our echo chambers and bubbles. On this occasion, I hope to persuade you, my fellow escapees, that despite there being a number of strong contenders for the position, gender identity ideology is the single greatest threat to rationality, creativity, and freedom of thought facing us today, and we must join together to destroy it.

Historically, the problem of irrationality has taken various forms. But Holocaust denial is largely a thing of the past in civilised countries, flat earthism never really got off the ground again after the first Apollo mission left it, the damage wrought by the Satanic Panic was largely contained only to a few locations in the American midwest, the horrors of the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism linger only through Arthur Miller’s eternally restagable theatrical masterpiece.

But perhaps we became complacent, because with the arrival of the Internet, in a terribly short space of time, and right before our eyes, an incoherent, homophobic and above all, misogynistic ideology has taken root in many of the UK’s most vital institutions. The NHS, the BBC, the prison service, the police, the charity sector, publishing, journalism, theatre, science, academia and worst of all, the political sphere have all fallen to what we might think of as a bloodless ideological coup, with the tragic result that a generation of vulnerable children, made more vulnerable by the pacifying, distracting power of the corporate internet, is being mutilated and misled.

These lifetime patients are being created for the benefit of a rapacious medical industry, given human form in such figures as the grotesque Dr Sidhbh Gallagher, who touts for business on Tik Tok, a social media platform containing many unhappy teenage girls. The good doctor’s lucrative business being the performing of unnecessary double mastectomies. Or as her catchphrase has it, “yeeting the teets” off these desperate young women.

For the last five years, those inside my bubble–that is, those of us concerned about the sudden, dramatic deterioration of women and children’s rights because of this fashionable madness, have had as a soundtrack an emergency siren that only we seem to be able to hear. Responding to it has cost me my marriage and a West End musical I spent a good many years developing. I have often wondered why my stand didn’t receive more support. I thought the threat was obvious.

For instance, I thought it was obvious that you can not be born in the wrong body, and you certainly did not tell young children this confusing, odious lie.

I thought it was obvious to that you do not medicalize or traumatise young people with surgery and prescription drugs because you've got a hunch that you might be doing the right thing.

I thought it was obvious that single-sex spaces are necessary for the dignity, safety and privacy of women and girls.

I thought it was obvious that you don't send rape and death threats to female authors of children's books.

And all these things were obvious, until suddenly they were not. Gender identity ideology has escaped its own bubbles– postmodern academics, teenagers diagnosing each other online, men’s rights activists sensing an opportunity and predators seizing one– to somehow, silently, take over the world.

Ask yourselves: how has this ideology achieved so much, so quickly? After all, it is made of bad ideas. Transhumanism, queer theory, a belief in gendered ‘souls’, the corrosive idea that pharmaceutical and surgical interventions are the route to happiness, the introduction of extreme, fetishistic porn into the mainstream… It’s a jigsaw puzzle that will never make sense. How has so much of it been assembled in such a short space of time?

I believe it’s because these fraudulent academics, these predatory men, these unhappy teenagers, these sociopathic surgeons, found in the Internet a way to coordinate and collaborate; the groomers and the groomed began feeding each other scripted answers to difficult questions, and creating a trail of wreckage in their wake.

I suggest another reason is that this ideology benefits one group in particular across every level of society. Men. From the imprisoned paedophile who is able to move a little closer to a mother and baby unit simply by changing his pronouns to “she/her”, to mediocre men taking the places of exceptional women on podiums and shortlists. This bogus diversity benefits men, and there are plenty of hands on deck to ensure an absurd situation continues for as long as possible.

Opportunities to speak against it are few and far between, and my own cancellation was an example to deter those who try. Nonetheless, despite the risks, or perhaps because of them, I ask you to pause the battle against whatever form of irrationality you’re facing within your own fields, and join the war against this one. Because this is the big one.

If together we turn our full attention to this grave threat to enlightenment values, if together we break through the wall of silence and fear on this issue, to reject the taboos and speech codes to which we are all suddenly subject, then together, we may find ourselves better able to fight whatever unexpected, viral threat the Internet has in store for us next. Thank you.