(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

On the first of June, the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, posted on X,

Andrew Sullivan objected,

The confusion here appears to be happening in good faith and this particular disconnect occurs quite frequently. Many people who understand that the term ‘queer’ is defined as being inclusive of everybody who does not fit the definition of ‘masculine man attracted to women’ or ‘feminine woman attracted to men’ perceive that this quite obviously includes gay men and lesbians. They are consequently genuinely confused when some gay men and lesbians say it does not include them and consider their perceived omission to be significant and worrying.

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This confusion arises when people do not really understand the significance of the concept of ‘queer’ in its current political context. This have failed to appreciate, as Andrew puts it, that “Queer is a left political position, not a sexual orientation.” That is, they have failed to recognise that ‘queer’ refers to a set of political and philosophical beliefs about sex, gender and sexuality which holds that having categories for these is an oppressive social construct which should be disrupted as a form of progressive political activism. This is the central tenet of "Queer Theory” which explicitly understands itself as a subversive, transgressive political theory. Therefore, to refer to somebody as ‘queer’ is to attribute to them a political identity rather than to make a neutral statement of fact about their sexuality.

The majority of people who are same sex attracted do not adhere to the tenets of Queer Theory and have a variety of political and philosophical views. Some strongly object to the concept of ‘queer’ and oppose same-sex attraction being regarded as a transgressive, subversive political identity. They may instead want to live in a society where homosexual is recognised as something that some people are and for this to be largely unremarkable and not assumed to include any particular social status or kind of belief system.

This has been the liberal stance with regard to gay rights as well as women’s rights and the rights of racial minorities. Liberalism, which foregrounds the right of all individuals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has focused on removing barriers that prevent some demographics from achieving this and then leaving them alone to decide what they want to believe and do. This was the leading approach to securing rights for women, racial minorities, religious minorities and sexual minorities from the end of the 19th century upto the 1980s. In relation to gay rights, it is best summed up by the slogan, “Some people are gay. Get over it.”

This was very successful because the individual and universal elements of liberalism appealed to intuitions of fairness commonly held by people on both the left and the right. However, beginning in the 60s, a movement of radically deconstructive postmodern thought on the left arose to disrupt it. The central belief of this was that what we consider to be knowledge is, in fact, a construct of oppressive power, perpetuated in discourses (ways of talking about things).Objective truth is unobtainable and the best we can do is theorise about what political forces caused knowledge to be constructed in this way in the first place and try to deconstruct it. This remained almost entirely within the bounds of academia where it troubled the general public very little due to being largely incomprehensible until the end of the 1980s. (I have written about this here). At this time, it was mutated into an accessible and actionable form by scholars developing a cluster of ‘applied postmodern’ theories that were known as postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectional feminism along with the lesser known dis/ability studies and fat studies. Central to this wave of theories was identity politics.

Identity politics works very differently to liberalism in that, instead of focusing on the rights of the individual to universally granted rights and freedoms and objecting when any group is denied this, it focuses on the group specifically, rejecting both individualism and universalism. The group then becomes a collective defined by specific theorised interests which are political. People from within those groups who hold those political beliefs are presented as the authentic ‘voice of colour’ or ‘queer voice’ while those who hold different views are regarded as inauthentic and not truly a member of the group whose opinions should be considered. In relation to race, it looks like this:

In relation to sexuality, it looks like the exclusion of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (LGB) who do not ascribe to the tenets of queer theory that sex, gender and sexuality are social constructs whose categories should be disrupted and whose boundaries must be blurred. Many gay men, lebians and bisexuals did dissent from this, because being attracted to people who have the same genitalia as you does not automatically predispose one to have radically deconstructive left-wing political views.

Many of the LGB believed that there is significant evidence that we are, in fact, a dimorphic sexually-reproducing species and/or that ‘gender’ is a nebulous ill-defined concept at best and that being gender nonconforming is fine and does not change ones sex and that homosexuality refers to being attracted to people of the same sex, not the same gender identity. Many did not think that being same-sex attracted was the same kind of thing as having a sense of gender identity different to one’s sex or being asexual, demisexual, polyamorous or inclined to dress up as a squirrel. In short, many objected to being bundled together with anybody who could be considered, under some definition or other, not to fit perfectly within vanilla concepts of heterosexual monogamy. They felt that being same-sex attracted was a clearly defined and easily understood category of its own and deserved to be recognised as such and not forced into political solidarity with anybody else and that they should not be expected to affirm political and philosophical allegiance to any theoretical framework at all.

Ultimately, many of the LGB objected to being defined not by something they are (same-sex attracted), but by something they are not (conventionally masculine or feminine, heterosexual, monogamous, devoid of sexual eccentricities) while having their existence explained by an ideology they did not believe in. They objected to being called ‘queer’ because they recognised this, correctly, as a political identity and not a neutral description of their innate sexual orientation. Adherents to queer theory are also fully aware that it is a set of political and philosophical beliefs, so when they call lesbians, gay men and bisexuals ‘queer’ they are imposing those beliefs upon them. Equally, when they refer to “queer” people, they are quite explicitly excluding lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who do not consider themselves to be queer.

A venn diagram may help to illustrate this because it shows who is included in which definitions and who is excluded. “Lesbians, gay men and bisexuals” refers to anybody who is attracted to others of the same sex including those who consider themselves queer and consequently hold the beliefs of queer theory. It does not include those who consider themselves queer but are not attracted to others of the same sex. “Queer” refers to anybody who considers themselves queer including those who are attracted to others of the same sex. It does not include lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who do not hold the beliefs of queer theory.

When Andrew Sullivan said that by specifying ‘queer and trans’ people, Mr. Mamdani was erasing gay men and lesbians (who do not also consider themselves queer), he is simply correct. Within the current discourse, ‘queer’ does refer to people who hold the beliefs of queer theory and ‘trans’ refers to people who perceive themselves to have a gender identity which does not match their biological sex. Gay men and lesbians who do not believe either of these things are not included here. While Mamdani does refer to Stonewall, Lesbian Herstory and ACT UP!, only those who also consider themselves queer are celebrated. While trans people are also celebrated, the majority of those who also consider themselves to be gay men or lesbians would, by the standard definition of homosexuality, be heterosexual.

It is, of course, possible that Mr. Mamdani misspoke and does not fully appreciate what queer means in the current discourse of political activism. People can use the term as a slur or misunderstand it as a broadly inclusive term as indicated by the people responding to Andrew. It seems unlikely that Mamdani would not understand the political implications, however, because he is a politician who has been active on many related issues. It seems much more likely that he was using the term in its political sense and celebrating those who hold those political views specifically despite this excluding gay men and lesbians who don’t.

When people advocate for LGB rights specifically, it is generally understood that they are exclusively advocating for people who are same-sex attracted and not for anybody else who considers themselves queer. Those who do this will explain why they have this particular focus quite explicitly in an open and principled way. It would be helpful if those who advocate for queer rights were either similarly explicit that this does not include gay men and lesbians who don’t hold the beliefs of queer theory and justify this with an ethical rationale. In this way, people who don’t keep up with political terminology will understand to whom the term does and does not refer. Alternatively, they could use language which does include gay men and lesbians in their advocacy regardless of their political and philosophical beliefs and accept that same-sex attracted people can and do authentically hold a variety of them. That would be ideal.

On the first of June, Zohran Mamdani posted on X,

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(Audio version here)

On Monday, 23-year-old Vikrum Digwa was given a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. Since then, there have been many, many think pieces on the broader significance of this horrible crime.

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It is unsurprising that the brutal and senseless murder of such a young man would arouse so much anger and disgust. It was also bound to be read through the lens of the culture wars. Henry’s killer was the son of migrants from India and a member of a minority religion. He had made false claims of racism against his victim and the police, accepting that Henry was the aggressor and not believing he had been stabbed, pinned down and handcuffed a dying youth. This is a toxic mix of characteristics bound to incite existing anger about immigration, violent crime, “woke” concepts of racism which hold that only white people can be guilty of it and potential police bias.

Some arguments along these lines have been serious, thoughtful and reasonable and addressed issues of cultural clashes, knife crime and the hampering of the police by racially relative guidelines. Others, however, have sought to read this incident through the lens of pre-existing cultural narratives in ways that simply do not work. The serious issues surrounding this case will be better addressed if people refrain from doing this.

Three primary bad arguments stand out to me on perusing online debate. They hold that this murder occurred because of immigration policies that allowed Indian Sikhs into the country, that allowing Sikh ceremonial daggers to be carried encourages such crimes from this particular group, or that Henry was failed by police having been ideologically trained to believe the white youth must be the perpetrator. Let’s look at those:

1) “If we had not let Sikhs into the country in the first place, this crime would not have happened.”

This claim is literally true in this particular case. Vikrum Digwa’s parents were migrants from India and the family is Sikh. However, the significance of this is generally expanded to a claim that the murder occurred because Digwa was a Sikh and that immigration policies that allowed Sikhs in are to blame for increased violent crime. This relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of crime per capita.

Confusion over the concept of per capita is common and it seems to be counterintuitive to people to think this way. While religion is not recorded in crime records, it is in prison populations which represent the most serious crimes. Sikhs are underrepresented in serious crime. If British Sikhs made up the entire population, serious crime would be about 20% lower than it is now. This may even be too low an estimate of the gap. Because the Sikh population is younger than the general population which increases prevalence of crime and because they are more likely to be city-dwellers which also has this effect, we would expect this to elevate serious crime rates among the group. This is not the case.

Sikhs are not a problem population for UK law and order, statistically speaking. Sikh communities generally show high levels of educational attainment, employment, politeness and law-abiding behaviour. Sikh women have criticised an honour culture which exists within some Sikh communities and denies them the choice and freedom of men. This is something that can and should be criticised but is a different issue to that of violent crime impacting broader society and culture. Sikhs are particularly likely to object to aggression and violence on religious grounds regarding this as Krodh - anger, rage - and Digwa had, in fact, been barred from his temple for aggressive behaviour. Sikh leaders condemned his violence.

2) Kirpans are the problem! Why are Sikhs permitted to carry knives when nobody else is?

This is a somewhat better question. It can be persuasively argued that there should be no religious exemption for carrying knives. I would support this argument and consistently object to religious deeply held beliefs being granted a privileged status over non-religious deeply held beliefs. If we support knife bans, we should do consistently.

Fortunately, the kirpan is a ceremonial object and not generally used for cutting anything. It is worn as a reminder against the five enemies of Sikhism including Krodh and using it as an offensive weapon is strictly taboo and prevents it from being a kirpan. Therefore, it does not need to be sharp. For this reason, some countries, communities and individuals already wear a blunt kirpan or one that is welded into its sheath for reasons of personal safety and compliance with laws. This is surely a satisfactory solution to balance religion freedom with universally applicable knife laws.

Sikhs have argued since the trial that the blade used by Digwa was not a traditional kirpan even though he claimed that it was. The association of the ceremonial object with knife crime is simply not supported by evidence and most of the rhetoric around it appears to be an attempt to paint Sikhs as inherently prone to engaging in violence because this item is part of their religious practice. Statistics do not support this.

3) Henry was failed because police were ideologically motivated or trained to believe claims of racism and see the white youth as aggressor.

This is not entirely lacking in plausibility. We know that police failed to act to protect white (and Sikh) girls against sexual predators in Rotherham because the perpetrators were Muslim and they were afraid of being suspected of racism or ‘Islamophobia.’ Good arguments can and should be made against ideological “anti-racist” policies and training or policies which seem to sanction culturally or ethnically relative policing. These are already under review following the murder of Henry Nowak.

It can also be convincingly argued that Vikrum Digwa and possibly his family attempted to use the cultural power of claiming racism to deflect from his violence because the police are trained to be particularly receptive to this and to intimidate them out of challenging it. To this extent, the cultural prominence and prestige of Critical Social Justice ‘anti-racist’ theories could potentially be used to hinder the investigation and give more credence to the account of the individual of racial minority.

However, it is not clear that this is what happened. The ideological explanation is plausible enough to investigate but not established by the evidence currently available. The police made a terrible misjudgement in not checking Henry’s chest after he said he had been stabbed and could not breathe. But the extent to which this was a result of a bias towards uncritically accepting claims of racism leading to automatically blaming the white youth or simple confirmation bias due to responding to a particular crime report has yet to be discovered. The police responded to a call about a racially motivated attack and found a family from a community underrepresented in violent crime confirming this report and holding upright a young man whose bleeding was internal and whose semi-comatose state was not immediately distinguishable from being drunk.

We cannot know that the police would have acted differently if the races of the individuals had been reversed or if the false accusation of an attack had not been claimed to have been motivated by racism. Dismissing Henry’s claim of having been stabbed with “I don’t think you have, mate” even while telling the murderer’s family that they had to take this seriously was stupid. Nevertheless, Hanlon’s Razor - Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - can be argued to apply here.

It is yet to be determined if the police’s terrible misjudgement was influenced by ideologically biased training around race or religion or whether it was purely error based on uncritically assuming the truth of the initial report and being met by a respectable-looking family. Either way, investigations need to be done to prevent such a thing from happening again. It would not have saved poor Henry if the police had believed him immediately but it would have prevented him from spending his last conscious moments in handcuffs.

In our deeply polarised times, there is a temptation after a horrific crime or tragic death for people to read it as confirmation of whatever social or political theory they already hold. The result is often that the facts of the case become secondary to the narrative people are committed to. We saw this very clearly with many adherents to the Black Lives Matter movement.when individual incidents were frequently treated as proof of sweeping theories about race and policing. We would do better not to emulate this.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has nearly 6500 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

On Monday, 23-year-old Vikrum Digwa was given a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. Since then, there have been many, many think pieces on the broader significance of this horrible crime.

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It is unsurprising that the brutal and senseless murder of such a young man would aro…

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For Skeptic, I argue that the best way to abolish bad ideas is not to ban them but open them up to genuine multidisciplinary critique.

Find the full essay here.

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(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has nearly 6500 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Today, I came upon this note by Alex Potts whom I know as someone who makes thoughtful and nuanced posts on current affairs and politics.

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This is true. The ‘sex work is work’ tribe are different to the ‘sex work is empowering’ tribe in that way. The former do not typically make a case that sex work is good but that it’s not uniquely terrible in a way that puts it in a separate category to other forms of work very few people would do by choice if they suddenly won the lottery. It might well be preferable to other jobs that produce disgust responses like cleaning out sewers or emptying portable lavatories or clearing up crime scenes or are dangerous like being a lumberjack or working on an oil rig. We don’t tend to try to rescue people from those jobs because they do need doing (and are overwhelmingly done by men whom we tend to perceive as having more agency and not needing to be rescued from anything). Sex work is not an essential service, but this does not speak to how terrible the experience of doing it is.

I am sympathetic to the “sex work is work” argument, in principle. If somebody really does make a level-headed cost/benefit analysis that goes “I don’t enjoy sex work but I don’t hate it. I’d rather earn the money I need to cover my rent & bills by doing that for two hours a night than by doing 8 hour shifts in a factory, supermarket, cleaning offices etc. which are the other options realistically available to me. I hate my life less with the first option.” I defend their right to make that choice. I don’t think the anti-sex work crowd would really be helping them much if they succeeded in banning it and saying “See! Now you have to work those tedious long shifts instead. It’s for your own good. We have saved you.”

However, for very many women, sex really is categorically different from typical forms of compensated labour. It seems very likely that this is due to the hard-wired intuitions that make us the more choosy sex and also much less likely to want sex unless we feel some bond with our partner. These almost certainly exist because we are the sex which gets pregnant and evolution has favoured the offspring of choosy females who require commitment thus passing on choosy and cautious genes. Many women have reported feeling genuinely degraded and violated in a deeply personal way after having sex without genuine desire or emotional connection. It is more likely that this is a result of evolved psychology deterring indiscriminate mating as counterproductive to female biological fitness than of patriarchal cultural conditioning telling women that their worth and value is bound up in their chastity, as some sex-positive feminists have argued. It is also unclear that sex just is objectively a more degrading exercise than other forms of physical labour women can engage in for money because it services man’s desires and is therefore necessarily a form of patriarchal oppression as some radical feminists have argued.

Men do, of course, engage in sex work too, although in much lower numbers due to men creating the overwhelming majority of the market for sex and the majority of men being heterosexual. Those who do seem less likely to feel this way. I was close to two male sex workers in the 90s.

For one of my friends who was gay, sex work really was just work. He took a pride in being good at it and having a loyal clientele, but did not feel empowered by it and frequently found it a chore. He was fond of some of his clients but actively disliked others. His clients tended to be wealthy, successful, professional men and two became bonded lovers with whom he had a loving, longterm relationship but he felt that both of them had a paternalistic, condescending attitude towards him because of the power imbalance in their relationship. The job was not his ideal one. He wanted to be a writer. If he’d won the lottery, he would have stopped sex work and focused on that. Nevertheless, he’d rather do sex work than any other job available to him and it paid well and he got to pick his own clients and hours. It was relatively safe by the time I met him but had not always been so. When he began, he was picking up clients in gay bars and was only prevented from going home with the serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, by another man intercepting him and warning that he had attempted to strangle him when he had passed out drunk. Police had not been interested in this information.

The other male sex worker I knew was a family member and he was heterosexual. There is very little demand for male sex-workers from women, but it does exist. He was an aspiring actor and model and his clients were older, very wealthy women who wanted no-strings sex. He loved this job. The women were typically attractive and in good shape and not terribly demanding in their requirements, preferring quality over quantity. The main perk, in his view, was that they would sometimes take him on expensive holidays to 5-star hotels and exclusive resorts that were quite out of his reach. Unfortunately for him, his shelf-life was limited and when he developed male-pattern balding in his late twenties and his youthful, model good looks faded, he was no longer in demand. The way he earned money also caused rifts in his relationships with other men who found it unworthy of respect and a temporary estrangement from his father ensued when he was featured in a newspaper article about an actress in her 50s who had been using his services. Nevertheless, he remembers the period fondly and does not feel demeaned or scarred by it.

Women can feel this way too, of course. While attitudes towards sex differ quite profoundly between the sexes statistically, individual variation always exists with some men only desiring sex within a committed relationship and some women being fully open to casual sex and regarding transactional sex as legitimate and honorable. I am a woman who falls in the latter category and regarded myself very much as a sex-positive feminist in the 90s. A gay male friend joked to me at the time that I conducted my sex life like a gay man, by which he meant I was direct and unapologetic about it. From my own perspective, I simply objected to complicated social game-playing and also an expectation that women be ‘hard to get’ which led to both ambiguity about whether a woman really meant it when she said “no” and men feigning interest in a relationship when they only wanted a casual sexual encounter. I believed that women who felt their self-respect depended on their sexual behaviour were buying into sexist narratives that reduced women’s value to their sexuality.

In retrospect, I think I fell into the trap of mistaking my personality for my politics and morally rationalising a personal preference for directness and no-strings casual relationships for a liberatory feminist stance. I suspect this to be very common and that often when we hear a socially conservative woman telling us that women inherently do and also should feel shame and lose self-respect if they have casual sex, or a radical feminist telling us women inherently feel that way because heterosexual sex actually is inherently exploitative we are hearing about their own experiences and preferences with a moral/political justification. I think it is significant that my attitude was likened to that of a gay man because gay male relationships are the clearest view into what male sexuality looks like when it is not accommodating the preferences of women. If women and men repeatedly exhibit different average sexual attitudes even in contexts where complementary traditional gender roles are absent, that weakens the claim that those differences are entirely products of patriarchal socialisation.

I have known women who genuinely enjoyed sex work or preferred it to other forms of work. When I was in a relationship with a woman, also in the 90s, another female couple suggested to us that we could make a lot of money by doing ‘video-cam’ work, because we were both attractive in typically feminine ways. They were very positive about this, telling us that this was their ideal job because they only needed to have sex with each other which they were already doing enthusiastically and could work from home for a couple of hours three times a week and take requests and earn more money than they ever could have done in other jobs available to them. This did not appeal to me but it did to them and I have no reason to think they were not exercising full agency.

Two of my female friends engaged in sex work, one as an escort and one as an exotic dancer, from a purely economic standpoint and have never regretted this. The first was saving for a home and offered her services by word-of-mouth in addition to her day job in retail. Her experience was much like that of the gay man described above in that she liked some of her clients and disliked others and saw it very much as a job that she would not do if she were rich. She would rather do the sex work and buy a flat than remain renting for another decade. She did not hate it. The second was a single mother funding herself through a social work degree. She actually enjoyed the work because it required a certain amount of skill and fitness, but did leave it behind when she had secured the degree and instead attended dance and fitness classes which she preferred.

Where I have most often encountered women engaging in sex work, however, is when I have been either working or recovering in psychiatric hospitals/rehabilitation centres. I suffer from OCD and have also worked in a variety of health and social care settings. These have not been women who have chosen sex work following a careful, level-headed cost/benefit analysis that introspected on their own psychology and mental wellbeing and determined that sex-work was compatible with that. These were women who were seriously mentally ill or struggling with addiction. This foreclosed the option of alternative work that could enable them to have a home and pay their bills because they required reliability, stability and the ability to work long, regular hours. The problems which made them unable to hold onto regular jobs also relegated them to the most risky and poorly paid end of sex work. Many women who are struggling with disablingly painful emotions and/or addiction are vulnerable to being sucked into sex work as a way to keep themselves afloat and/or because they are suffering with very low self-worth and self-destructive impulses. Men experiencing the same emotional pain or dependencies are more likely to exhibit different maladaptive ways of coping and self-destructive behaviours.

The purpose of these personal anecdotes from the life of one 50-year-old woman (which is dubious evidence at best) is not to make a blanket, declarative statement about how we should understand sex work. It is to support the argument that making such statements will always miss part of the picture and that those of us who care about individual autonomy and addressing material issues which affect the most vulnerable people should resist buying into any of them.

The right answer to ‘Sex work is empowering for women” is “For some women, certainly. For most, probably not.” The correct response to '“Sex work is (just) work” is “It can be, yes, but for many people, especially women, sex is a more personal thing they do with their body than manual labour and thus belongs in a different mental category.” The best way to respond to “Sex work is exploitation of vulnerable women who have no other options” is “Yes, it often is. How do we address that in a way that does not simply close down the one option for survival that they do have?”

All too often, when people say that sex work is a certain thing, they mean “You should consider yourself morally obligated to see it that way. You should find sex work empowering/think of it as just another job/consider yourself a vulnerable and exploited person. If you don’t, there is something morally wrong with you or with society which has culturally conditioned you into believing otherwise.” (Why is it always women who are considered particularly vulnerable to being culturally conditioned while men are considered to be using their autonomy to work within the options they have?)

The problem with buying into one or other of these narratives uncritically is that they are all very easily falsified by simply pointing at women whose experience disconfirms it. This then leads to claiming that some women have the authentic, authoritative stance on this while others are brainwashed in some way or inauthentic. We see this dynamic online when sex-positive feminists and feminists who oppose sex work argue with each other. They are each likely to bring out personal accounts of sex-workers whose experience and beliefs match their own and then accuse the other of not listening to sex workers. This is not remotely helpful to women.

What is helpful to women is having a default assumption that they are individuals with agency and autonomy who may have a range of experiences and beliefs and exercise that autonomy differently, just like men. When they are able to exercise this, we do not need to be managing their sex lives for them or deciding what they may or may not use their bodies for in terms of recompensed service. This frees us up to focus on the women who are not able to exercise agency or autonomy due to mental illness, addiction or other factors which have led them to lose control of their lives, without assuming that this is the natural condition of women. The solution to this is the provision of better services for mental health and addiction and programmes to assist those struggling to cope with work demands into regular jobs rather than penalising them for not having them.

The temptation to feed the complex reality of sex work into simplistic narratives that define all women involved in it as empowering themselves, straightforwardly working their chosen job or being passively exploited is both common and destructive. They cannot map onto the complex reality of real people’s experiences. Some women experience sex work as empowering. Some experience it as degrading. Some experience it as merely a way to pay the bills. Some are making free choices from a position of relative stability. Others are making desperate choices in circumstances nobody should have to face. None of these women cease to exist because their experiences are inconvenient to anybody’s preferred narrative.

If we genuinely care about women in sex work, we should spend less time arguing over which ideological slogan captures the essence of their experiences and more time recognising them as individuals with a variety of circumstances and views. Liberalism requires us to tolerate such complexity. It requires us to accept that women, like men, are autonomous individuals whose desires, values, vulnerabilities and ambitions differ profoundly from one another. Once we stop trying to force every woman into a single political story, we can focus on the far more important task: acknowledging the agency of women who are capable of directing their own lives (even if the direction they take is one we wish they wouldn’t) and supporting those whose lives are currently out of control to change their direction.

Today, I came upon this post by Alex Potts whom I know as someone who posts thoughtful and nuanced thoughts on current affairs and politics.

This is true. The ‘sex work is work’ tribe are different to the ‘sex work is empowering’ tribe in that way. The former do not typically make a case that sex work is good but that it’s …

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I was recently invited to speak to a liberal LGBT organisation in Turin about the relationship between LGBT rights and liberalism itself. With their permission, I am republishing my remarks here.

(The conference was filmed and can be found here. My talk is at 2 hr 50 minutes and I am translated into Italian after each paragraph).

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Why LGBT Rights Need Liberalism

Liberalism has always held that LGBT rights matter. They matter because gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people are individual human beings who must have the same rights, freedoms, dignity and opportunities as everybody else. They matter because the ability to live openly, love freely, speak honestly and participate fully in society should not require conforming to norms of heterosexuality or gender conformity.

LGBT rights are again under threat. They have always been under threat from the forces of social and religious conservatism, which are now resurging. But they are also under threat from newer ideological movements that claim to speak for the LGBT while undermining the liberal principles that made LGBT progress possible in the first place.

My argument today is that liberalism has historically been the most effective framework for securing the rights of minorities, including sexual minorities, and that it remains our best hope now. By liberalism, I am referring to the philosophical tradition that underlies liberal democracies. It values individual liberty, universal human rights, freedom of belief and speech, equality before the law, and the right of people to live as they see fit without being coerced into any moral or ideological stance.

Allegedly liberal societies have often failed to live up to these principles. But liberalism contains within itself the tools of its own correction. It allowed women, people of racial minority, religious minorities and sexual minorities to say to a culture that took pride in those principles, “You claim to believe in individual liberty, individual dignity and universal human rights and yet you have not extended these to us.”

This appeals to people’s sense of fairness and empathy and justice. It works.

The civil rights movement, liberal feminism, and gay rights movements advocated for groups who were denied rights, by appealing to universal principles. They argued that black people, women and gay men and lesbians were full human beings and individuals who should not be denied rights, opportunities or dignity because of race, sex or sexuality.

Gay rights activism, at its best, did not say, “We are a separate moral caste with our own truth.” It said, “We are people. Our love is love. Our relationships matter. Our private lives are not the business of the state. We should not be treated as criminals, sinners, degenerates or psychiatric cases. We should be allowed to live and love and have that love recognised as legitimate.”

This was a liberal argument. It was also a winning one. Unfortunately, as real progress was finally being made, there emerged a new school of thought which declared that progress itself was a myth and liberalism a false metanarrative. It must be dismantled in favour of identity politics and critical deconstructive theories about identity. From this emerged queer theory.

I have been a prominent critic of queer theory but this does not mean it is entirely wrong.

The way societies have understood and talked about homosexuality really has changed dramatically. For much of Christian history, homosexuality was seen as a terrible sin. In the nineteenth century, the idea of “the homosexual” as something someone was emerged, first in medical writing. That medicalisation was invalidating and stigmatizing. Then, over the twentieth century, this changed again. The dominant liberal attitude became something like: “Some people are gay; get over it.”

Queer Theory is right to notice that the social meanings attached to sexuality have changed. It is right to notice that categories are not simply neutral; they can carry stigma, power and expectations. It is right to question rigid norms that punish people for failing to conform.

But Queer Theory goes badly wrong when it treats categories like ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ as if they are merely discursive constructions produced by power. Human beings are a sexually reproducing species. Biological sex is real. Same-sex attraction is real. Gender roles and stereotypes are partly cultural, but not everything about masculinity and femininity is invented by discourse.

This matters for LGBT rights. If homosexuality is treated as merely a social construct or a lifestyle category or, worse, a political identity, it becomes harder to defend same sex attracted people against the old claim that their sexuality is just a choice, a fashion, corruption or something that can be prayed away. Of course, if homosexuality or gender nonconformity were a choice, it would still be a perfectly ethical one. But the overwhelming testimony of gay men and lesbians, and the gender nonconforming, suggests that it isn’t.

While liberal activism sought to change prejudice by appealing to shared humanity, Queer Theory treats universality, normality and stable categories as suspect. It seeks not merely to expand freedom within society but to destabilise the concepts of sex, gender and sexuality themselves as a form of political activism.

This can be exhilarating within an academic seminar. It is much less useful as public persuasion. Most straight people do not appreciate being told that their sex or sexuality are oppressive social constructs. Nor is it helpful to LGBT people who want to be accepted as a less common variation on normal to be constantly rescued from normality by activists who regard the very concept as oppressive.

This brings me to the wider problem of identity politics.

Liberalism and identity politics are often confused because both can focus on groups who have suffered injustice. But they are not the same thing.

Liberalism says: no identity should prevent an individual from accessing the full range of rights, freedoms and opportunities available in society. Identity politics says: political life should be organised around group identity, with marginalised groups understood as possessing distinct forms of knowledge and moral authority, and privileged groups understood as bearers of domination.

The difference is profound.

Universal liberalism tries to reduce the social significance of race, sex and sexuality. Not by pretending they do not exist meaningfully for people, but by insisting they should not determine your rights, your moral worth, your career, your relationships, or the assumptions others make about you.

Identity politics tries to intensify the social significance of identity. It tells people to understand themselves primarily as members of identity groups in conflict with other identity groups.

This is a terrible way to encourage a species of tribal, territorial apes to think. We do not need much encouragement to divide the world into “us” and “them.” Liberalism is an achievement precisely because it asks us to rise above some of our baser tribal instincts and expand our circle of empathy. It asks us to judge people as individuals with whom we share a common humanity, to apply principles consistently, to empathise across difference.

Identity politics works against this. It reduces empathy between groups, makes conversation harder, and creates different moral rules for different identities. It becomes acceptable to be hostile to some people because they are seen as members of a dominant group. But this is not social justice. It is collective blame. It is also an invitation to backlash.

If we undermine the principle that people should not be judged by race, sex or sexuality, we should not be surprised if others stop applying that principle too. The taboo against racism, sexism and homophobia is historically recent and fragile. It must be defended consistently.

That does not mean pretending racism, sexism or homophobia no longer exist. It does not mean ignoring the needs of minorities. It means addressing injustice through universal principles: fairness, liberty, equal treatment, freedom from discrimination, and the dignity of the individual.

This is especially urgent right now because we are currently facing a number of illiberal ideologies operating in the sphere of sexuality and gender that threaten to reverse much of the progress that has been made for the LGBT.

The first is the old enemy - social conservatism - enabled to resurge again in backlash against the authoritarian ‘queer’ activists. This holds that masculinity and femininity are natural, good, and should align with biological sex and work within exclusively heterosexual relationships. Its kernel of truth is that sex differences do exist. Men and women are not identical populations in their interests, temperaments or behavioural tendencies, and most people are heterosexual.

But social conservatism goes further than this and turns average differences into rigid roles and regards divergence from them as a transgression. It becomes illiberal when it treats deviations from traditional masculinity and femininity, including homosexuality and gender nonconformity, as morally wrong or even contaminating and socially dangerous.

This remains a major threat to the LGBT.

The second ideology comes from the gender-critical faction. At its best, it rightly insists that biological sex is real and sometimes materially important for reasons of safety and fairness.

But the gender-critical stance also has its dangers. In radically feminist forms, it treats men as a political class opposed to women and has a dour view of men and male sexuality. This can manifest as homophobia and representation of trans women as fetishistic sexual predators.

In right-wing populist form, the gender-critical label has been adopted by those who are not critical of gender roles at all but actively wish to restore them. This matters because a movement that began partly as a defence of women’s rights and freedom of speech can be pulled into reactionary politics that is hostile to homosexuality, gender nonconformity and liberalism.

The third ideology is genderqueer or queer activism. Its kernel of truth is that many people do not fit neatly into conventional masculinity or femininity, and they should not be forced to. A liberal society should make room for the feminine man, the masculine woman, the androgynous person, the trans adult, the flamboyant, the quiet, the sexually unconventional, the celibate, the monogamous, the experimental and the ordinary.

But contemporary gender identity activism has often hardened into something authoritarian. It claims that all must affirm gender identity to be more authoritative than biological sex. It reframes same-sex attraction as attraction to gender identity. It treats disagreement as literal violence. It has encouraged no-platforming, censorship, institutional coercion and abuse of dissenters.

This is not liberal. It is also not good for the LGBT.

Gay men and lesbians should not be pressured to redescribe their sexual orientation as attraction to gender identity. Women should not be told that concerns about safety, privacy or fairness are bigotry. Children and adolescents should not be rushed into life-altering medical pathways without sufficient exploration of their sexuality. We should be concerned that the UK Tavistock clinic joked “Soon there will be no gay people left.” And nobody should be compelled to say what they do not believe.

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us in need of liberalism again.

Liberalism does not require us all to agree about gender. A socially conservative person may live by traditional gender roles. A gender-critical feminist may reject gender roles. A genderqueer person may play with them. A transsexual adult may seek medical transition.

A liberal society can contain all these people.

What it cannot contain, at least not peacefully, is the demand that one faction’s metaphysics be imposed on everyone else.

LGBT rights cannot be protected by abandoning liberalism. They were won by appealing to it. They were won by saying that people should not be criminalised, pathologised, excluded or humiliated for being who they are or loving whom they love. They were won by insisting that the individual matters more than the category, that private life belongs to the person, and that a decent society protects freedom of conscience, speech and association.

That remains the path forward.

We should resist the old social conservatism that would force gay people back into hiding and gender nonconforming people back into rigid roles that make them miserable. We should resist feminist blank-slatism that denies psychological sex differences and demonises men and trans women. We should resist the new queer authoritarianism that would force everyone to affirm contested beliefs. We should resist identity politics when it divides people into hostile moral tribes.

And we should defend a liberalism strong enough to protect minorities, humble enough to allow disagreement, and principled enough to apply its freedoms to everyone.

Because LGBT rights do not require a society in which everyone thinks the same way about sex, gender and sexuality. They require a society in which people are free to live differently.

That is what liberalism offers.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has nearly 6500 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has nearly 6500 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Today, I came upon this post by Konstantin Kisin introducing a video clip in which he says that it is a parent’s job to teach children how to live their lives and considers the concept of fairness. This has inspired me to have a rather lengthy meditation on the subject of teaching children about fairness myself. It is not intended as a rebuttal of Konstantin with whom, as shall be seen, I largely agree, but an expansion on this theme.

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This is a question certainly about how to teach children about fairness and an important one. There are other questions too, including “Is fairness a good thing that we should strive for? Should we try to be fair? Should we object to unfairness?” It would not, for example, be good parenting to give one child many books, tutors and time to study while giving another none and then telling them that some people will always have more and some less and it is up to them to chase their potential rather than make excuses about why they are not getting the same grades as their brother. This would not be a useful learning experience.

This is, of course, a ludicrous example and no parent would consider doing this (assuming they did not hate one of their children). Nevertheless, across society such disparities do exist and they are unfair and I think it is defensible to say that it is undesirable that such unfairness exists and that we can teach children to have an expectation of fairness and object to unfairness. How we think about this in relation to our own lives and in relation to public policy, however, varies significantly and legitimate differences of opinion exist. I think most of my readers would find the argument of the UK professor who claimed that parents reading to their children unfairly disadvantaged other children utterly ridiculous self-flagellation while also agreeing that ensuring that all children have access to a good education is a social responsibility.

Although Konstantin says “It’s not an ideological question. It’s empirical. Is it more useful for a child be to fulfil their potential or to navel-gaze and analyse the precise way in which they didn’t have as much as Johnny the neighbour?” the framing of this specific question could certainly be considered to be based on conservative premises. It is a focus on individual responsibility. A progressive thinking about what to teach their child about fairness would also be unlikely to think they should teach them that life is fair but their empirical question might be “Is it more useful for society for a child to be taught to accept unfairness as a fact of life and focus on their own advancement within that system or that this is something they should oppose and endeavour not to perpetuate themselves?” This is a focus on social responsibility.

It is not that progressives focus only on the responsibility of society to make systems fair for all people and not at all on personal responsibility or that conservatives focus solely on the individual’s responsibilities and not at all on society’s although they do typically perceive each other to err in the wrong direction. Most people who are not radical ideologues believe both that it is important for children to be taught to take responsibility for their own lives and to develop resilience and avoid self-victimising and that society should be set up in such a way that it does not unfairly disadvantage any subset of people and hinder them from reaching their potential.

Ultimately, I think we should teach children to pursue agency rather than grievance, while also teaching society to pursue fairness rather than indifference. Given that children ultimately become society, it is ideal to do these in tandem.

It is the case that when I was 14, my parents were focused on getting me a maths tutor and many books to help me prepare for GCSE, my private school had also arranged extra classes and had a well-stocked quiet and comfortable library of such books and I was excused other responsibilities so that I could focus on my maths in my private study which adjoined my bedroom at home. It was this intensive support which enabled me to pass GCSE maths with which I had always struggled and consequently gain access to a university where I studied English Literature and History and discovered postmodernism and wrote about my dislike of it in a book which became a bestseller. It enabled me to fulfil my potential.

It is also the case that when my husband, David, was 14, he had left school and was working full-time in order to support his family. There was not much point in him remaining at school as it was so awful that it had not, by this time, taught him to read. It was eventually closed down and dubbed “the worst school in England” for failing in this most basic of educational responsibilities. Nor could he learn under his own steam because his parents had neither the education to help him nor the income to provide books and, because there were five boys in a three-bedroomed house, quiet and space in which to study were hard to come by. He acquired literacy in evening classes as an adult, but it is fair to say that this did hinder him from reaching his potential.

Dave would certainly not consider himself a victim of anything, however, and he is not one inclined to navel-gazing. He got a job in which he had the opportunity to take exams in the operation of so many kinds of moving machinery that his skills were sought after and he was able to take a job at the top of his payscale and, when he married and started a family, provide for them so I could stay home with the baby. I have just asked him whether he considers himself successful and he said, “Yes.” (He is a man of few words). When pressed to expand on this, he said, “Well, I’ve done well for myself. I’ve got a nice house, wife and family. We’ve always done alright.” Indeed, we have. On explaining the purpose of this piece, he pronounced himself in agreement with Konstantin, saying, “You’ve just got to get on with it. I can point at other people who had more opportunities than me, but you’ve got to make your own opportunities.”

However, the reason we have a house is because my first flat in London cost £26,000 in 1993 and the mortgage was within my means as a care assistant earning £10,000 a year. When I married him in 2002, a forklift driver earning £16,000 a year, we were able to pay that off quite quickly between us, start a family on his salary alone and then move up the property ladder. That flat is currently valued at £180,000 and forklift drivers now earn about £26,000 a year. It is unlikely that one could now afford to buy it and start a family there. I am sympathetic to the feelings of many of Gen Z that they are not getting the chance of a fair start in life that previous generations had. The attitudes of some boomers and Gen X that they just need to work harder and skip the Netflix and avocado toast simply do not map onto reality. Even someone with my struggles in maths can see that this does not work.

Sometimes, people perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage because they are and the hardwired moral intuition that is likely to arise here is that of unfairness. Rather than telling people that they just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, we might want to consider prioritising workable policies to enable affordable housing, especially if we would like the birthrate to increase. There are both economically left-wing policies for increasing social housing and libertarian proposals to enable building that could potentially address this problem.

I deeply admire my husband’s ‘You’ve just got to get on with it’ attitude. It has certainly served him well and our family well. When I wanted to stop work for a couple of years to be with our baby, he took on more work to enable that to happen. When I returned to work, he dropped back to his allotted hours so I could work evenings and weekends. When I had a neurological accident and became disabled, he switched to working nights so that he could take our daughter to school and pick her up if needed and also because it paid more so I could finally do my undergraduate and postgraduate study. When this led to me being invited to travel and speak in the US frequently, he maximised his annual leave so I could do that and he could be at home overnight for our now teen daughter. He did not get a holiday which was actually a holiday for five years. My ability to reach my potential and our daughter’s to reach hers has been enabled by a thoroughly good man ‘just getting on with it.” I was glad to be able to enable him to retire early and, now that our daughter is an adult, dedicate his time to his own interests.

This, however, is not a possibility for most people. When my husband hit 50, his work, which includes much manual lifting of heavy objects, began to get too heavy for him. He could still do it, but his immune system began to suffer. After 14 years without a sick day, he began to get every bug and virus going, be hit hard by them and struggle to throw them off. His work was unsympathetic. If he made it into work but informed them that he needed lighter tasks, they would give him the heaviest. If he said he could not do overtime, they gave him a big job five minutes before end of shift. They believed that, because he’d be unlikely to get another job of this kind at 50, they could exploit him now. In fact, they could not, because my mother just died and I had inherited two houses and convinced him, with difficulty, that it would make more financial sense for him to work on repairing and redecorating them to be sold than for us to hire someone else to do it. He enjoyed giving in his notice and said that, when asked, ‘What will you do for money?” he only just restrained himself from citing the Harry Enfield character, “I am considerably richer than you.” This is, of course, not the situation the vast majority of men or women in manual jobs find themselves when they hit their 50s. This is another reason I think we should raise children to expect fairness from the systems and institutions around them and, if they themselves attain positions of power or management, to treat others fairly in turn.

When I founded Counterweight to help people experiencing a Critical Social Justice authoritarianism problem at their place of work, university or children’s school, I heard from many individuals who objected to narratives of grievance and victimhood which they felt infantalised them or undermined their children’s confidence. Following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, many companies and schools across the Western world developed new policies to address racism based on the work of Robin DiAngelo. They implemented anti-racist unconscious bias training which held that society was set up in ways that disadvantaged black people at every turn and that much of this was rooted in unconscious racist bias held by all white people. The white people who came to us for help to address this mostly objected to assumptions that they were racist and being forced to affirm this. However, a disproportionate number of the people who objected to this were black, particularly in the UK, and their objection was that such a narrative was an assault on their dignity, individuality and professionalism. They particularly objected to their children being taught that society was against them and that they would be hobbled at every turn. So many parents felt this way that we produced a template letter for them to adapt for their own situation,

Dear <school official/head teacher/school board>,

Thank you for your communications that you have been teaching about racism and the importance of opposing it. I heartily support this endeavor. It is very important that children have an understanding of history and the ways in which black people and other people of color have been oppressed. They need to know not only the importance of ensuring that this never happens again but also the importance of continuing to oppose evaluating people’s moral worth and social status by their race. We will support any ethical approach to conveying this important message in age-appropriate ways to our child. However, I am somewhat concerned about the ways in which this is being done.

…

I am particularly concerned that my child is being taught that society is stacked against <her/him> and that <she/he> is unlikely to be able to succeed no matter how hard <she/he> works. While racist attitudes do still exist, and we do have to prepare our child to face them, this fatalistic and defeatist attitude undermines the values and confidence we have worked to instill in our child. Children are very impressionable at this age, and I must object to your encouraging them to believe they will fail in life simply because of their skin color. We must request that you stop undermining the strength, ambition, and hope we have instilled in our child and attempting to replace it with resentment and despair.

This maps very closely onto the argument that Konstantin was making and it is one I heartily agree with. It is very difficult to see how any child could develop the confidence to reach their full potential if they believe that every white person they meet has been socialised into believing them to be unintelligent and criminally-inclined and consequently to underestimate their ability to fulfil roles of responsibility and expertise and also regard them as a liability.

However, many of these individuals, particularly in the US, felt it important to stress that black children did continue to face disadvantage statistically and that it was important to address this. The problem with the CSJ approach, they said, was that it rooted this problem in the unconscious minds of white people rather than the material disadvantages that continue to affect black communities who had been relegated to second-class citizens for so many generations. This, then, is partly a class issue, not fundamentally dissimilar to that which affected my (white) husband, although the origins of this class structure are bound up in America’s racial history. It would be a mistake, however, to try to reduce disadvantage entirely to class issues as some Marxists are inclined to do. Racial prejudice also plays a role as indicated by social science experiments which have sent out job applications with identical qualifications but with names associated with Black (ADOS) Americans and white Americans and found the former to receive a less favourable response.

The fact that prejudice and structural disadvantage continues to exist does not mean that descending into self-victimisation and resentment of others is a good solution to it. Surely it is ideal to teach children to be strong and resilient in the face of adversity and also to advocate for social policies and norms that reduce class or demographic-based adversity? We will never be able to make life entirely ‘fair’ for every individual because much individual variation in aptitude exists. I will never be a mathematician or a ballerina. Is it ‘fair’ that my generally serviceable brain becomes paralysed in the face of maths or that I regularly trip over my own feet? Maybe not, but it is unclear how this could redressed. I just have to accept reality and do something else with my life. But if someone had the aptitude and was prevented from being a mathematician because of their sex or a ballet dancer because of their class or race, this is something we, as a society, should surely seek to redress.

When arguing about this in the past in the context of race-based disadvantage, I have semi-facetiously suggested that we might do best to apply the thinking of Shelby Steele to our individual advancement and that of Cornel West to our stances on society. Both of these black intellectuals agree that racism continues to exist and is morally wrong, but while Steele sees the solution to this as black individuals prioritising individual agency, responsibility, education and hard work, West sees it as a universal responsibility to create systems that do not discriminate by class or race and prioritise the needs of the disadvantaged. Both men place a significant focus on the importance of dignity and moral development, but their ethos would seem to be fundamentally opposed. Nevertheless, Steele’s emphasis on agency and dignity is psychologically strengthening when directed inward, while West’s emphasis on justice and social obligation is morally strengthening when directed outward. Even if one disagrees with one or both of these specific thinkers strongly, I’d suggest that when teaching our children about fairness, this should include an understanding of what is owed to oneself and what is owed to society.

Ultimately, as parents, don’t we all want our children to grow up to be confident and resilient, to take responsibility for themselves and to have the capacity to ‘just get on with it’ when life throws something difficult at them, rather than dissolving into a puddle of resentment and self-pity? But don’t we also want them to be adults who can advocate for themselves and object to being treated unfairly rather than accepting that others have the right to treat them badly and they must resign themselves to this because that’s just how it is? Don’t we want them to be socially responsible adults who have an expectation that their political leaders and the systems of society will operate fairly and make this expectation clear to those who hope to be elected by them to positions of power, whether they are on the left or the right? Do we not want our children themselves, if they attain positions of power, to hold themselves to high expectations of the fair treatment of others? I think that most of us, whether more conservative or progressive in our outlook do want this because human beings value fairness, and this goal need not be naive, idealistic or self-victimising.

I think we should teach children to pursue agency rather than grievance, while also teaching them to expect fairness from society and from themselves.

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Today, I came upon a six-part series by in which he argues that liberalism and evolutionary forces are in conflict. He says,

Modern liberal and feminist societies generate:

• very low marriage rates
• delayed motherhood
• widespread voluntary childlessness
• fragmented kin networks
• weak boundary maintenance
• identity structures built around autonomy rather than family
• economic incentives that compete with reproduction
• urban living conditions that suppress fertility

These are not moral failings. They are structural features of the system. But evolution does not evaluate intentions, it evaluates outcomes. When these outcomes persist, the demographic trajectory is simple:

Liberal societies shrink. And shrinking societies are replaced.

Replacement is a polite term for extinction.

In another installment, Spooner writes,

Moral progress and evolutionary progress are two entirely different things.
They do not track each other. In fact, they often move in opposite directions.

A culture can become kinder and still collapse.
A society can become freer and still disappear.
A civilization can become more humane while dismantling the machinery that allowed it to survive in the first place.

Evolution is not a moral project.

It does not reward virtue.
It does not honor fairness.
It does not care if people are happy, equal, fulfilled, or expressive.

To evolution, the only metric is persistence.

And this is where the modern West walks blindfolded toward a cliff.

And,

David Hume gave the world a principle that prevents catastrophic confusion.

“You cannot derive an ought from an is.”

Evolution defines what is selected, not what ought to be selected. Nature tells us what survives, not what should survive.

This distinction is the firewall between science and ideology.

I feel a need to challenge some of this!

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Science tells us what ‘is’ certainly but there are very many things that ‘are’ and what we decide to do in relation to them will depend on our principles, values, goals and the kind of society we want to live in. It will depend on our ideology. It is no less ideological, for example, to decide to limit freedom and enforce conservative values in an attempt to boost the birthrate and reduce the need for immigration from more fecund cultures than to decide not to do that and prioritise individual liberty for the humans already living in the society and seek other means of increasing the birthrate or accept that immigration (or robots?) will be necessary.

Spooner himself comes dangerously close to confusing his ‘is’ with his ‘ought’ when he seems to assume that liberals not seriously considering the ‘ought’ of abandoning liberal principles and taking people’s (women’s) reproductive freedom away have simply not appreciated the ‘is’ of a declining birthrate and potential consequences thereof. It is quite possible that they have but that they do not see entirely abandoning the liberal foundations of Western Civilisation as a workable solution to this. They may even see this as giving up on our culture without a fight and be inclined to suggest that those who regard living in a society which denies such freedoms and enforces such values with equanimity might want to go and live in one rather than destroying the culture of Western liberal democracies.

There is much to be said on this subject but, today, I will just address the rather strong, emotive claims made in the post I encountered today:

It is true that nothing but reproductive success matters to biological fitness. Evolutionary forces do not care if any individual is happy, good, free, loved, intellectually fulfilled or productive of anything else. An individual who lived 25 years experiencing nothing but misery and suffering and causing nothing but misery and suffering to others but produced 10 children would be a resounding success in evolutionary terms. One who lived 100 happy, joyful years bringing love and joy to others while discovering the cure to multiple fatal diseases, writing great literature and composing great music but had no children would be an utter evolutionary failure.

If we evaluate what really matters by whether it serves the purposes of evolution, we must support endeavours that produce more of the former kind of people and penalise the latter.

This is a good reason not to evaluate what really matters by whether it serves the purposes of evolution.

The fact that we are biological organisms who replicate by sexual reproduction does not mean that we should structure our lives, meaning and purpose around this fact.

The kind of biological organism we are is a big-brained ape who can understand its own nature and much of the world it lives in. It can think abstractly and theorise and is capable of complex and powerful attachments and emotions and moral reasoning. It can discover and invent groundbreaking things and create great art and form complex societies and devise ways to enhance the thriving and minimise the suffering of the apes who live in them.

These are biological facts about us just as much as our nature as a sexually reproducing species is.

One can deny either aspect of human nature, I suppose, but both remain true. We know both that we are sexually-reproducing mammals and that the kind of sexually-reproducing mammal we are is a complex human capable of multiple forms of greatness, discovery, purpose, connection, fulfilment, compassion and love.

We could prioritise our nature as sexually-reproducing biological organisms and make that everything that matters in theory. In practice, we cannot because of the kind of organism we are. We are humans. Much more than this matters to us. All of us. Not just liberals. There has not been a society of humans yet that did not think love, connection, happiness, morality, discovery, art, purpose, reputation and so much more matter. Liberalism is just the system which enables us to think freely about these and value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Denying this aspect of our humanity is to be just as fundamentally wrong about the biological reality of humans as denying that we perpetuate our species via sexual reproduction.

Is it possible that the sheer complexity of our brains and the purposes, meanings and life goals we set for ourselves as individuals makes enough of us deprioritise reproduction that our species goes extinct? Possible? Yes. The birth rate is dropping worldwide and not most dramatically in liberal societies. Likely? No. In theory, though, this could happen because we are not mindlessly driven by the biological imperative in the same way other animals are. We could go extinct. This feels very sad to us because we are not yet extinct and so we still exist and have brains that can theorise about this hypothetical scenario and have feelings about it. If we actually became extinct, nobody would exist to recognise it or feel anything about it so it wouldn’t matter very much.

We could consider the large and complex brains of humans a design flaw on the part of evolution that works against its primary aim of getting us to procreate. To remedy this, evolution would need to favour the genes of the stupid, incurious, uncreative and amoral and those inclined to value safety over freedom and collectivism over individualism. Selecting for these could, over a long enough period of time, devolve our species into some form of ape which lacked our higher cognition, curiosity and capability for complex attachments and was driven much more by a simple drive to survive and procreate. That could also happen. Either way, humans would have ceased to exist.

Spooner’s argument, of course, is not that evolution should solve this problem for us but that Western societies should consider changing their culture to make humans less free to embrace so many aspects of their humanity. In this way, we could prevent liberal societies from being replaced by other cultures and consequently going extinct. The same reasoning applies, however. If, in order to save liberal Western democracies from being taken over by other cultures, we have to change them from being liberal democracies and make them more closely resemble the cultures we are supposedly saving them from, how can we be said to have saved them? Can we prevent ourselves from obliviously “walking off a cliff” by instead hurling ourselves voluntarily over it?

This argument commits an abuse of evolutionary principles in the service of a culturally and socially conservative (ideological) stance. Few people genuinely take the position that we must be driven by the biological imperative and especially not social conservatives who would frown upon the ‘harem’ set up that would maximise male biological fitness and the serial monogamy that would maximise female biological fitness. Those few who genuinely think we do and that to do otherwise is a denial of science and betrayal of our nature are themselves in denial of the complexities of human nature. They are just as wrong-headed as queer theorists who claim that our belief that we are a dimorphic sexually-reproducing species is a social construct that we can overcome by theorising otherwise.

There is no need for any of this if one really just wants to make a case that it would be good if we increased the birth rate to replacement levels. This can be done while remaining firmly rooted in material reality. The pronatalist position does not actually require quasi-mystical submission to “the biological imperative.” Instead, we can think about ways to make parenthood easier, more affordable and more attractive to more people living within our cultural reality. No denial of human nature or concealment of ideological commitments under the guise of ‘science’ is needed.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6000 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Today, I came upon a six-part series by in which he argues that liberalism and evolutionary forces are in conflict. He says,

Modern liberal and feminist societies…

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(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6000 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.

This comment was made to me by one of my readers who has always expressed her commitment to liberalism very strongly. She is a staunch defender of individual liberty. She does, however, tend to disapprove of me criticising other people’s deeply held beliefs. She is not alone on this. At least once a month, I am asked why, if I am such a strong defender of freedom of belief, I cannot just leave other people’s beliefs alone. I think this misses a core feature of liberalism.

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Liberalism is, at root, the commitment to letting people believe, speak and live as they see fit provided this does no material harm to anybody else nor denies them the same freedoms. It is a commitment to individual liberty which requires allowing other people to be wrong.

This can lead some people to believe that a commitment to liberalism is a commitment to moral or epistemological relativism - everybody having their own factual truths and ethical principles which must all be respected as equally valid. This is false. One can be a relativist and uphold the central liberal principle of leaving other people alone unless they are harming anyone or imposing their values on them, but relativism is not part of the liberal philosophical tradition.

Liberalism, emerging from the Enlightenment, is rooted in a tradition that values evidence, reason and robust debate. To see this clearly, it helps to separate two core commitments within liberal philosophy:

1) The right to believe, speak and live as one sees fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedom.

2) The idea that beliefs matter, that some ideas are better than others and that we can determine which these are through a marketplace of ideas in which bad ideas can be beaten by better ones.

These are not at all incompatible. They are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. This is, arguably, set out most clearly by John Stuart Mill in Chapter Two of On Liberty. Mill first argues that any attempts to control the expression of ideas is an assault on individual liberty:

I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

He then explains why this matters for truth:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Liberalism protects the expression of even widely rejected ideas not only as a matter of liberty, but because without this protection, truth and falsity are decided by whichever orthodoxy is dominant at the time. Individuals are denied the opportunity to evaluate ideas for themselves, tested against their strongest opposition.

If an idea is wrong, allowing it to be expressed and challenged publicly is the best way to demonstrate that it is wrong. If it is suppressed, all that is established is that those in power dislike it. This can increase its appeal, particularly when those in power are unpopular or distrusted by large swathes of the population. Driven underground, the ideas are insulated from criticism and grow more extreme in unchallenged communities. This is a breeding ground for bad ideas.

If an idea widely held to be wrong is actually correct, enabling people to argue for it publicly and address criticisms of it publicly is the best way for it to be shown to be correct. Allowing people to be wrong is a precondition for discovering what is true.

For this reason, we should be wary of any authority or movement that seeks to shield its ideas from criticism. Either it lacks confidence that its ideas can withstand scrutiny, or it lacks respect for individuals’ capacity to judge for themselves.

These are foundational principles of the liberal philosophical tradition and moral or epistemological relativism play no part in them. If beliefs did not matter and truth were relative, we would lose a primary liberal reason to defend free speech or open debate. Liberalism works because it combines individual liberty with a commitment to truth-seeking.

The claim that liberalism entails relativism is often made by authoritarians who cannot understand how one might believe some ideas are bad without seeking to ban them. If we cannot persuade them of the intrinsic value of liberty, we may at least persuade them that suppressing ideas is unlikely to eliminate them and likely to strengthen them.

More interesting, however, is the opposite mistake. Some anti-authoritarians, deeply committed to individual liberty, conclude that liberalism requires refraining from criticising others’ beliefs altogether. They believe that liberalism should embrace relativism and that not doing so is intolerant and thus illiberal. They feel that, unless somebody is imposing their views on other people, it is presumptuous, interfering or even authoritarian to tell someone we think their belief is false. This is claimed to be at odds with the ‘live and let live’ ethos of liberalism and is often criticised in a tone of “Can’t we all just get along?”

Where drives this stance? In some cases, it reflects a genuinely relativist position: the belief that objective truth either does not exist or cannot be known. This is a Counter-Enlightenment stance held by a tiny subset of liberals, interestingly most commonly found among libertarians. (Those who want to see what a libertarian postmodernist looks like might be interested in my friendly conversation with Thaddeus Russell).

More commonly, in my observation, disapproval of criticising others’ sincerely held beliefs comes from an epistemologically woolly humanitarian stance underlain by what Moral Foundations Theory identifies as the ‘care/harm’ foundation. This moral driver is more pronounced in progressives and works by considering, first and foremost, what makes people feel included, cared about and protected from hurt. While this can manifest in authoritarian ways, such as the censoriousness of the Critical Social Justice movement, it can also exist in the non-authoritarian way of simply believing that it is unkind or intrusive to criticise other people’s beliefs and kind and considerate to respect them.

Jonathan Rauch offers a useful taxonomy of principles for discerning what is true which is relevant here:

• The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.

• The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect.

• The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.

• The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.

• The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

The Simple Egalitarian Principle combined with the Humanitarian Principle is, I believe, what best explains most incidences of anti-authoritarians expressing disapproval of liberals (or anyone) criticising the sincerely held beliefs of other people. The Simple Egalitarian Principle constitutes the epistemological base but the moral driver for taking that stance is the Humanitarian Principle to cause no hurt. In Rauch’s view, the humanitarian principle can work in tandem with any of the other principles except the liberal one to establish truth via public criticism. Truth-seeking is inevitably painful. It is also, however, important.

Why is the truth important? Consider the statement which inspired me to write this piece. “I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.” I would suggest this relies upon inherently atheistic assumptions. Religions make claims not only about how we should live in this life and treat other people but also about how to achieve eternal salvation and avoid eternal torment. That does seem like a rather important thing not to be wrong about! If you understand that someone might carefully research a pension plan to ensure that their final years are comfortable, you should understand why they’d pay at least as much attention to their eternity. People who don’t think it matters whether the claims of any religion are true or not tend not to believe that any religions are true.

Religious believers frequently think other people’s religious beliefs matter. For example, a Christian might answer my reader’s question with, “Because Christ is the way to salvation.” It would not be reasonable to expect someone who believes there is one path to salvation and cares about their fellow humans to accept that it does not matter if they take it or not. We just require them not to badger them about it and to leave them alone if asked to do so. Likewise some atheists believe not only that the claims of religion are false and that this matters but that many religious beliefs are harmful and that the world would be a better place if people stopped believing they know what the divine creator of it wanted. (I am one of these.)

Both of these sets of people are likely to object to the claim that it should not matter what other people believe provided they do not impose it on anybody else and respond that caring about this is part of caring about other people. They would likely raise the issue of harm that can result from holding false beliefs. This applies much more broadly than religion and has recently most prominently been argued in relation to the concept of gender identity, antisemitic conspiracy theories and science-denialism in the realm of health.

It can be convincingly argued that people believing things that aren’t true is harmful to society which functions better and more ethically when more people’s beliefs correspond with reality. False beliefs frequently result in misguided actions that harm the actor and potentially others too. Unchallenged false beliefs can be taken at face value by others who are then wronged by having been misled. Also, people holding false beliefs in a non-authoritarian, harmless way still contribute to normalising those beliefs and making them more popular, increasing the number of people who will act on them in authoritarian and harmful ways.

Because the central tenet of liberalism is that only the prevention of harm to others justifies coercion, it has been essential to maintain a very high bar for what constitutes harm and keep it to that which is both material and direct. It cannot include the expression of subversive and/or false beliefs even when the vast majority of people would agree that their spread is being/would be detrimental to society and human wellbeing. As discussed above, this not only denies individual liberty but is unlikely to effectively reduce the popularity of the ideas. Also, occasionally, the purveyors of ideas considered subversive are right. The way to effectively demonstrate that this is not the case and defeat the bad ideas is to facilitate a culture which is positive towards robust and vigorous public criticism of all by all.

However, I would suggest that we don’t even need the justification of preventing potential harm or the pragmatic argument that knowing what is true enables effective action to defend criticising the deeply held beliefs of others. It is legitimate to care about truth for its own sake. It is legitimate to care about how we determine what is true, put energies into discovering what is true, remain committed to testing what we believe to be true and to make sound, reasoned and evidenced arguments for what we believe to be true and address criticisms and counterviews. It is legitimate to enjoy this. For many, the pursuit of truth is not merely instrumental but is a value in itself, and often a source of intellectual pleasure. Arguing, testing ideas, refining beliefs are not experienced as aggression, but as highly enjoyable and, yes, respectful engagement.

I have argued before against the belief that it is respectful and considerate to validate everybody else’s beliefs and feelings and refrain from pointing out when you think they are wrong or unwarranted. This, to me, feels very much like humouring people and to be condescending and disrespectful. I would much prefer people to assume me to be someone who cares about what is true and, if I am wrong about something, to be given the opportunity to stop being wrong.

It is, nevertheless, clearly true that many people do not enjoy engaging in arguments about their own beliefs or anybody else’s. They may be less interested in addressing questions of truth, more conflict-averse, or simply occupied with other priorities. Far from experiencing argument as enjoyable, they may experience it as intrusive or hostile. They would prefer to go through their lives not questioning anybody else’s deeply held beliefs or defending their own. This is a perfectly valid preference. It seems likely that both dispositions are part of human variation and consequently that nobody is likely to be convinced that they should enjoy engaging in vigorous debate if, in fact, they do not or that they should not enjoy this if, in fact, they do.

It is probably highly beneficial that we always have some people who want to argue stridently about matters of truth and ethics and more people who wish to do no such thing. If everybody was a dedicated arguer, daily life could become quite exhausting. If nobody was, we’d never advance any ideas or uncover any errors. How do we manage this? The simple solution would seem to be for those who want to discuss and debate ideas to do with each other and leave everybody who does not wish to do this alone. Alternatively, those of us who who wish to make arguments can do so in writing and publish essays which other people can comment on or respond to or simply ignore.

The solution is: Argumentation with consent.

A liberal society protects not only the right to express and challenge ideas, but the right to decline engagement. Written into the concept of “the marketplace of ideas” is that it is not compulsory. You may enter the market. You may leave it. You may stay at home and read a good novel or go for a walk and smell the flowers. Nobody can force you to go to the market and display your wares or buy anybody else’s. Other people, however, must remain free to do so in your absence. As I have argued before,

There are some who will not accept other people’s right to decline to argue with them or to disclose their stance on any issue or even consider the possibility that they may not have a stance. They will accuse others of being evasive and hiding their true position which is assumed to be problematic. They may insist that not taking a stance on their particular pet issue is a dereliction of duty or even that ‘Silence is violence.” Silence, however, is not violence and such people are illiberal ideologues who are failing to appreciate the principle of free speech which includes the freedom to remain silent and to ignore the speech of others.

There are also the ‘debate me, bro’ types who erroneously think that if anybody expresses a belief, they then have the responsibility to defend it with evidence and argument. This is not the case. The burden of proof only applies if you are trying to prove something in a debate situation. If you are not, you can just mention that you believe something and leave it there. The fact that you have mentioned being, say, a Christian or an atheist does not commit you to proving that God does or does not exist to anybody else. If anyone asks you to do so, you can say, “But I don’t care whether you believe me or not” and go away.

We must protect the right of people who do not want to argue not to have to do so and also make this a perfectly socially acceptable stance to take and not badger them into doing anything they don’t want to do. All we can ask of anti-authoritarians who do not want to engage in a debate on any issue is that they do not stand in the way of others who do. Provided those of us who do consider truth-seeking important and who do find argument intellectually stimulating are doing this with others who have consented to join in collaborative truth-seeking and productive debate, this is a perfectly liberal activity. In fact, liberalism exists precisely to make this possible.

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I very much enjoyed speaking to Eric. As he wrote,

”At its core, this is a conversation about intellectual humility. About the discipline of staying curious even when an answer feels obvious. And about the responsibility to keep testing ideas, especially the ones we most want to be true.

Topics Covered

• How ideas shift from open inquiry to unquestioned belief

• The role of language in shaping perception and moral judgment

• Why good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes

• The difference between disagreement and harm

• How moral certainty can suppress curiosity

• The psychological comfort of belonging to a shared ideology

• Why institutions sometimes protect beliefs instead of testing them

• The tension between social justice goals and open debate

• How identity can become fused with ideology

• The importance of intellectual humility in public discourse

• Why skepticism is a form of care, not hostility

• The risk of treating complex problems as morally simple

• How to create cultures that encourage disagreement without hostility”

Katherine had argued that truly knowing another person requires physical proximity, shared space, eye contact, spontaneous conversation, and that online connection can be deceptive in creating an illusion of friendship and community.

I disagreed. I think, for some of us, writing is the medium in which we are most precise, most open, and most ourselves. In face-to-face interactions, a great deal of attention gets taken up by social niceties and trying to read tone, facial expression, body language and social cues, which can obscure rather than clarify what someone actually thinks.

We got together to see if we really did have a fundamental disagreement here or if we could find common ground. We found we had shared concerns about people replacing physical communities with virtual ones and agreed that a meeting of minds can take place online and lead to genuine connection.

We briefly addressed a question about freedom of speech and we developed another disagreement over the subject of tea. (I suspect the thumbnail image selected is from that part of the conversation due to the fanatical gleam in my eye).

(Audio version here)

The joining of Substack by self-proclaimed misogynist, Andrew Tate, has caused something of a furore on the platform. My own readers, who tend to be staunch defenders of free speech, are divided on the ethics of this. The majority take the view that, while Tate is a deeply unpleasant character with abhorrent views, Substack must stand by its commitment to free speech and only ban people from the platform if they incite violence on it. They advocate blocking, criticising or mocking him.

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There have been a few people who appear to believe that Tate does actually have worthwhile things to say.

However, I would suggest that we can acknowledge the problem with discourses that demonise men and pathologise masculinity without endorsing Andrew Tate whose relation to such rhetoric appears to mostly be to confirm and support it. There are, in fact, many influencers who promote fitness, discipline, and psychological resilience in ways that offer a positive and aspirational model of masculinity without the misogyny or criminality. There are certainly grounds to advocate for these kinds of models having a more mainstream presence for boys and young men than they currently do and for rhetoric which problematises masculinity to be challenged in the mainstream. Nevertheless, as Brian himself concedes, Tate’s ultimate vision is not a solution but a path to misery even if some of the steps along the way appear superficially constructive.

Others have resorted to ‘whataboutism’ to offer some defence to Tate via deflection. These are people who, while unwilling to defend Tate himself, are keen to argue that the values associated with the left pose a greater threat to women than anything he represents.

This does not contribute anything worthwhile to discussions of whether Andrew Tate should be banned from Substack. It does, however, indicate the kind of challenges Substack would face if it did, particularly the ease with which any attempt at content moderation can become entangled in broader ideological disputes about fairness, political bias, and double standards.

Much of the loudest opposition to Tate on Substack has involved invoking the concept of a ‘safe space.’ This is a move unlikely to garner much sympathy from defenders of free speech because it is closely associated with the identitarian left and has commonly been used to exclude dissenters from their own ideas including mainstream conservatives and gender critical feminists.

Some of the people in my network, however, without embracing ‘safe space’ rhetoric, are inclined to think that tolerating the presence of Andrew Tate on Substack really goes beyond what can expected of a commitment to free speech. His views on women, they argue, are straightforwardly hateful and have no merit at all. He is not known for making arguments that could be addressed but provocative statements intended to shock so there is little hope of a productive exchange of ideas with him. They also point to the seriousness of the allegations surrounding him: charges of sex trafficking, accusations of rape, violence, and exploitation, and a public record of statements that appear to endorse or trivialise violence against women, including suggesting that women bear some responsibility for sexual assault. While he may not be known to have directly incited specific acts of violence, they argue that his broader persona and messaging function as a form of implicit incitement.

What has received far less attention is what banning Andrew Tate from Substack would entail in practice and what it would actually achieve.

Substack’s current policy is to remove users only for direct incitement to violence. In practice, this amounts to a largely “hands-off” approach, leaving users to curate their own feed through subscriptions and blocking. If Substack were to change its policy in order to ban Tate for his aggressively misogynistic views, it would face a choice between two broad approaches. It could adopt a principle that bans sex-based hatred consistently across the board, or it could attempt to apply such a rule selectively and target misogyny in particular.

Substack could, for example, introduce a policy prohibiting the expression of hatred or contempt toward any demographic group including aggressive rhetoric, claims of inferiority, or arguments that such groups should be excluded from positions of influence. A consistent rule like this would not only remove figures like Tate, but also a significant amount of rhetoric that is currently tolerated and even popular on the platform. It would, for example, make misogyny a bannable offence but also misandry, and would likely result in the removal of many well-subscribed feminist accounts.

Misandry is an issue feminists have addressed at length and their defence of it parallels that made by Critical Social Justice ‘anti-racist’ activists. It holds that power is concentrated in the hands of men or white people and for any prejudice to be real and meaningful on a systemic level, it has to be supported by systems of power. Therefore, only white people can be racist and misandry is either not real or not an ethical problem. Expressing hatred and contempt for the oppressor class is a valid and justifiable form of political expression within this political worldview.

Some feminists would object here and point out that it is not simply about systems of cultural power but real, material violence. Men have a greater capacity for it, a greater likelihood of engaging in it and when they do, women are particularly vulnerable to it. Misogyny is therefore much more likely to result in real physical damage to female humans than misandry is to do any physical harm to male ones. This is true. However, Substack is a platform for expressing ideas, not blows, and when it comes to verbal acuity, women have a statistical advantage. We can hold our own.

The strongest objection to this is that ideas do not exist in a vacuum. They influence behaviours in the real, material world. Certainly. If we accept that censoring hostile and radical ideas is an effective way to make them go away - I do not - and that substack has a social responsibility to play its part in this, it would need to call upon empirical research into which ideas are radicalising people into hateful, contemptuous stances on great swathes of the population. It is not at all clear that this is all coming from far-right sources, nor that young men are taking on more radically hostile views than young women or that the rise of a misogynistic manosphere can be understood to be inspired entirely by right-wing influences and not at all by the rise and social prestige of misandrist strains of feminism.

In short, if Substack were to enact a general policy against hate speech applied consistently across groups, it would not simply remove figures like Andrew Tate, who add little of value to political discourse, but also a great deal of substantive and provocative political expression. It would amount to a form of “tone policing” that excludes many common and widely accepted forms of political argument on both the left and the right—but particularly, I would argue, on the left, where the ethos of “speaking truth to power” often involves ‘taking the gloves off ‘ and engaging in sharp, generalised, and deliberately provocative claims.

Some would welcome this. I share the concern that the temperature of public discourse is often far too high, and that a return to more measured, thoughtful, and civil exchange would be desirable. In practice, however, such a policy would likely rebrand Substack as a platform for polite but largely ineffective centrism and diminish its appeal both to progressives and to those who value free speech, viewpoint diversity, and the exchange of robust, unfiltered arguments.

If, instead, Substack were to prohibit hateful speech only when directed at minority groups and women, it would be taking a clear political position on how power and language operate in society. It would be implicitly endorsing the view that we live in a society structured by white supremacist and patriarchal power, and that it has a responsibility to intervene in discourse accordingly. Any claim to be non-partisan or committed to free expression would quickly become untenable, as critics asked why some ideologies were excluded while others were not—why Nazis but not communists, misogynists but not misandrists. It would, as many users have suggested, come to resemble a long-form version of BlueSky which is hardly a model for an open pluralistic platform.

Once a platform begins moderating speech on the basis of content rather than direct incitement to violence, it enters an inherently subjective moral terrain. It must then justify which ideas are “acceptably” horrible and which are unacceptably so. This requires increasingly complex rules of moderation, heightening the risk of political and cultural bias. It also becomes difficult to prevent the boundaries of allowable speech from steadily contracting.

If Substack justified banning ideas on the basis that they are simply too objectionable, it would then have to contend with the implication that it implicitly endorses those that remain. It would voluntarily abandon the principled defence of free speech as a system in which ideas compete and bad ones can be challenged and defeated as the basis for which it declines to moderate content. This gives activists, fuelled by moral outrage, ammunition to make endless demands using the precedent of already banned ideas, and defences against that will necessarily be subjective and give the appearance of ad hoc rationalisations.

A far stronger and more ethically consistent position is to prohibit only direct incitement to violence, and to trust users to decide for themselves whether they wish to block those expressing objectionable ideas or to engage with them. This also, I would argue, respects the judgement and agency of users of the platform, many of whom (like me) have accounts dedicated to addressing bad and illiberal ideas and would resent the paternalistic attitude inherent in being kept ‘safe’ from them.

This would be a bad move for Substack, and therefore a bad move for its users. For us.

On a broader societal level, those of us who claim to hold liberal principles and to believe in the marketplace of ideas should resist attempts to turn Substack into a “safe space” whether in general or from any particular political standpoint. The platform’s founders have expressed a commitment to freedom of speech. We should both support them in that commitment and hold them to it.

The belief that bad ideas can be made to disappear by censoring them seems to make intuitive sense to our species, but history shows it to be profoundly mistaken. We are a deeply disagreeable species and will always be generating conflicting ideas, buying into them and trying to sell each other on them. As I have argued before, “The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it.” Ideas do not disappear when they are excluded from mainstream spaces. Instead alternative marketplaces of ideas form to accommodate them but they risk then being characterised by limited ‘anti-establishment’ stances and consequently lack sufficient productive conflict with counterviews. Some of these then form “black markets” of ideas where the most extreme views become more concentrated and twisted, feeding and building upon themselves due to absence of challenge and internal competition to stand out by becoming more radical than everybody else.

The manosphere is a clear example of this dynamic. Its appeal to adolescent boys is not unrelated to the fact that many of its ideas have been pushed out of more mainstream discourse, acquiring a kind of transgressive allure in the process. Those of us who wish to draw boys away from it would be wise not to assist it in presenting itself as a space for outcasts and rebels against the norm. Instead, we’d do best by showing it to be rather ridiculous and pathetic in comparison to other platforms that celebrate healthy, unashamed masculinity of the kind that is genuinely affirming to ambitious and energetic young men and is also attractive to psychologically healthy young women!

Substack is an excellent place to do some of this. It is not the marketplace of ideas but it is a marketplace of ideas and its expansion is pushing it well and truly into the mainstream. It is in all our interests to keep it that way. That requires maintaining it as a space which is genuinely open to all ideas being able to test themselves here. Unlike more reactive forms of social media, where engagement is brief and often aimed more at sloganeering and signalling one’s allegiance to tribe, Substack is populated by people who like to read widely, think carefully and engage substantively. This can take the form of rigorous analysis of ideas, grounded cultural commentary, or clever and vicious satire that punctures the pretensions of illiberal ideologies. All of these are effective ways of addressing rhetoric of the kind associated with Andrew Tate. The last thing we should do is get in the way of that happening. He’s on our turf now. We can choose to block and ignore him and his ilk or we can meet them there.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6000 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

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(Audio version here)

It is common, in political debates, to hear people respond “Nobody is saying that!” This can be quite baffling because it is so often said in response to someone addressing something that people are, quite clearly, saying. What it usually means is something more like: “None of the people in my group whom I approve of are saying that, and I feel like you are attacking my group.”

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Most recently, I saw a man claim that nobody is saying it is a moral problem when women do not have children until their thirties to a woman responding to precisely that discourse. I’ve seen people insist that ‘nobody is saying all white people are racist’ to people objecting to diversity training explicitly based on the thesis of Robin DiAngelo that all white people are racist. I’ve had gender critical feminists insist that “nobody is saying that men should not be allowed to wear dresses’ even though I was clearly responding to a deluge of people saying precisely that.

This is, I suspect, another manifestation of a broader problem: people speaking into tribal narratives, vibes, and themes rather than addressing specific arguments and principles. It is an attempt to reclaim the narrative from the more extreme or indefensible views within one’s own side and towards a more reasonable version. In effect, “Nobody is saying that” means “Don’t look at those people who are saying that. Look at me saying this more reasonable thing.”

Sometimes this is a conscious rhetorical move—a version of the motte and bailey, where a more radical claim retreats to a more defensible one when challenged. More often, I think, it reflects a discomfort with the existence of those more extreme views, combined with a reluctance to acknowledge them openly. It is easier to minimise or deflect than to say, “Yes, some people who broadly share my values do say that, and they are wrong.”

Another variation of this is “That’s not the point” or “You are missing the point” when someone is clearly addressing a specific point that they themselves have raised and set out clearly. I have typically responded to people doing this in the comments of one of my pieces or threads that I am the person who wrote it and consequently, I know what the point of it was. If they want to raise a different point, they should make that clear or perhaps even write their own piece or start a separate thread.

What “That’s not the point!” often means is: “I don’t want you to focus on that point. It is weak, inconvenient, or difficult to defend. I would prefer to move the discussion onto stronger ground.” This, again, is much easier than saying the honest thing, “Yes, that argument does not really work even on its own terms. We’d be better off abandoning it.”

At root, this is an attempt to minimise or gloss over the most extreme or indefensible views on one’s own side and, rather than correctly directing one’s annoyance at the members of one’s own tribe who are creating them, instead aiming them at the people noticing them. This is, I think, a very strong tribal instinct.

This became very clear to me when I was addressing problems with Critical Social Justice (woke) scholarship in accusations of ‘nutpicking’ that work in the same way. I was frequently told that I was unfairly selecting only irrational and illiberal examples to criticise rather than better scholarship. But my focus on those examples was deliberate. I think irrationalism and illiberalism are the problem. I do not criticise good, rigorous work addressing racism or sexism because I think it is good. I support it.

The same pattern appears on the right. When I criticise ethnonationalists or Christian nationalists, I am sometimes asked why I pick on the extreme positions and do not instead address more thoughtful arguments about cultural compatibility or the challenges posed by illiberal interpretations of Islam. The answer is the same: I think those more principled, well-reasoned and evidenced arguments are sound. Why would I criticise them?

In both cases, the assumption is that criticism of the worst arguments on one side must be an attempt to claim they represent the entire group and thus discredit it. That assumption itself is a projection of tribal thinking. If one’s own critique of one’s most illiberal and irrational political opponents genuinely is nutpicking rather than a good faith engagement with specific bad ideas, it is natural to assume that anybody criticising any element of one’s own side must be doing the same.

Ultimately, all of these responses reflect a commitment to tribal narratives over engaging with specific arguments and consistent principles. It is not necessarily that people doing this secretly agree with illiberal or irrational ideas on their own side or don’t see the problem with them, but that their understanding of solidarity and effective organised action requires not drawing attention to them and instead minimising them while pointing out the illiberal and irrational ideas on the other side.

I believe this attitude to be both very natural and a fatal mistake. When people prioritise defending their side’s overall narrative, they become less willing to acknowledge its weaknesses and more inclined to attack those who do. The result is increased polarisation. Each side constructs its own narrative out of its strongest arguments while constructing a counter-narrative of their opponents out of their weakest arguments. Over time, this makes it harder to see one another clearly at all and self-correction becomes all but impossible. This tribalistic tendency may have served us well in some other context in our evolutionary history, but it certainly does not do so now.

The same kind of confusion arises around spurious accusations of “straw manning.” It is correct to accuse someone of making a straw man when they misrepresent a position in order to attack an easier target. But it is not a straw man to respond directly to an extreme, unreasonable, or unethical argument that someone has actually made. There is no obligation to improve a bad argument before criticising it.

The thing not to do when people are criticising the worst arguments made and least ethical stances taken by people on your own side is become angry with them for noticing that and accurately pointing out the problems with it and insist that they instead address your best and most defensible arguments.

Instead, go to the people on your own side making the extreme, ridiculous, fallacious, blatantly unethical or otherwise easily refuted arguments and say something like, “No. What are you doing? Stop that. This is not reasonable, principled and grounded in reality, is it? Come on, now. I share your overall aims and am sympathetic to your frustration and the sense of urgency that is making you want to go full ‘scorched earth’ here. But you’re turning a strong and principled position which can be convincing to ethical and reasonable people into one that is neither and won’t be.”

Ideally, say this privately if you can and try to help that individual who is going off the rails to get back on them again. If this is not a possibility or it fails, say it publicly and address the problems with the stance being taken by people on your own side in detail and with clarity and consistent principle. This is how political sides and movements self-correct and self-regulate and become the strongest, most ethical and most persuasive versions of themselves. This is always going to be more effective than ignoring internal problems and then getting angry with political opponents for noticing them.

If you find yourself getting angry and frustrated with someone for accurately criticising a position actually being taken by people on your own side, stop and ask yourself if you have ever acknowledged and addressed those problems yourself.

If you have, you are in a good position to say, “Yes, I agree with you that this stance is indefensible. It is one I do not hold and am actively countering. Can we now discuss the position I do hold and am setting out here? I’d be interested to know if you have objections to that.”

If you have not addressed these problems, your anger at your political opponent for observing one and accurately spelling out why it is a problem is misplaced. That was your job and if enough people on your side had done it, you could have fixed it by now and not have to be dealing with your political opponents doing it for you.

If we can resist this impulse to build narratives that function as public relations for our own side while casting our opponents in the worst possible light, we might have a chance. That would mean engaging in good faith with the best arguments from those with whom we disagree, as they really are, and addressing the worst arguments on our own side honestly and transparently in order to self-correct and become better. We might even create a political system in which both sides are incentivised to be honest, accountable, and consistently principled, rather than one in which the average reasonable, ethical person is left trying to work out which is the lesser of two evils.

We can but dream.

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