Liberalism is Not Wishy-Washy, Fence-Sitting Centrism

It is strong and consistent opposition to authoritarianism

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

Cathy Young

recently wrote an excellent piece on “How to Navigate Transgender Issues in the Trump Era”. Cathy argued for a ‘sane middle’ that rejected any bullying and dehumanising of trans people and discriminating against them in the military or controlling how they lived their lives while recognising the need for stringent safeguards on gender clinics and protections for women’s spaces and sports where biological sex matters. She called for open debate over dogma. I shared the piece and congratulated Cathy on it. One reader commented,

This is where Cathy is stuck between a rock and gaping chasm: their wish to “live as they want” as she puts it, impedes the ability for women and gay men to live as is their (our) hard-earned right. Need I remind anyone reading this, gender ideology is inherently non-consensual and forces people to use language that runs head on against reality.

Hmm! Does compelled speech seem particularly “sane middle”?

When the transgender movement has set colonised and reappropriated gay rights to the point where we've all been dragged into the quagmire of gender identity fiction; when we're outcast from our own social circles because we adhere to fundamentals of reality; how reasonable are we expected to respond?

Being constantly forced into preference falsification has resulted in gaping wounds of moral injury.

The well of charity, for many of us, has run dry.

This fascination with being middle-of-the-pack and “centrist” over every issue inherently causes people to trip over themselves in favour of playing into fiction.

Furthermore, every time we're “nice”, we're enabling this ideology and in many cases a fetish, whether the source be innate or social. Not affirming. Enabling.

This comment perfectly encapsulates a fundamental misconception of liberalism that I have been encountering increasingly frequently. Although Cathy is writing about the need for a ‘sane middle,’ what she is defending and what her critic is condemning is what I have described as the fundamental liberal principle “Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided it does no material harm to anybody else nor denies them the same freedoms.”

No belief, speech or way of living is “inherently” non-consensual or forces people to use language that goes against reality or against their own positions. People can really, really believe that everybody else must perceive reality the way they do and use language that affirms that, but they have to have institutional power to enforce this. The use and abuse of institutional power in a society is the legitimate business of members of that society while the beliefs, speech and lifestyle of other people are not.

We can test whether a belief is inherently non-consensual or whether consent is forced by institutional power quite easily. Imagine a situation where someone says, “I am a woman despite having been born with a penis” and you want to say, “No, you are not because ‘woman’ is a biological sex category defined by the reproductive system.” What happens if you try to say or type that? Do your mind, tongue or hands get possessed and you find the words, “Yes, you are a woman” coming out? Does your head explode? Do you get struck by lightning?” Clearly not. There’s nothing inherent about the beliefs that coerce minds or speech and, in fact, throughout history, people have been able to say that men and women are sex categories without being prevented from doing so or anything bad happening to them. Coercion is enabled to happen when the proponents of an idea gain institutional power and can start firing, arresting or cancelling people for not affirming it.

This has always been the case. Imagine someone says, “Christ is your saviour and the only way to Heaven” and I want to say, “I don’t believe in Christ or Heaven.” I am physically able to form those words and nothing bad happens to me for doing so. Yet, 500 years ago here in the UK, I’d have had to recant and pretend to believe that or be executed. What has changed in that time is the use of institutional power. Christians who believe that everybody must accept Christ as their saviour because otherwise they and anybody else they convince of this will be damned to eternal hell still exist, but the rights of others to be atheist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh etc. are protected by law, in institutions and largely accepted socially. There is nothing inherent to Christianity that enables it to be imposed on everybody else and we can know this because we live in a time and place where it isn’t. I have also lived in a time where nobody was coerced into pretending to believe in gender identity.

We need to do effective things to be living in such a time again and we are. In the UK, Gender Critical views have been upheld in a court of law as a protected philosophical position and we have seen the closure of ideologically captured gender clinics that were harming children and changes to rules about sports and prisons that were harming women. Challenging coerced beliefs and speech on an institutional level works while trying to coerce people to pretend to hold different beliefs just recreates the same problems from a different perspective. This remains the case even when one of those positions is almost certainly true and the other demonstrably false. I think Christianity goes against reality and Young Earth Creationism does so demonstrably. I think the world would be much better off without it. Yet I will not seek to impose my position on everybody else to try to prevent the harms done to people (again, often women and gay men) in the name of Christianity. People must be able to believe, speak and live according to their beliefs and we must prevent them from using those beliefs to do material harm to others or deny their freedoms.

This is liberalism and it is the role of liberalism to protect everybody from coerced beliefs and speech, including Christians and trans-identified people. The problem is that we, as a society, have not been upholding the principles of liberalism and that is what we need to remedy if we do not wish to be coerced into pretending to believe anything we don’t or penalised for not doing so. It would not have been ethical or productive to replace authoritarian Christianity with authoritarian atheism and it is not ethical or productive to replace authoritarian trans activism with authoritarian ‘anti-wokeness” or gender critical feminism.

When people try to address a problem of coerced beliefs and speech by neglecting the role that institutional power has to play in the coercion and instead going to “Nobody must be allowed to believe or express belief in these ideas that are currently being imposed on us”, they just seek to replace one authoritarian form of mind and mouth control with another. They might be able to do that if their ideas gain enough influence and power, but not only will this perpetuate the abuse of institutional power as a norm, but the people in power will almost certainly change and their complicity in enabling them to impose their ideas on everybody will come back to bite them.

Is this entirely satisfactory, though? Cathy’s critic goes on to say that every time “we” are “nice”, we are enabling this ideology. Is this not a reasonable point? People who want the concept of gender identity not to exist enable its existence by being nice to people who claim a gender identity different to their biological sex?

I understand the drive to eradicate beliefs that one thinks is harmful in all situations. I have felt this drive myself as part of the New Atheist movement. I continue to think religion is harmful and way more so to women, children and same sex attracted people than a belief in gender identity and if I were to try to urge people not to be complacent about or speak in ways that give credibility to anything, religion would still be my priority. However, having been part of a movement that did that for many years - picking up on people referring to "God" as though one is real and asking them to evidence this, imploring other atheists not to speak in ways that validated the concept of gods but use terms like 'mythological deity,' criticising atheists who treated religion with respect as 'faitheists' enabling a delusion - I have to say it wasn't helpful and only alienated people. What we really needed to do was work with religious believers who also upheld the values of secularism to oppose harm and denials of freedom being done in the name of religion. Activism that works by trying to change the way people think by changing the way they speak doesn't work. It just makes people stop talking to you when you really need them to talk to you to achieve anything.

Nevertheless, it could be a good argument for one anti-woke or gender critical activist to make to one another that if they want to eradicate the concept of gender identity, they should not be nice to people who claim to have one or use any language that could be seen to accept the concept of gender identity. However, people don’t have to be anti-woke or gender critical activists. Most people are not. I am neither. I am a liberal. I will find common ground with anybody who shares my aim to let people believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided they do no material harm to anybody else nor deny them the same freedoms. This means I share values with liberal trans people, liberal anti-wokeists and liberal gender criticals and am opposed to authoritarian trans activists, anti-wokeists and gender criticals.

Because I have been so critical of the authoritarian Critical Social Justice (woke) movement including authoritarian trans activism, there is a tendency for some among the anti-woke and gender criticals to treat me as though I am a malfunctioning anti-woke or gender critical activist who is not pursuing their goals doggedly enough when I am actually being a functioning liberal pursuing my own. Compare:

Primary anti-woke activist goal: Oppose anything woke.

Primary gender critical activist goal: Oppose the concept of gender.

Primary liberal activist goal: Oppose authoritarianism.

I have no “fascination with being middle-of-the-pack or ‘centrist’” but a strong commitment to being consistently liberal. Sometimes, to be consistently liberal, one has to push back hard at a rising authoritarianism on one side and then one is perceived as being on the other side. I have been pushing back at the authoritarianism of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement on the left for a decade now and this has caused people to see me as being on the right or as being defined by anti-wokeness or as being gender critical rather than a left-leaning, empiricist, rationalist, anti-authoritarian liberal even though I have made no secret of this. Often, to be consistently liberal, one has to push back at rising authoritarianisms on both sides and then one is perceived as being a wishy-washy, centrist fencesitter. I am still a left-leaning, empiricist, rationalist, anti-authoritarian liberal and still making no secret of this.

This misconception about the fundamental principles of liberalism typically arises in people who do not hold freedom-centred principles themselves and have difficulty conceiving that anybody else does. The fundamental (and, I believe, genuine) failure of the dogmatic, authoritarian mindset to comprehend “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms” is not only unethical, however. It is also counterproductive because most people are not dogmatic or authoritarian. Most people are not strongly principled liberals who look closely at all the major issues of our day and apply first principles to them either, I must concede. Nevertheless, people who are not deeply entrenched in any aspect of the Culture Wars and way too online do typically have a general sense of fair play, proportionality, a will to live and let live and a dislike of bullies. That is, most people are more liberally-minded than authoritarian-minded. (I have argued this in more detail here).

It took significant time for enough liberally-minded people to become convinced that the “woke” movement was authoritarian, unjust and disproportionate that public opinion shifted against it and it began to wane. It seems clear from polling surveys that illiberal, identitarian left-wing ideas were a significant factor in the shift away from the Democrats in the last election. It would be a huge mistake, I’d suggest, to believe that this means those swing voters are now in favour of illiberal, identitarian, right-wing ideas. Those of us who want to see ‘woke’ die would do well to influence the parties and movements we support to become more liberal and less identitarian if we do not want people who support us in that aim to swing back behind wokeness again. The gender critical movement, similarly, had an uphill start in trying to convince enough well-intentioned people who care about the rights and freedoms of everyone, but particularly minority groups, that the dominant form of trans activism was aggressive, abusive, authoritarian and was doing harm to women and children. They achieved this, I have argued, by focusing on the harms and denial of freedom of belief and speech being done by it. They gained the support of the liberally-minded and they will lose it again if they mistake this support for freedom of speech and opposition to harm and abusive behaviour for newly acquired gender critical activist aims and badger people to take an aggressive, abusive and authoritarian attitude towards trans people.

The authoritarian anti-woke and gender criticals will shoot themselves in the foot if they do not recognise how much of their support they owe to liberals opposing the same harmful authoritarianisms that they were because they were harmful and authoritarian and not because they have suddenly become anti-woke or gender critical activists. Strongly principled liberals won’t be bound by the activist aims of either group and will actively oppose them if they become harmful and authoritarian. This is not because we are wishy-washy, fence-sitting centrists who always want to find a middle ground and ‘both sides’ everything. We are not half-measure anti-woke or gender critical activists. We are full-measure liberals.

To be a principled liberal is not to take a weak position but a strong one that frequently finds us fighting many battles at the same time. When one is opposing authoritarianism coming from more than one angle, one frequently finds oneself in between two or more opposing dogmatic forces and believed by each of them to be on the other side. Alternatively, dogmatists on one side or the other may believe that we are there too because we have supported their freedom of belief and speech and supported them in opposing harmful authoritarianism, but believe we do not support them strongly enough because we oppose their harmful authoritarianism too. At the same time, we are typically trying to persuade the large number of people who are liberally-minded in that they value freedom and tolerance and oppose bullying, but do not dedicate much of their lives to evaluating the culture wars using the first principles of liberalism not to surge left or right depending on which side they see as more authoritarian at any time, but to oppose authoritarianism consistently.

Consistent, principled liberalism is not for the faint-hearted! It is not a weak position and it is often significantly harder, more complicated and more stressful than falling in line with a dogmatic, single-issue movement. Liberalism requires accepting that social reality is messy and that navigating it in an ethical and effective way that both protects freedom and prevents harm takes more than simply trying to blast all the ideas we don’t like out of existence, (which has also never worked in the history of humanity). What liberalism has in its favour is that it works. We need progressives to recognise that what has produced so much progress for women and racial, religious and sexual minorities is liberalism and conservatives to recognise, when speaking of conserving Western Civilisation, that the defining feature of this is liberalism.

There is nothing wishy-washy about that.