Hidden Agender

Gerard Casey

Description

In Hidden Agender, Gerard Casey develops a timely and provocative defence of free speech and toleration against the transgenderist ideology that has infiltrated so much of the media, the political establishment and the law.Opposing ideas, not individuals, Hidden Agender provides a compelling critique of the transgender ideologists and trans activists, and the new reactionary form of legal intolerance of our right to free thought and free speech.As a libertarian, Casey believes that we should be free to say and do whatever we wish provided that, in so doing, we do not perpetrate violence, or threaten to perpetrate violence, against the person or property of another. The fundamental objection is rather to individuals being forced, on pain of legal or social sanctions, to believe (or to pretend to believe) what to them is patently false, namely, that a man can become a woman or a woman a man, and to be legally obliged to treat those who claim to have transitioned from one sex to another as if they really had managed to do so.Drawing on extensive research, both scientific and anecdotal, Hidden Agender is a robust defence of free speech and tolerance against the combined forces of prejudice, wokeness and legal intimidation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Political correctness

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788360661
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hidden Agender
Transgenderism’s Struggle Against Reality
Gerard Casey




Published in 2020 by
Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter
EX5 5YX, United Kingdom
imprint-academic.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 Gerard Casey
The right of Gerard Casey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Imprint Academic or Andrews UK Limited.



Foreword
Hidden Agender is the third and final part of a research project that I began in 2017 in response to a challenge I felt obliged to meet. The first book to be published was ZAP , a defence of free speech and toleration, and an attack on the currently sacrosanct dogmas of diversity, inclusion and equality; the second was After #MeToo , a critique of radical feminism, focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the latent misandry of the #MeToo movement, and its implications, both social and legal, for relations between the sexes. All three books are, in their own ways, a defence of freedom against prejudice, social intolerance and legal intimidation.
Hidden Agender is not a book I ever enthusiastically desired to write. Having carried out extensive research and done some preliminary writing on the topic throughout 2018 and 2019, I spent the months of December 2019 through February 2020 in a more or less constant state of ‘Will I?, Won’t I?” The advice of those I took into my confidence was, for the most part, a set of variations on—‘Don’t do it!’, ‘Are you crazy?’, ‘Do you want to draw the wrath of the transactivist establishment on you?’, ‘It’s not worth the grief you’re sure to get.’ Many times I was inclined to take this advice, more especially as it coincided with my own not unreasonable fears, combined with my deep-seated inclination to avoid work if at all possible. My courage wasn’t exactly bolstered by witnessing the barrage of abuse that landed on the head of the normally PC-friendly J. K. Rowling in June 2020 for having the temerity to support a woman who was fired from her job for expressing ‘gender critical’ views on Twitter (‘gender critical’ meaning simply that she didn’t believe people can change their biological sex), and for Rowling’s objecting, humorously, to the bizarre expression people who menstruate instead of just women . No sooner had I overcome my innate pusillanimity and the depression of winter than the politically-induced panic surrounding the Covid-19 virus broke out in March 2020. I was so depressed (again) and angered by the political establishment’s rush to impose quasi-totalitarian restrictions on basic freedoms, and by its politically inept but economically effective destructive interference with people’s means of making a living, that I found it difficult to concentrate on anything as seemingly trivial and foolish as transgender ideology. Since you are reading these words, it is obvious that, despite the serried ranks of discouragement, cowardice, depression and laziness, I have persevered in my efforts. Whether my expenditure of time and energy was worth it, only time will tell.There really shouldn’t be any reason for this book to exist. That there is, says something—and not a good something—about the deep intellectual, moral and legal confusion of the times in which we live. If this book were to be redundant when or soon after it is published, then I should be a very happy, but also a very surprised, man. If, as I suspect, it is not redundant, then I should welcome its rapidly becoming an historical curiosity, to serve as a memorial to a cultural moment of madness, and perhaps to help hinder (vain hope!) similar mad moments in the future.
Of the three books that this research project has produced, Hidden Agender has been by far the most difficult to write. In part, this is because I feel like an idiot having to argue for what is blatantly obvious to anyone who is not in the blinkered grip of transgender ideology: Males cannot become female ; females cannot become male . How difficult is it to grasp this truth, a truth so blatant that no one until the last microsecond of human existence has ever thought to deny, a denial that, to adapt the words of Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility, scarcely deserves ‘the compliment of rational opposition’. It is absurd to pretend that such changes can take place, and it is tyrannical to force people by law to pretend that they can, and to punish them if they persist in speaking the truth. In addition to this intellectual equivalent of stepping on a stair that isn’t there, a practical difficulty I encountered in writing this book was that the various topics tended to bleed into each other, so much so that it was far from obvious which topic should be dealt with before which and in what way and in how much depth. In the end, I made the decisions I have made in the ordering and exposition of the text, with the result that there is perhaps more anticipation, overlap and repetition than would normally be desirable or acceptable.
Much good material has been published already in relation to this topic and, where it is suitable, I have made use of such material in this book. A look at the bibliography will give some idea of what is available, and this is only a representative sample. From this material, however, some books must be singled out for special mention: Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally , and Gabriele Kuby’s The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom , and the brilliantly written, intellectually incisive, and eminently quotable book by Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It . The final chapter, inasmuch as it has any claim to intellectual respectability, relies heavily on the ground-breaking work of Pitirim Sorokin in his Social and Cultural Dynamics . As I was putting the finishing touches to my manuscript in July/August 2020, Joanna Williams’s The Corrosive Impact of Transgenderism appeared, just in time for me to incorporate some of its findings in Hidden Agender . To be sure, there are some differences between Williams’s approach and mine, but our conclusions are for the most part convergent which, if what we say is true, is to be expected.
The book falls into two distinct sections. The first section, chapters 1, 2 & 3, makes some use of my competence in philosophical analysis, and treats of sex and gender, gender dysphoria, and transgender ideology; the second section, chapters 4 & 5, makes use of my competence in law, and treats of transgenderism in a legal context. These two substantive sections are sandwiched between a brief introduction that disposes of some preliminary issues, and a brief conclusion (chapter 6) that sketches the broader social context in which transgenderism is, I believe, to be located.
When asked what the most difficult aspect of his job as Prime Minister was, Harold Macmillan is reputed to have responded, ‘Events, dear boy, events!’ It is the inevitable fate of books such as this to be overtaken by events. Just as I was finishing the writing up of my material on the US Equality Act in chapter 4, I was blind-sided, as were many commentators, by the US Supreme Court’s bizarre and baffling decision in Bostock. When I first began to write up, it looked as if the UK Government was going to permit self-identification in its proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act, so that some passages in the book reflect that expectation. However, as I began to conclude the writing up, it became apparent that the Government wasn’t going to allow self-identification after all, but what other changes it would permit were not immediately evident. By the time Hidden Agender is actually published, who knows what else will have happened or been done, where, when, by or to whom? However, sufficient unto any book is the evil thereof, and the future must take care of itself.
In a few places, I have reproduced some material published in some of my earlier books where I could not find a better way of saying what I had already said, but I’ve kept these passages to a minimum. The final chapter contains the largest amount of pre-published material.
When this book is published and I hold a copy in my hand, I know, with an unshakeable certainty, that as I glance through it, my eye will inevitably fall upon a typographical error. Typographical errors (‘typos’ to their friends) are the cockroaches of the literary world—omnipresent and virtually ineliminable.



Note
Given the current legal environments in the UK and Ireland with their respective Gender Recognition Acts and their various forms of equality and anti-discrimination legislation, I have, when referring to identifiable transgender people in the third person, adopted the practice of using the compound pronouns, he/she, him/her, his/her, s/he, her/him, her/his. This practice of using compound pronouns may also have the ancillary and welcome effect of decreasing the risk of giving gratuitous offence to some readers’ sensitivities.
I am a libertarian for whom the most fundamental politico-legal principle is the zero-aggression principle—no one may initiate or threaten to initiate physical violence against the pe