“Truth Hurts”
The Conversion Therapy Nobody Is Discussing
Less than two weeks ago, Macy Gray appeared on the TalkTV show, Piers Morgan Uncensored and she was asked to define what a woman is. Her response included this: “I will say this, and everybody’s going to hate me, but...just because you go change your parts [Gray makes a chopping action with her hand] doesn’t make you a woman. Sorry.” Piers Morgan retorted, “You feel that?” Gray didn’t miss a beat: “I know that for a fact.” Gray went on to offer her support for this demographic: “Like if you want me to call you a ‘her,’ I will, ‘cause that’s what you want, but that doesn’t make you a woman just ‘cause I call you a ‘her’.” Gray tacked on her “sorry” to her statement of fact knowing that she would face some criticism, but little did she know then how much vitriol she would face.
Her statement touched off a stream of social media abuse that set its sights upon Gray at breakneck speed. At least as fast as the mobs went after Bette Midler that very same day when Midler pushed back on the disappearance of the word “woman.” Gray was sent thousands of insults on Twitter with men taking up the occassion to express thinly veiled threats like “Dead to me.” In typical fashion, the genderists—almost uniquely white men—piled on to tell Gray “Fuck you” with one dude tweeting “fuck you too—throwing away all your music now…” The misogyny came in furiously, yet nowhere were Twitter moderators banning accounts of the more abusive trolls. Were any woman to post a tweet suggesting that @Sienna_Tgirl is a “man,” we could literally count the hours—if not minutes—until that woman’s Twitter account were permanently suspended.
The most frequent insult employed by the wokerati to let Gray know that her views on this subject were not acceptable, was that her career was “over.” Even India Willoughby, known for making his gender his career, shared his thoughts in a now-deleted exchange with Gray: “how to kill what’s left of your career.” Gray’s response: “truth hurts.” Gray posted her reaction to the threats and ad hominem directed at her: “just becuz I said something you don’t agree with—be whatever you wana be, and fk off.” Aptly put, however, her response only fed the trolls.
This lobby wants total capitulation—and not merely of the written or spoken word: they don’t want Gray to offer linguistic concessions knowing that she knows that hers is a concession. The mobs set out to punish Gray because she was willing to concede in language but not in thought. Her soul was impure and needed “educating” because what the wokerati want is not only for people to shift their speech, but to cleanse their thoughts. This is a religious war where words demonstrate the purity of the soul and the woke soldiers on the left ensured that Grey would repent.
The gender lobby continued its assault on reason with Gray as their target for their postmodern version of the ducking stool: trial through social media pile-on. And these ducking stools have proliferated throughout social discourse in recent years, largely operated by men. Take the case of Jennifer Finney Boylan who, upon realising that the letter he had signed in support of open debate (published in Harper's on 7 July 2020), also included the signature of JK Rowling, he retracted his signature making a public apology to which Rowling responded: “You’re still following me, Jennifer. Be sure to publicly repent of your association with Goody Rowling before unfollowing and volunteer to operate the ducking stool next time, as penance.”
The parallel to witch hunts and public confessions during the height of the Spanish Inquisition is a point I have made for years writing in 2016:
Gender as religion is upon us. The reality of the body is obfuscated by the burgeoning discourse of gender identity while rolling back women’s rights several decades. Males who “identify as females” are now telling women that they are privileged while women and girls are forced to shower and change clothes in front of males who identify as non-binary or transgender. The current regime of callout culture, online aggression, no-platforming, and privilege-shaming by males towards females in addition to the discursive positioning of women as oppressors of men are all part of a new chapter in men’s rights activism.
Where Rowling, Gray, and Midler were put into the metaphoric ducking stool of social media, this vehicle of torture is its own form of conversion therapy.
The online mobbing of Gray encapsulates the upside-down nature of political discourse today on the left. I have been speaking with women for ten years about their fear of not putting pronouns in their professional email signatures, their discomfort of being forced to call men “she” at work, and the many women who have suffered a loss to their reputations, livelihoods and/or professional standings all for saying that sex is immutable. No matter what. I’ve interviewed a good many of them who range from no-nonsense mothers to barristers, journalists, scholars, comedians, psychotherapists, midwives, Olympic and high school athletes, and politicians like Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd, Jennifer Wagner-Assali, Selina Soule, Lidia Falcón, Donna M. Hughes, Marina Terragni, Jess De Wahls, Ceri Black, Julia Long, Jenni Swayne, Dora Moutot, Kathleen Lowrey, Karen Davis, Helen Joyce, Sharron Davies, and Mary Lou Singleton. There are also men like Eric Kaufmann, James Esses, Jonny Best, and Vito Gesualdi who have also been fixed in the crosshairs of this mob.
Little did Gray know then that days later after issuing her statement of fact on Morgan’s show she would have faced the Inquisition and been pressured into issuing a retraction. Her abjuration on NBC’s TODAY show revealed Gray nervously presenting the canned narrative she was given to parrot: “Being a woman is a vibe…if you in your heart feel that that’s what you are, then that’s what you are, regardless of what anyone says or thinks.” The show’s host, Hoda Kotb, responded, “I think life is an education process," completely unaware of the trenchant irony in how re-education has been employed historically.
Then the right-wing wokerati took to social media to lecture Gray as to how she was a "coward" because she back-slid from her original statement. Canadian professor and evolutionary behavioural scientist, Gad Saad, who has been critical of the gender identity movement for several years, tweeted: “Dear @MacyGraysLife, I’m getting a weird vibe tonight. Can you walk me through the process of how I might establish that I’m a woman? Perhaps @MattWalshBlog can help?” Tagging Matt Walsh then resulted in Walsh chiming in: “Sorry but women who publicly renounce the definition of “woman” for fear of mean comments from trans activists deserve all the scorn they get. That kind of gutless cowardice is exactly what got us into this position in the first place.” Many of these men’s followers demanded that Gray be “be vilified publicly” while feminists responded, pointing to the obvious: that it is most certainly not Macy Gray who is responsible for “getting us into this position in the first place.” It’s yet another episode of “Apple meet Eve” where women are bizarrely always responsible for what men do, say and now “identify as.”
JK Rowling also tweeted in defence of Gray: “Endless death and rape threats, threats of loss of livelihood, employers targeted, physical harassment, family address posted online with picture of bomb-making manual aren't ‘mean comments.’ If you don't yet understand what happens to women who stand up on this issue, back off.” This isn’t hyperbole—it’s a truism that women know all too well. We were getting piled on social media a decade ago for merely liking or sharing a tweet by another woman who stated that sex is immutable
In 2013, I published my first piece on gender ideology and its toxicity to women’s and girls’ rights. It was a fair and balanced piece and you can read it here on CounterPunch which ran many of my gender-critical pieces thereafter here, here, and here. They even ran my interview with the lovely Janice Raymond, the trans ideologues’ ideological arch-enemy. Years later, CounterPunch’s editor wrote me to say they had to stop running my gender-critical pieces because they received too much pushback from their readers. Like Macy Gray, this publication recanted and has since gone on to publish the “gender woo-woo” to the pleasure, one can only assume, of its woke readership.
The line between refusing to publish articles on this most contentious topic because readers will write letters of complaint or troll you on social media has one of two effects and intensities. And the intensity and words employed are uniquely and ironically dependent upon the sex of the receiver of such missives. Male journalists know this since for years I regularly reached out to them when they published on this subject to enquire if they are OK or being trolled excessively. One journalist several years ago wrote that he wasn’t getting too much harassment adding, “But I’m not a woman.”
We can wrongfully place the blame on Macy Gray for walking back her statement or we can open our eyes and condemn the identitarians who terrorised Gray pressuring her to repent and change her thinking. The greatest conversion therapy of our day is not the teachers and parents who discuss with children the need to accept their bodies underscoring that gender is a social fiction—it’s precisely the woke mobs who foist conversion of thought onto even the most infamous of singers forcing her to do an about-face. We ought to be alarmed that women are being trashed, harassed and cyber-stalked all for knowing that sex is immutable and that humans are sexually dimorphic.
Let’s be completely transparent about this theatre of virtue, however: even the purveyors of “sex is just a feeling” don’t believe their own hokum. Pink News (also known by feminists s Penis News) has been one of many publications to spin the anti-science notion that sex and definitions of “woman” are “transphobic.” After a decade of running nonsensical stories about TERFs and sic “cis women” who “kill transgender women” with their words and how sex is “assigned at birth,” Pink News ran a story on 2 July entitled, “Gay couple who wanted a son sue IVF clinic after surrogate gives birth to daughter.” This story was effectively Pink News’ unwitting confession that when push comes to shove its writers and editorial staff know precisely what sex is. Many of the hundreds of responses on Pink News’ Twitter feed to this story were priceless—even popcorn-worthy: “How do they know it’s a girl?” “Why are they assuming their baby’s gender?” “Isnt it too early for that? What if the baby identifies as male?” and “I thought sex was merely ‘assigned’ at birth, not observed? This is very terfy” among many others. Pink News provided much Schadenfreude for British feminists who for years have been blocked by this fake news publication which has been successful in supporting the gender industry through stories that are entirely untethered from reality.
So when we discuss Macy Gray, Bette Midler or any number of less famous women, let’s not focus on why they went silent or backtracked. We already know why and the why is the problem here, not them.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: the conversion therapy of the masses orchestrated by mainstream and independent leftist media working in collusion with social media whereby women are shut up (and down) and made to stand before the Grand Inquisitor of social sycophantism to recant their perfectly cogent, scientific statements about the immutability and reality of sex. Instead of being able to take part in civil society and debate the reality of human biology and the need to dismantle the misogyny of gender ideology, these women are forced to recant their “sacrilege” and denounce scientific truisms under duress, all in the service of men with asymmetrical haircuts.
Make no mistake, dear reader: the threat of losing one’s profession, livelihood, reputation, economic stability, and/or community in addition to death and rape threats is par for the course in this debate and it is a reality that women face every time they disagree with a man in a dress or his “allies.” This is the baseline from which women operate in 2022, where even famous, wealthy “vagina havers” are obliged to recant science and iterate the lie that sex—just like 30 Rock’s Dr Leo Spaceman’s infamous definition of science—is “whatever we want it to be.”
Now, where do we go from here? I, for one, stand with Macy Gray and Bette Midler who, like myself or any of the billions of women on the planet, should not have to endure a postmodern Catherine wheel that seeks to obliterate our ability to speak about our lives, our bodies or any number of scientific truths, and whose end goal fundamentally is to annihilate our ability to think.
Welcome to the misogyny from the left, women. Let’s roll up our sleeves and fight.
Fabulous piece, thank you.
I love this Julian. Thanks.