In late 2019, I co-founded Radical — a civil-rights campaign for truth and freedom on matters of sex and gender, committed to free expression and equal respect. We’ve now largely wound down this campaign. I’m still interested in sex and gender (you can hear my recent thoughts in the final section of this podcast), but I’m now trying to spend most of my time thinking about other things.
Here are some of the first Radical publications: one, for the Telegraph, launching the campaign; a second, for spiked, on the way in which fear has stifled the debate; a third, which is a call to arms to people on the centre-right, asking them to stop ducking the issues; and a fourth about why children should not be prescribed puberty blockers, owing to their lack of capacity to make such serious decisions in a sufficiently reliable manner.
The majority of the pieces I have written on sex and gender are instances of the fortnightly Radical column that my co-founder and I took turns to write for ConHome between March 2020 and September 2021. Many of these columns focused on the way in which UK institutions have suffered from ideological capture: this on the Keira Bell case; this on academic freedom; this and this on the census fiasco; this on Peter Singer’s new journal; and this on the Stonewall scandal and the risks of thinking that any organisation is irreproachable.
Also, here’s something I wrote on my Medium site, discussing the many common contradictions (pushed by certain lobbyists and hobbyists) that make engaging with the topic difficult. And here you can read a speech I gave at the Battle of Ideas on the topic of borders, including the border between true and false, and the border between male and female.