ROD LIDDLE
Press watchdog rules you cannot tell the whole truth if it might hurt someone’s feelings
Maybe it’s time the pencil-necks at IPSO understood that no matter how liberal they are, truth is still truth
I KNOW there is important stuff going on in the world.
Syria being taken over by loveable little squirrels who aren’t at all deranged Jihadis — if you believe much of the media.
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Or the fact our economy is on a one-way journey down the lavatory basin.
So perhaps I should be writing about these sorts of things.
But not this week.
Instead, I’m going to write about an organisation you’ve most likely never heard of, upholding a complaint from a bloke you’ve never heard of.
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It regards an article in a magazine you’ve never read. Written by a bloke you’ve never heard of.
And if that doesn’t sound terribly promising, I’m sorry. But this is really important, and tells you a lot about the Madness of Now.
The writer is Gareth Roberts who works for, among other publications, The Spectator. He has also written for Doctor Who, by the way.
In the article in question, he referred to author Juno Dawson as “a man who claims to be a woman”.
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Dawson complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about this description.
There were three separate complaints — that the description was inaccurate, that it amounted to harassment and that it was “prejudicial or pejorative”.
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The IPSO people binned the first two charges. Roberts hadn’t been inaccurate. He had been, therefore, entirely accurate.
And nor did what was written amount to harassment.
But they upheld the complaint that he had been prejudicial or pejorative by saying Dawson was a man who claimed to be a woman — and forced The Spectator to publish their ludicrous judgment.
Because here’s the problem. Juno Dawson is a man who claims to be a woman.
There is no way around it. He was born a man, in 1981, and lived as a man until about nine years ago when he had hormone treatment.
Real problem
It’s quite possible he had bits snipped off and others stapled on. I don’t know and it’s not really any of my business.
It’s a free world and I have no objection to Mr Dawson deciding he wanted a different life, perhaps feeling uncomfortable as a chap. Good luck to him.
We should all try to understand the misery felt by people who think they are trapped in the wrong body. They deserve our empathy and our help.
Our job is to tell the whole truth — and not to leave out bits because other people might find them uncomfortable or offensive
But like it or not, biological sex is not alterable.
You cannot change your chromosomes. And Juno Dawson still has the XY chromosomes which designate him as a bloke. There is nothing he can do about that.
He has a gender recognition certificate which says he’s legally a female. But those pesky chromosomes beg to differ.
Daft IPSO kind of recognised all this. They said it was not inaccurate to describe Dawson as a man who claimed to be a woman.
I dare say, they might have preferred it if Mr Roberts had written that Dawson identified as a woman.
But that amounts to precisely the same thing, doesn’t it?
In other words, IPSO have said that telling the truth contravenes their Editors’ Code of Practice.
You must not tell the truth, because it might hurt somebody’s feelings — in this case Mr Dawson’s feelings.
Now, for us journos — and you readers — this is a real problem.
Our job is to tell the whole truth — and not to leave out bits because other people might find them uncomfortable or offensive.
We take this stuff quite seriously, most of the time. You know, when we’re sober.
But it would seem IPSO have bought, hook, line and sinker, the propaganda from the transgender lobbying groups such as the odious Stonewall.
This has led IPSO into a quandary — where they have to insist that telling the truth could be prejudicial.
New Spectator editor Michael Gove, who was not at the magazine at the time of publication, criticised IPSO’s ruling, saying: “I am in no doubt this is an outrageous decision, offensive to the principle of free speech and chilling in its effect on free expression.”
The lobby groups insist that once someone has identified as a different sex, they are of a different sex.
You know, I wish that were the case. If only we could close our eyes, wish and — shazam! — suddenly Laurence has become Loretta.
But it’s not like that and it doesn’t matter how much work you have done on your body, you cannot change the essentials. It’s as the feminist Germaine Greer once put it.
You can staple a pair of long, furry ears to your head but it doesn’t make you a beagle.
She’s long been cancelled, of course. For telling the truth. A little colourfully, perhaps.
And this idea that, simply by identifying as a nice lady and maybe taking a few testosterone suppressants, you actually are a lady is a big issue for society right now.
Not at all happy
In sport, for example. Where more and more men pretending to be women are winning world championships and loads of other competitions in women’s sports.
And that’s because they are not women. They are men — with greater speed, greater strength, greater lung capacity, greater bone density and a load more besides.
There are real differences between men and women. And they can’t be surgically altered. Or just wished away.
Is IPSO telling us we must not write the truth when we report that a man pretending to be a woman has just aced the 400 metres in a women’s event?
Isn’t it quite important that we are all allowed to know something like that? Don’t the actual women have a right to know?
But, of course, it’s not just sport. The trans lobbyists insist that men who identify as women should be allowed in the female wards of our hospitals. And in women’s prisons.
An organisation which is required to police standards in the Press should be charged with the task of upholding one principle above all others
An awful lot of women are not at all happy about this.
They believe, rightly, that they are sharing their private spaces with people who are basically men.
There have been horrible incidents where men claiming to be women have abused their use of women-only spaces. When these events come to court, is IPSO saying we must not assert that the perpetrator was a man claiming to be a woman?
It seems they are doing just that.
Which leads to laughable reports from court cases about the defendant “taking out her penis”. Um, spot the obvious error. But it is also more fundamental than that.
An organisation which is required to police standards in the Press should be charged with the task of upholding one principle above all others.
That it must never be a crime to tell the whole truth. No matter who it offends. And no matter what Stonewall have to say about it.
As some dead old poet put it: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all you need to know.”
Maybe it’s time the pencil-necks at IPSO dusted off their copies of John Keats’ poems.
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And understood that no matter how liberal they are, no matter how they might agree with the trans lobbyists, truth is still truth.
And its beauty should never be cancelled.
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