Quotes from Douglas Murray

In India there are the Hijras – a class of intersex and transvestite – knowledge and acceptance of whom dates back centuries. In Thailand the Kathoey is a type of effeminate male who is widely accepted to be neither male nor female. And on the island of Samoa there are fa'afafine, men who live and dress as women.

biology throws up certain complex and often cruel challenges.

about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can be framed through the headline: 'Roads Designed by Men are Killing Women'.10 Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other.

we seem to have decided that the individual complexities which actually exist not just between women and men but within men and within women can simply be pushed to one side with the assumption that they have all been overcome.

Hume and Kant set the foundations in their work for the arguments that would make racism untenable. They helped to expose its fundamental flaws. For instance, Hume argued "that morality is based on humans' natural attunement to one another's feelings and a discomfort at sensing others' discomfort that can be elevated into more impartial justice.

Among the things these issues all have in common is that they have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash barrier. Not content with being equal, they have started to settle on unsustainable positions such as 'better'. Some might counter that the aim is simply to spend a certain amount of time on 'better' in order to level the historical playing field.

punta del zapato una de estas minas recién colocadas. «Intolerante», «homófobo», «sexista», «misógino», «racista» y «tránsfobo» no son más que el principio. Las luchas por los derechos de nuestra época giran en torno a estos

something that may be among the biggest issues of all. It is whether being gay means that you are attracted to members of your own sex, or whether it means that you are part of a grand political project.

If free countries have to have unsightly security controls, why don't they have them around the national borders rather than around every single thing inside those borders?'8

Always at the hands of people who range from the semi-informed to the uninformed.

If there remains any overriding idea it is that ideas are a problem. If there is any remaining commonly held value judgement it is that value judgements are wrong. If there remains any remaining certainty it is a distrust of certainty. And if this does not add up to a philosophy it certainly adds up to an attitude: shallow, unlikely to survive any sustained onslaught, but easy enough to adopt.

growth solely accounted for by immigration – led to the usual strains

these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.

By 2018 the BBC seemed to have decided that items of specifically gay news needed to be not just reported but headlined as major news.

And while taking oestrogen made him cry more and change his taste in movies, when testosterone came back into his body it had an equally 'sexist' set of effects. He noticed a lot of common behaviours. He became more angry, more aggressive and – yes – far more horny. Today he has been off hormones for more than two years. But the effects of his time 'transitioning' across the sexes is still with him.

In one way Timothy had gone all the way around the oppression cycle. From woman, to trans, to white man and therefore to the personification of the white patriarchy. From minority to oppressor. Where female to male transitioners can create one pile-up, male to female transitioners produce another of their own – most obviously with people who have been born as women.

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds.

From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of 'power'. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love.

fascism'. 1 Yet however abused, anybody offering

Diversity of thought" is just a euphemism for "white supremacy".'16

late 2018 Twitter's 'hateful conduct policy' changed so that Twitter could permanently ban people from the platform if they were found to have 'deadnamed' or 'misgendered' trans people.9 So the moment that a person says that they are trans and announces a change of name anybody who calls them by their previous name or refers to them by their previous gender has their account suspended.

So the recognition that there were two different sexes turned into the suggestion that there were two different genders. And from there the argument was carefully escorted to what turned out – in the universities at least – to be a wildly popular conclusion: which is that there was in fact no such thing as gender. Gender was not real but merely a 'social construct'.

In society at large, when people come out as gay they are celebrated for having arrived at their natural end-point. For most people this is a decent recognition by society that there is no problem with them being who they are: they have arrived at the place that is natural and right for them. But one oddity of this position is that anybody who is gay and then subsequently decides they are straight will be the subject not just of a degree of ostracism and suspicion, but widespread doubt

With regard to women's rights and sexual-minority rights, and, of course, in particular when it came to the issue of racism, everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better.