Language has been liberated on the gender identity issue - so now do Israel

The front page headline of today's Telegraph reads "Trans women are not women", and while those are still provocative words, I'm not sure even a Tory-supporting publication would have dared use them in that way a few years ago.

I kept thinking back yesterday to 2021, when several people urged me to crowdfund a poll on GRA reform.  After a bit of thought, I agreed, because most of the polls I had seen on the subject were marred by particularly awful question wording.  Organisations like Stonewall would artificially generate pro-reform results with questions that made it sound like all that was being proposed was some modest administrative tidying up and "streamlining".  Whereas on the other extreme, you had Stuart Campbell using tortuously worded, novel-length, absurdly leading questions to get anti-reform results.  It seemed obvious to me that he was harming his own case by doing that, because the majority of the population are in fact in tune with gender critical views, so to demonstrate that fact all you need to do is ask very simple, straightforward, balanced questions using plain language - and the results you get will have much more credibility.

However I had no idea how difficult it was going to prove to persuade polling companies to run neutral and balanced questions on the subject.  I ran into an Orwellian insistence that balance was bias and that to achieve true balance the questions all needed to be converted into Stonewall-esque Newspeak.  Plain language like "biological women" or "people who were born female" needed, I was told, to be replaced with misleading, incomprehensible or ideologically-loaded jargon like "cis women" or "individuals assigned female at birth", or else the questions couldn't possibly run.  My question asking about concerns that allowing trans women to participate in women's sport could result in women being seriously injured was met with either panic or incredulity.  Apparently to maintain balance you have to genuflect to the fiction that there is no documented injury risk that people are even allowed to be concerned about.

If you can't run a poll to ascertain whether a population approves or disapproves of a new ideology that is being imposed on them without the poll questions themselves pushing that ideology, I began to wonder what the point was in polls or in polling companies.  Eventually in desperation I turned to the slightly more expensive Panelbase, and they saved the day by running the questions as I had written them, with one exception where they made a perfectly reasonable clarifying edit.  And the results were of course exactly as expected, with strong support for women-only spaces and women's sport being reserved for biological women.  But if Panelbase hadn't existed, I'm not sure that poll would actually have been possible.

I suppose it's conceivable that the British polling industry of 2021 just happened to be largely run by strong supporters of gender ideology.  But I think it's much more likely that they were running in fear of the reputational damage that would be caused to them if they were labelled as "bigots" or "transphobes", and therefore they were allowing militant activist groups to police their language and police their polls.  Many other organisations, public bodies and media outlets were doing much the same thing.

It's amazing how quickly that reign of terror has since been broken, and that raises hope that other subjects where intimidation has led to distorted language and self-censorship on an industrial scale can eventually be discussed freely.  The obvious example at present is the genocide in Gaza.

Can we look forward to a time when the BBC report on the death toll without trying to detract from the credibility of the numbers by robotically reminding people that they come from a "Hamas-run" health ministry?

Will they one day allow interviewees to call the genocide a genocide without an instant heavy-handed intervention from the presenter to point out that Israel denies a genocide is taking place?  (I mean, it's not necessary for programmes on the Holocaust to provide "balance" by pointing out that Dr Goebbels never confirmed a genocide had happened.)

Will they eventually drop the blatant double-standard that only Hamas has "hostages" and that Israel merely has "prisoners" and "detainees"?

Will they in future report plainly on war crimes, without insulting the intelligence of viewers by parrotting ridiculous Israeli propaganda about the bombed hospitals being terrorist bases?

This particular reign of terror is going to be harder to break, because the State of Israel is even more influential in this country than Stonewall is, and by all accounts is engaged in a massive programme of bribery, intimidation and blackmail to cow the media and politicians into silence.  But yesterday's events offer a glimmer of hope that the tide can eventually turn.