The Free Speech Union’s (FSU’s) Director of Education and Events, Jan Macvarish, attended the Genspect Conference in Lisbon at the end of September.
The conference was called ‘The Bigger Picture’ and brought together professionals, academics, parents, young people and activists who have become experts in questioning gender ideology and especially in challenging the medical ‘transitioning’ of children. The FSU was invited because we understand that this issue, above all others, has been subject to an unprecedented culture of ‘no debate’, in which asking perfectly legitimate questions about the safety and wellbeing of children has become shockingly difficult.
Jan Macvarish spoke on a panel with Baroness Claire Fox and Akua Reindorf KC titled ‘The Culture War vs the Legal War’, which focused on the use of the law to defend free speech on this and other issues. This is the text of her remarks.
This morning, psychiatrist Dr Stephen B. Levine started off the day with reference to Freud’s recognition of how two aspects of life are fundamental to us as humans: Love and Work. So far, we have spent a lot of time discussing the ‘love’ side of that dyad. So many of you have become expert in preserving the ability to love in the face of fracturing family relationships and fracturing selves. But I want to turn our attention to the other side of the dyad: to the significance of ‘work’ and of what happens when that part of our selves comes under attack.
During the four and a half years of its existence, the FSU has become expert in understanding the attack on people’s working lives and in protecting individuals when a silencing onslaught comes at them and threatens to overwhelm them. We now have just under 20,000 paying members and almost 3,000 of them have required our services as ‘cases’ in need of support, advice or legal defence.
Forty-six percent of those cases arise from workplace issues and forty-four percent of all our cases relate to ‘sex or gender’, which in practice means problems experienced by people raising questions about the phenomenon of gender ideology. As all of you in this room know, there are not two sides in this battle fighting in equally ‘toxic’ ways.
Some of our casework will be made up of high profile cases which end up in a court room – when excellent lawyers like Akua Reindorf, sitting next to me today, might get involved – but most do not get that far, they are of a more everyday character in some respects, but nevertheless, they represent a brutal attack not just on an individual’s ability to express an aspect of themselves at work, (which we can all recognise may be legitimately restrained for in some contexts) but also on an individual’s ability to express themselves through work.
Those of us lucky enough to love the work we do can appreciate what it means to have that destroyed by hostile forces outside ourselves. This is not reducible to the removal of livelihoods, but can represent an unpersoning of an individual, a denial of our place in the social world.
Some of you will know the case of Gillian Phillip – an author for young adults who was summarily sacked because she reposted a tweet in support of J.K. Rowling. Gillian can still earn a living – as a lorry driver – but she was excluded from the career she had cultivated and her profession as a writer.
Such attacks on our ability, our freedom, to work are enacted and experienced individually, but what the FSU does is to help people to convert that experience into a collective one. This happens in multitude of ways: through moral support from our caseworkers and our wider network; through controlling a situation that has the potential to spiral into all areas of life, far beyond the workplace; through shaping the story and amplifying it in the media and through legal defence. Law is part of the equation, but uncancelling the person is the overall aim.
And through the cumulative experience of individual cases, what we are learning to do is to illuminate the ‘tripwires’ that have been laid throughout the territory that has been captured by new ideologies.
If a tripwire is a concealed trigger – designed to destroy those who trespass into enemy territory – then I think I can identify three different types of trespasser amongst the individuals who come to us for support:
- Those who stumble across a tripwire, without having realised the tripwire was even there and not realising that were even in enemy territory. Their own workplace, sometimes having worked there for decades.
- Those who know the tripwires are there for other people, but are surprised to learn that they operate indiscriminately. That asking a very reasonable question, in a reasonable way is as threatening to making an angry challenge to new language or new guidelines, new ideology.
- Those who know exactly what they are doing and are knowingly stepping up to hold the line.
For every one of them, to refer back to something else Stephen Levine said this morning, their response is shock and an overwhelming sense of betrayal at an interpersonal level by people they may have known for years, by an institution that they believed in, by bureaucrats they didn’t even realise were running the show.
So I suppose what I want to convey is that legal defence work, when successful, is important because it has the potential to focus attention on a very precise argument, to recapture territory and plant a flag that others can pick up and wave in their own stage of the battle, but even where it fails, it potentially transforms the degrading experience of workplace-based cancellation into a fight for justice and it potentially transforms the ‘victim’ into an exemplar of a problem, from whose treatment we can all learn lessons and whose restitution to full personhood can inspire others to speak out, knowing that they have the support of at the very least, 20,000 other people.
