Around the time of Donald Trump’s re-election, and especially following the barrage of executive orders he issued after reassuming office, a sentiment widely expressed was that woke was waning, and that the worst of it was surely behind us. That was a read of the situation informed by his targeting of gender ideology and trans madness in particular, something he’d emphasised throughout his campaign.
The thinking was that America was where the worst excesses of progressive liberalism had emerged from, and so if they were dialled back there, they’d be dialled back everywhere. That is a claim that at this stage can be categorically denied, if ever there was any truth to it.
An Irish Associate Professor of Law at Oxford, Dr Michael Foran, has had to cancel a lecture series on sex, gender identity and the law due to “escalating disruptive protests”.
“Due to escalating disruptive protests, I have decided to cancel the remainder of these lectures”, Professor Foran said on X, adding that this was “deeply lamentable, but the disruption has undermined the academic nature of this series”.
“Students shouldn’t face bullying or harassment when attending academic events,” he said.
Footage since published on social media shows protestors standing up beside Professor Foran’s lectern, one of them claiming that he “masks his transphobia behind a thin veneer of academia” and encouraging the audience to join him in “refusing to platform this bigot”.
“It is unfortunate that these protesters have chosen disruption over genuine intellectual engagement grounded in academic charity and rigour,” Professor Foran further said regarding the protest of his lectures.
“In attempting to shame students into deplatforming these lectures, they manifest the antithesis of what a university stands for.”
Upon hearing of Professor Foran’s shameful cancellation, the words of Taoiseach Micheál Martin came to mind, who told Gript’s own Ben Scallan just two months ago that children can be transgender, and that what’s more, he doesn’t want any “culture wars like they have in the United Kingdom and elsewhere”.
In light of that helpful analysis, what, exactly, should Professor Foran do, or have done? What role is he playing in the culture wars, to An Taoiseach’s mind?
Professor Foran is a gender-critical academic, or more precisely, someone who takes sex seriously as a legal category and argues from that basis, whose work was cited in the influential UK Supreme Court ruling last year that transgender women (men, in other words) are not legally women.
Is he a mere foot soldier in the nefarious culture wars peddled by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson? Are the brightly-coloured drones disrupting his protests merely students trying to skirt the edges of the omnipresent culture wars and get on with their pursuit of the truth? As if.
The reality is that the students whose minds have been captured by an ideology fundamentally opposed to goodness, truth and beauty are the foot soldiers in an ongoing “culture war” to overturn those very things. The damage wrought by gender ideology remains a largely untold tale, its keenest edge felt in the stories of those brave detransitioners who are willing to stand up and talk about how they’ve personally been affected by it. Often permanently.
Whereas, as far as this issue is concerned, Professor Foran represents commitment to the truth and rigorous academic discipline. Two things that western universities are experiencing a dearth of at present.
The war on such people has not lost an iota of intensity, despite the brief optimism inspired by what seemed a significant changing of the guard stateside. If anything, the consolidation of resistance to these toxic trends around a figure as polarising as Donald Trump in the US has galvanised those who see nothing wrong with men wearing dresses in female bathrooms.
With his return to office, it has allowed what are in reality elite, misguided ideologies, reigning in governments, universities, newsrooms and corporations across the western world to reposition themselves as truly resistance-oriented movements, offering a ‘compassionate’ alternative to a nebulous Trumpism.
But the unintended influence of the American president – who, for the avoidance of doubt, I believe to be doing a good job as far as these matters are concerned – is obviously not the only factor at play here. The unfortunate reality that must be contended with is that the “long march through the institutions” carried out by leftwing thinkers and activists was longer, and went deeper, than many have come to terms with yet.
In Ireland, the leftwing bent of almost every curriculum reform at the level of primary and secondary education testifies to this. As the saying goes, bad ideas have bad consequences. We are seeing the consequences now with the cancellation of Professor Foran and others, and will continue to do so.
The rumours of woke’s death were greatly exaggerated. They won’t be when a critical mass of people, at every level of society, realise that unless you call black black and white white, deluded activists are going to keep on getting them mixed up.
The culture wars will trundle on, whether An Taoiseach wants them to or not.