{"id":1870,"date":"2024-04-08T14:34:33","date_gmt":"2024-04-08T14:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/?p=1870"},"modified":"2024-04-08T14:38:53","modified_gmt":"2024-04-08T14:38:53","slug":"lionel-shriver-transgenderism-is-a-social-mania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/2024\/04\/08\/lionel-shriver-transgenderism-is-a-social-mania\/","title":{"rendered":"Lionel Shriver: “Transgenderism is a social mania”"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Artigo original publicado no The Telegraph<\/span><\/h5>\n

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The fearless author on the \u2018disadvantage\u2019 of being male, \u2018evil\u2019 hate speech laws and why universities are \u2018destroying\u2019 themselves<\/h5>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u201cYou cannot survive as a civilisation in a state of cringing shame,\u201d says\u00a0Lionel Shriver<\/a>, as she launches into a broadside at the self-loathing that people are supposed to feel about the colonial sins of the West. \u201cI am very suspicious of this whole pose of guilt,\u201d she says, explaining that it\u2019s usually used by white people to \u201cassert superiority over other white people\u201d. I\u2019m with the writer of We Need to Talk About Kevin at her house outside Lisbon; she moved there in October after living in the UK for 25 years. She\u2019s not holding back.\u00a0<\/div>\n
\u201cReal guilt is a terrible sensation. It is not something that you parade, shame. That is not what these people are experiencing. It\u2019s proud guilt. It\u2019s used to shut people up, to essentially deprive you of your right to free speech. You know, you\u2019ve been privileged, so we\u2019re taking all your privileges away, and we\u2019re giving them to other people. That doesn\u2019t work. It\u2019s all to do with heritable guilt. And I reject that out of hand.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
We\u2019ve been chatting about her latest novel, Mania, which digs into the way that social manias have come to dominate our world. They\u2019re insidious, she believes, from the clamour for Covid lockdowns (\u201cthe biggest public health mistake in history. And the biggest economic mistake in history\u201d) to the response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (\u201cthey were marching down the street in Korea. They don\u2019t have any black people. This was just social contagion\u201d) to global warming (\u201canyone who is not on side with climate change is evil\u201d).<\/div>\n
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The 66-year-old lives with her husband, the jazz drummer Jeff Williams, who is off playing in Slovenia; their life together is punctuated by periods at home and away. She misses her friends in London, but spends so much of her time reading and writing that she doesn\u2019t feel lonely \u2013 \u201cnot consciously\u2026 I am very comfortable spending long periods of time alone.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
There\u2019s a pool and a lemon tree in the garden. Inside, there\u2019s a simplicity to her home; it\u2019s unfussy, and so is she, in a cardigan and boot slippers. She has an infectious laugh. \u201cMy sensibility has an element of wickedness,\u201d she says. It surfaces in her books and her columns, giving them their provocative edge. \u201cIt\u2019s kinda the point,\u201d she says. \u201cOtherwise, someone else might as well write them.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The worldwide success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize in 2005, made her famous. She\u2019s written other talked-about novels since, though none that has captured the popular imagination in quite the same way. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether I will ever pull it off again,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/div>\n
In her 2016 novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, she imagined a near future America, with its first Latino president, experiencing complete economic collapse. In Mania, she goes back in time to depict an alternative history that begins in 2011, \u201cbecause I think that\u2019s when things started really going to s—\u201d. It\u2019s a dystopian satire, dark and funny in uncomfortable ways, about how society is radically transformed by the Mental Parity movement \u2013 \u201cthe last great civil rights fight\u201d \u2013 which maintains that \u201cstupidity is a fiction\u201d and that it\u2019s \u201cdiscriminatory\u201d to suggest that anyone is more intelligent than anyone else.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Uttering any words that suggest otherwise leads to public rebuke \u2013 calling something \u201cdumb\u201d can mean losing your job or having your children taken away. An intermediate step involves attending a six-week re-education course, in which participants learn never to refer to a room as \u201cdim\u201d and that because people cannot be \u201cthick\u201d, nor can planks of wood. Gooseberry fool is off the menu.<\/div>\n
Of course, this mirrors the sort of changes that have been made to existing works of fiction, removing references to anyone being \u201cfat\u201d, \u201cplump\u201d, \u201cmad\u201d, \u201cnuts\u201d, or even \u201crather pretty\u201d in\u00a0Roald Dahl<\/a>, for instance. Has anyone ever suggested Shriver\u2019s own work be combed by a\u00a0sensitivity reader<\/a>? \u201cNo one,\u201d she says. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ve been with HarperCollins for a long time, so nobody in that company is that stupid.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Beyond the comic set pieces, there\u2019s a serious intent in how Shriver depicts society being hollowed out from within, and it\u2019s clear that it is no imaginary world in her sights. \u201cThings start falling apart because functionality no longer matters; all that matters is ideology. And that\u2019s what we\u2019re dealing with right now. You\u2019re watching grand storied universities destroy themselves because they no longer believe in themselves, they don\u2019t believe in the canon they\u2019re supposed to be transferring to the next generation.\u201d The students now have the power, she says. \u201cIt was bad enough that the universities had converted into supermarkets, which were offering products. But the administration and faculty are now terrified of their own student bodies.\u201d<\/div>\n
Cancel culture, Shriver believes, \u201cis getting worse… there\u2019s nothing moderate about it. It\u2019s aggressive, hostile, angry, deliberately disruptive, vengeful, perhaps vengeful above all… it\u2019s about hunting people\u2019s careers for sport.\u201d The goal, she says, \u201cis to utterly destroy you. And that is the appeal of this stuff \u2013 that satisfaction of destroying other people\u2019s lives. And also, in doing so, you don\u2019t have to take any responsibility for being a destructive force. You are the force of righteousness.\u201d<\/div>\n
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We talk about JK Rowling, whom the Telegraph has described as \u201cthe woman who can\u2019t be cancelled\u201d. \u201cOf course, they would have taken her down if they could,\u201d Shriver says. \u201cThat\u2019s why she\u2019s been so important. Because she hasn\u2019t apologised, which has been the format, traditionally. She\u2019s stuck by her guns and has helped make it more possible for people who are in less powerful positions to also be forthright about their reservations about this consuming social mania for transgenderism.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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What has particularly disturbed her is \u201cthe personal disloyalty between individuals who maybe go back decades,\u201d she says. In the case of the Harry Potter cast, \u201cit\u2019s been really hideous to watch. It\u2019s almost always someone to the Left disavowing someone who\u2019s a little bit to the Right,\u201d she adds.<\/div>\n
It happened to Shriver after an appearance on Question Time in 2019: \u201cThere was one person in particular who ended our friendship\u2026 for purely political reasons. We\u2019d been friends for 13 years, and then suddenly she couldn\u2019t. I always thought there was an undercurrent of she couldn\u2019t afford to be associated with me.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
Mania openly risks offending more people. Its narrator, university lecturer Pearson Converse, revels in taboo language, such as \u201cthickos\u201d, \u201cdummies\u201d and \u201cretards\u201d. Shriver makes a defence of the latter \u2013 \u201cit was used very casually [in the US] and it wasn\u2019t a big deal… it was a schoolyard thing, but even when I was a kid, you wouldn\u2019t have called someone whom the state had classified as retarded that.<\/div>\n
\u201cOne of the reasons I get exasperated with that kind of \u2018ooh, ooh\u2019 restriction is because it\u2019s a completely different thing to fling a slur at someone who through no fault of their own has been born with a mental disability. And to throw it at a friend of yours who\u2019s just said something stupid, or even to use it to describe yourself.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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She once \u201cslipped up\u201d and used it about herself at a literary festival, she says, \u201cand boy, did I get it in the neck from a couple of audience members who were just outraged\u2026 but I was talking about myself \u2013 whom had I hurt?\u201d<\/div>\n
The novel is about the phenomenon of cultural revolution rather than an attack on the less intelligent. \u201cIf there\u2019s any single social mania that this book is based on, it\u2019s really transgenderism,\u201d Shriver says. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s that much of an overstatement to say it feels like it comes right out of a Nazi concentration camp. Cutting off people\u2019s healthy body parts. I have grown only more horrified.\u201d<\/div>\n
I wonder if her decision to rechristen herself with a boy\u2019s name at 17 was in any way influenced by a gender dysphoria of her own. \u201cNo, not really. I mean, I was a tomboy. I was sometimes envious of my brothers, because their lives were less restricted than mine. And my father himself admitted in his eighties that they probably underestimated me.\u00a0<\/div>\n
\u201cI have never relished physically being female,\u201d she continues. \u201cI don\u2019t like being physically weaker. My mental image of myself is taller. I hated getting periods. I didn\u2019t end up taking advantage of the biggest plus side of being female because I didn\u2019t have any children.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
She chooses her words carefully, seriously, apart from \u201ctaller\u201d, which she delivers with a laugh. \u201cThere are problems with being male too,\u201d she adds. \u201cRight now, being male, I would say, is on a career level, a disadvantage\u2026 because of the DEI business (diversity, equality and inclusion), which has been going on for a long time.<\/div>\n
\u201cI am very hostile to all this equality legislation,\u201d she continues. \u201cI believe in equality under the law, which is a primitive principle of liberal democratic government. And the UK has abandoned it\u2026 This hate speech legislation is evil. It\u2019s about controlling what you can and can\u2019t say. I\u2019m willing to make the sacrifice of living in a world where people are not always nice, because that\u2019s the real world.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cYou know, racism shouldn\u2019t be against the law, as an internal state. We all have our conceptions and sometimes misconceptions of groups of people. And we have a right to that. We are now well on our way to criminalising internal states. The Left thinks you should be able to say things that are insulting as much as you want, as long as it\u2019s the \u2018wrong person\u2019, someone from the Right. I\u2019m close to a free speech absolutist, and that absolutism is partly reactive. But I would scrap all hate speech legislation.\u201d\u00a0<\/div>\n
She is talking theoretically, not advocating racism as a lifestyle choice. In Mania, Obama fails to win a second term because he\u2019s \u201ctoo erudite\u201d; Pearson\u2019s most talented student is black. There\u2019s a distinction to be made between the stridency of her opinions and the subtlety of her novels. She wanted Mania \u201cto be fun and playful, and also to have a serious personal element\u2026 it\u2019s not meant to be hectoring\u201d.<\/div>\n
She\u2019s still thoroughly engaged with British politics, though she remains an American citizen. She\u2019s imported her London routine, too. She still cycles, although the hill is almost impossible to pedal up with full panniers of shopping. She can\u2019t run as she used to because \u201cmy knees are shot\u201d, but she exercises with determination. \u201cI\u2019ll do 500 burpees; I do mountain climbers, I use that for high-intensity interval training, so 300 pairs of mountain climbers, 10 times in a row. I can\u2019t tell you how much I hate that. I have a whole set of callisthenics, sit-ups and press-ups. It\u2019s dreary as f—. I\u2019m very, very dependent on the television. I\u2019m still playing tennis in the summer,\u201d she adds, \u201cand that\u2019s the only part that\u2019s fun, but I have a vertebra that is out of alignment \u2013 this is going to turn me into a cripple if it gets much worse, but I\u2019m still defying the odds.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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She also sticks to her unusual habit of\u00a0eating one meal a day<\/a>, at midnight. She doesn\u2019t have an eating disorder, she says, \u201cthe meal that I eat is generous and well-balanced and healthy. I\u2019m just a small person. I don\u2019t require that much food, and if I did eat three meals a day, they would have to be ridiculously tiny. And I\u2019d rather eat a substantial meal once, with wine.\u00a0<\/div>\n
\u201cIf I ate as much as I wanted to, I would be very fat,\u201d she adds, \u201cwith my genetic background on my mother\u2019s side, I would easily become a butterball.\u201d Her mother, she says, was \u201ca noticeably less happy woman from her forties onward, because she always weighed more than she wanted to.\u201d Her elder brother, Greg, was 24 stone when he died from complications related to clinical obesity. She wrote a novel based on him,\u00a0Big Brother<\/a>, in 2013, which side-lined body-positivity to deal with being \u201cfat\u201d as a health problem. \u00a0<\/div>\n
In her essay collection Abominations (2022), Shriver wrote that \u201cthere have been three concerted attempts at my effective \u2018cancellation\u2019\u201d. First, after she donned a sombrero at the end of a speech defending cultural appropriation in 2016. Next, in 2018, when she took issue with publisher Penguin Random House\u2019s drive to diversify its staff. (Has the publishing world forgiven her? \u201cI think that the Left in general is an unforgiving bunch. And most of publishing is occupied by Left-wing women. So, by the transitive property, I\u2019m not forgiven.\u201d) Third, when she questioned mass immigration to the UK in 2021.\u00a0<\/div>\n
I mention the former deputy Labour leader Alan Johnson\u2019s comment to me that same year on how stopping migration across the Channel via France, Holland and Belgium inevitably got worse because of the loss of co-operation when we left the EU. \u201cI don\u2019t think Brexit has been very determinative of immigration,\u201d she says. \u201cThe real problem in the UK is legal immigration, and the Tories, rather than tightening immigration policy, loosened it further.\u201d She doesn\u2019t want to get too deeply into that issue, she says, because \u201cthat\u2019s the book I\u2019m writing now.\u201d A pause. \u201cThat\u2019s the one that\u2019s going to end my career.\u201d A laugh. \u201cPromises, promises.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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IR PARA ARTIGO ORIGINAL<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artigo original publicado no The Telegraph Por Chris Harvey The fearless author on the \u2018disadvantage\u2019 of being male, \u2018evil\u2019 hate speech laws and why universities are \u2018destroying\u2019 themselves \u201cYou cannot survive as a civilisation in a state of cringing shame,\u201d says\u00a0Lionel Shriver, as she launches into a broadside at the self-loathing that people are supposed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internacional"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1878,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions\/1878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudeemtransicao.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}