Entries by Richard Knight

Transgenderism and word magic

Introduction A previous article ended with the statement that the path to transgenderism was laid by feminism. Transgenderism also owes much to postmodernism and especially to the postmodern belief in word magic. This article looks at how this belief affected history, journalism and politics before being picked up by transgenderism.   Word magic Word magic […]

Gender, “identifying as” and identity

According to Helen Joyce, her bestseller Trans is about gender self-identification: the idea that “people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology”. But she doesn’t say what gender is.[1] When people have these feelings or make these declarations, what are they feeling and declaring? […]

Twenty statements about transgenderism

Introduction Here are twenty statements about transgenderism as a social phenomenon or an ideology. The first twelve are probably fairly obvious; the others concern the aims and methods of transgenderism as a political project, looking especially at its use of a single word. Factual assertions No one can change their sex. A person’s sex, like […]

The Rude Boys of South London

As a young man in the 1970s I always enjoyed observing the characteristic behaviours of the various races I saw around me in the English cities where I lived. For example, I was intrigued by the way older Black men played dominoes in the doorways of empty shops on the Golborne Road in west London, […]

The litany of White wrongdoing

Introduction Every so often someone recites a litany of the wrongs supposedly done by Whites to Blacks in Britain over the years. These litanies draw more on myth than fact. Consider the one written in 2000 by Stuart Hall, the Jamaican Marxist who had been professor of sociology at the Open University.[1] As though with […]

Multiculturalism, brainwashing and psychological abuse

Introduction It seems that in the 1990s, training in multiculturalism could involve brainwashing or psychological abuse. How true is this of today’s anti-racism training? Cornell in the 1990s Almost thirty years ago a student at Cornell wrote to its president about what he saw as the brainwashing techniques used to spread the ideology of multiculturalism, […]

Prevent what?

When Theresa May was Britain’s prime minister and Amber Rudd was her home secretary, one of them, I can’t remember which, identified not only terrorism but also far-right extremism as a threat to society, suggesting that the two were equally to be feared. I assumed that this was done out of political correctness. Everyone knew […]