![Róisín Murphy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/columnists/2023/09/04/TELEMMGLPICT000347952445_16938311576300_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFvvtRDs0z3qKbSB0QJVoxnjAedc5lNAlNLx_aileOx4.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Róisín Murphy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/columnists/2023/09/04/TELEMMGLPICT000347952445_16938311576300_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFvvtRDs0z3qKbSB0QJVoxnjAedc5lNAlNLx_aileOx4.jpeg?imwidth=680)
In East Germany, some decades ago, a woman was asked by a neighbour to water their house plants while they were away. She went through all their cupboards and found the ingredients for a lavish West German dessert. This being austere East Germany, she informed state security. As a result, the breadwinner of the house was fired from his job, plunging the family into dire straits.
This is how the Stasi worked: getting ordinary people to inform on each other, neighbour against neighbour, child against parent. There was constant surveillance of every activity. There could be no private space.
It strikes me that social media has created a similar situation. The Irish singer Róisín Murphy has had gigs cancelled and record promotion stopped because someone took a screenshot of a message she had written on her private Facebook account. In it, she expressed doubts about puberty blockers, saying vulnerable children should be protected. She then added: “Please don’t call me a terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist], please don’t keep using that word against women.”
The substance of what she said is in fact current policy of NHS England, which has pulled back on the use of puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria. There are concerns about the long-term side effects of these drugs. Instead, a “watchful waiting” approach is now the model. It turns out that, after puberty, many gender-confused children (increasingly, young girls) turn out to be simply gay.
Murphy had broken some unsaid rule in the arts, which is “Keep your head down on any issue to do with gender ideology”. There is one line and one line only or you will be cancelled. Yet Murphy did not even make a public statement: this was a private conversation. Half the people attacking her don’t even appear to know what she said, but the pyre has been built, so the crowd gathers to light the flame. It’s an awful spectacle.
In Manchester, another private conversation resulted in trouble. In a hotel during the city’s Pride festival, Dev Mistry, a burlesque performer, overheard a member of staff talking about trans people. He had to take his headphones out to hear precisely what they were saying. “It was not necessarily malicious, but it was that ‘men are men’ and ‘women are women’ and there’s no in between”. Mistry complained to reception and the employee reportedly apologised for causing offence, but Mistry made sure his complaint went to the hotel’s head office. HR was informed and agreed that staff needed to have more training on LGBTQ issues. This is someone complaining about a private conversation that they had to strain to hear. How does this advance the cause of trans people?
We saw calls for cancellation during the Edinburgh Festival. Sometimes it involved sieving through someone’s tweets. A couple of wrong “likes” were enough to cause the Royal Lyceum Theatre’s David Greig to issue a grovelling apology for “careless and harmful” behaviour online. The tweets he had liked were perceived to be transphobic. By whom? Who is on the central committee that now governs arts and culture whereby rigid gender ideology must be so enforced and never questioned? The very place where we should be able to discuss issues is utterly closed. The Stonewall tactic of “No Debate” has served to make the arts a place where people can inform on each other for wrongthink, even though someone like Murphy has been a lifelong supporter of gay rights.
The new Stasi will report anyone who wants to insist on women’s rights or women-only spaces. In Hebden Bridge, a 70-year-old woman had the police turn up at her door. She had photographed a small sticker that said “Keep Males Out of Women-Only Spaces” which had been stuck on top of a poster which said “Stand by Your Trans”. She had somehow been traced, whether by CCTV or, again, through Facebook, and a complaint had been made. The sticker could “cause alarm”, apparently. The police questioned her for 30 minutes, decided that no crime had been committed and filed this as a “non-crime hate incident”.
But who complained in the first place, and why was it taken so seriously? The effect of screeching “transphobia” at anyone who does not kowtow to the slogans is an eerie silence, where everyone keeps their head down for fear of being destroyed. It’s been like that in the public sphere for some time, of course. What is worse is that you don’t have to make a public statement to be burnt at the stake. You must be careful about what you say in private. Someone is waiting to inform the relevant authorities.
Even private chats can get you cancelled by gender ideologues
You don’t have to make a public statement to be vilified – there’s always someone just waiting for the chance to attack you