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I came across the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (“powering solutions to extremism, hate and disinformation”) the other day. Seems pretty heavy hitting, financed by the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the WEF, various governments, etc. It’s aim is to "counter hate and disinformation". So I guessed I’d see measured, robust info on it. Silly me. Like many other -- increasing numbers -- organisations in the west, it’s been captured by today’s woke ideology, to an extreme and surprising extent.
The very first article I came to was something about trans issues. Which I happen to have been following for years. Bitching about “trans haters” and “trans disinformation” it is full of hate and disinformation itself. And quite clearly of the Left leaning Far Left.
See "Analyst Aoife Gallagher challenges anti-trans rhetoric in op-ed”, and then see my email comments to author Aoife Gallagher
MY EMAIL to media@isdglobal.org
TO: Please pass to: AOIFE GALLAGHER. RE: "Analyst Aoife Gallagher challenges anti-trans rhetoric in op-ed"
From the ISD article I went over to read Aoife Gallagher’s “Trans rights issues are being used as a right-wing recruitment tool”.
TL;DR: No, they are not.
I am neither right-wing, nor Christian, nor trans. I’m an atheist, liberal, dem-voting straight guy. I fully support Trans Rights, but share concerns about some trans issues that have come to the fore in recent years.
These concerns are shared by wide segments of society, men, women, LGBT+, scientists and laypeople. These are people — I’ll call us “we” — who denounce any violence against trans people, who denounce doxing anyone, who support trans rights. Yet we want to discuss trans issues that have become urgent: how to share private facilities, trans women in sports, trans incarceration, the minimum age of transitioning (“gender affirming”), rates of trans suicide, and so on. We expect — we wish, we hope -- that these could be discussed without our being labelled “transphobic” for simply raising them.
On this score, your article does nothing to help promote discussion. Instead you denounce us a “radical right-wing campaign, bubbling in… sewage swamps….”, joining forces with the “evangelical Christian right…”, who want to “harass and abuse” trans people. We are conflated, in short, into a large and rather nasty straw man.... That is itself disinformation.
Science is, as you say “constantly changing and evolving”, but on the issue of mammalian sex it remains steadfast, as it has done for 200 million years: the mammal homo sapiens is sexually dimorphic, distinguished — by biologists throughout the world — as follows: the male has many small motile gametes while the female has one large immotile gamete. The fact that there are some intersex people does not invalidate the binary nature of our species, any more than someone being born with only one leg invalidates that fact that we are a bipedal species.
By the way, your figure “approximately 1.7% of the world’s population are born intersex" is clearly plucked from single-click “search" at Google. The actual figure, per medical literature, is in the region of 0.02% or about 1/100th of your figure (and much less than the number of red-heads!). In any case, the number of intersex is largely irrelevant here, because the vast majority of trans people do not start out intersex; they are either male or female.
Given that you work at a place that claims to be against “hate” and against “disinformation”, it’s odd indeed that your article is riddled with both.
I would have thought that the ISD ought to be a platform for having civilised, courteous and respectful debate on issues of centrality and urgency in our society. Not for promoting more disinformation and via an article chock-full of emotive language.
I’m more than happy to carry on the conversation if you wish.
Peter Forsythe
Hong Kong
PS: I don’t have my own pronouns. But I do have my own adjectives. Which are: “handsome and intelligent”. Please use when discussing me, or I shall be triggered.
ADDED (17/9/22): Americans are deeply divided on transgender rights, a poll shows
ADDED (15/3/23): Re Covid, I came across Aoefe Gallagher again on a video here, where she again talks of “disinformation”, seemingly oblivious to the amount of disinformation that we now know has come from “trusted sources”, like herself and the CDC, et.al. and calling people that had concerns about lockdowns (which include me, from early on), the likes of Stanford professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya, “far right” (the ISDs go-to smear), "conspiracy theorists" who believe that it was all the doing of some cabal. Well, no, we are not. We just had a different view -- one that turns out to have be much closer to reality -- than the mainstream. There’s the rub with the “disinformation” stuff. It’s mainly just to smear views they don’t like. That’s why I hate this whole “anti-disinformation” crowd, the people who say they are the ones against “hate”.
Note Gallagher is labelled a “Disinformation expert”. There is no such expertise. There is no degree you can take in it. No apprenticeship. You just have to follow the line of the establishment and call yourself a “disinformation expert”. That’s it.
Really, I wish these people -- well meaning as they may be -- would just but out. Be done. We don’t need you. We can figure it out for ourselves.
ADDED (ii): Gallagher says what you need to do to stop being taken in by disinformation is “Stop, Think, Check”, as in stop reading/watching; think about what it’s saying and check the source. Not bad advice, which she then ruins by quoting Reuters in the “check the source” part and saying that they are a credible source. I see Reuters every day in the SCMP and they’re just a purveyor of whatever the government line is, the most recent being that the latest Pentagon leak was “Russian disinformation”, which story lasted about a minute, before it was found to be a dopey teenage National Guardsman. Right. Reuters, go-to source: “it’s Russia!" So... yeah... right. Reuters. And Gallagher pins herself to that. Disinformation!
