It would be easy to pass this off as more short-sighted, politically correct thinking on the part of bureaucrats in the UK, but the issue goes much deeper, and has much darker implications about the UK and western populations that do not recognize the distinction between society and the state.
Steve Bird, of the Telegraph.UK, recently reported on the stunning, but not unexpected, story of a British physician who was fired for not complying with the National Health Service (NHS) command that he use incorrect, scientifically improper, gender pronouns that his patients might demand.
Dr. David Mackereth has worked for 26 years as an NHS doctor but was told he could not be employed as a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability assessor if he refused to identify patients as being of a sex that they did not see themselves as.
In a field where biological differences in the sexes are a teensy bit important, this doctor was booted for saying he would call people what they biologically were.
Mackereth was in the middle of a training program to become a disability assessor. During the training session, the mighty “trainer” demanded that assessors refer to patients (or “clients”, in the parlance of Newspeak officialdom) by their preferred gender. Then, the group began to talk about the supposedly fluid nature of gender.
I said that I had a problem with this. I believe that gender is defined by biology and genetics. And that as a Christian the Bible teaches us that God made humans male or female. I could have kept my mouth shut. But, it was the right time to raise it… The tutor took me aside and said he had passed my comments up the chain to the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions).
And then, as you might have guessed, things got uglier.
As Bird notes:
Dr. Mackereth then received an email from Advanced Personnel Management (APM), the agency that employed him and would have hired him out to the DWP.
Sorry, mate. No working for the government unless you conform.
Mackereth would not conform. As he says:
If we are no longer allowed to say that you believe sex and gender are the same and are determined at birth, everyone who holds my views can be sacked on the spot under this Act (the 2010 Equality Act). I’m not an isolated case.
And Mackereth’s situation is not just about whether he might make patients uncomfortable when they are trying to get disability benefits (itself a thievery scheme that takes from productive workers what they could stash away themselves then doles it out, and, more often, steals from payers to hand out to other recipients in a wholly unethical manner of theft and redistribution).
It goes deeper.
As reflected in the experience of Dr. Jordan Peterson fighting the Canadian 2016 gender pronoun mandate law called C-19, he is one of the few who knows that there is a distinction between societal, voluntary change based on personal interaction, and compulsion via state force.
As Thomas Aquinas understood in the Middle Ages, there is a difference between society and the state. Natural Law is different from statute. Statutes foist upon people through the force of the state, while Natural Law is the set of societally accepted modes of behavior developed through voluntary interaction over centuries. In his epic 3,500 page book, “Summa Theologica”, Aquinas was famous for, among other things, stating the Latin phrase, “Lex Malla, Lex Nulla”, which translates to “Bad Law is No Law.” In other words, statute that does not conform to Natural Law is not “law”, and, as Aquinas observed, people have the right to engage in civil disobedience against it. John Locke and Jefferson took this a step further, stating that men had the option to violently rebel against such government. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that men had a “duty” to rebel. If they did not, he believed, they were doing a disservice to God.
With Canada’s C-19, politicians mandated that any bureau of the government, any entity receiving government funds, or any business “regulated” by the government (which would include almost all of them) had to address people according to the gender pronouns they desired.
But Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, understood that such compulsion was immoral and did not conform to Natural Rights. He had no problem taking each personal case on its own, and deciding if he would choose to address people as they might request, but he would not be compelled.
This marks the fundamentally important distinction between society and statute that most modern Westerners have forgotten or never learned.
Since the UK NHS is a parasitic government agency, it can dictate to those working for it that they must work in certain ways. It can also dictate to taxpayers that they must pay for such a system, whether it interferes with their beliefs or not. This coercion can shift in every direction, depending on who controls the levers of power. And that’s a dangerous, dangerous thing.
To be blind to the distinction between societal change and statutory mandates is to miss the lessons of statism that have been handed to us from horrific events going back to pre-Christian governments.
The bankrupt NHS trampling upon the medical necessity of knowing whether someone is male or female is just the most recent, absurd, example.
But if more people don’t open their eyes to the lessons of compulsion the way Jordon Peterson and David Mackereth have, not only will governments push their mandates more and more, societal recollection of those destroyed by government compulsion will be lost.
Poisonous medicine, social justice warriors. Best to learn from history, instead.