The tyranny of ‘lived experience’: How the woke elites are gaslighting the entire population.

‘Lived experience’ is the great incontestable. No doubt may be expressed about a person’s lived experience. It is the truth and nothing but the truth. We’ve witnessed this over the past few days as people have been demonised, hounded and in some cases even sacked for having had the temerity to question Meghan Markle’s ‘lived experience’ of royal racism and mental-health problems.

Piers Morgan got the heave-ho from Good Morning Britain for saying he didn’t believe a word of what she said. That’s pure blasphemy. Disputing lived experience is to 2021 what disputing the Word of God was to 1521. Ian Murray of the Society of Editors was pushed out for challenging Harry and Meghan’s claim that the British press is racist. ‘Show me proof’, he essentially said. Big mistake. You do not ask for evidence to substantiate claims of lived experience. Data and analysis count for nothing in the face of what people feel. The truths of social experience — the measurable reality of racist attitudes in the press or among the population, for example — are subordinate to an individual’s perception of what his or her lived experience has been. To muddy a victim’s impression of life with cold talk of analysis is to compound the oppression they feel. Just genuflect to their lived experience. Ask no questions, venture no facts.

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Or consider the transgender issue. We are expected to bow down to trans people’s ‘lived experience’ of transphobia. In the broadsheet media, in leftish political circles and on campuses across the Anglosphere, the lived experience of systemic transphobic bigotry — as many see it — is a constant talking point. And yet when it comes to women’s ‘lived experience’ of encountering trans women (ie, biological males) in a less than desirable way, that is instantly written off as insignificant, partisan, bigoted and worthy of nothing more than censorship.

So when Holly Lawford-Smith, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, set up a website called ‘No Conflict They Said’, on which women were encouraged to share their ‘lived experiences’ of encountering born men who identify as women, she became a hate figure for woke elites across the West. ‘Tell us your story’, her website said. It asked women to share their personal experiences of encountering biological males in women-only spaces, including ‘changing rooms, fitting rooms, bathrooms, shelters, rape and domestic violence refuges, gyms, spas, schools’, etc.

Anonymously, women told of encountering male-bodied people in changing rooms. Of having biological males join women-only swimming events. Of males behaving menacingly in bathrooms. All ‘lived experiences’, right? But again, these experiences do not count. They’re the wrong ones. The reaction to ‘No Conflict They Said’ has been furious. Lawford-Smith’s fellow academics signed a McCarthyite letter denouncing her and demanding that the site be taken down. ‘Why the University of Melbourne must shut down No Conflict They Said’, declared one newspaper headline. These lived experiences, it seems, stand for nought. We don’t want to hear from women who have had difficult experiences with a deified ‘marginalised group’.