Macy Gray and the poison of cancel culture: Gray has been defamed and threatened simply for speaking the truth.

When today’s radicals were fresh-faced youths, reading their Gramsci and putting up their Malcolm X posters, I wonder if they could ever have imagined that their proudest achievement in the year 2022 would be to make a black woman shut her trap? Supposedly leftish agitators used to dream of revolting against capitalism – now they rage against revolting women who say heretical things about sex and gender. Their latest target is the great Macy Gray. She sinned. She was seen consorting with TERFs. Men, she said, cannot become women, a vile calumny in the eyes of the high priests of the gender cult. And so she had to be taken down a peg or two, this nasty woman, this uppity broad.

The moral slaying of Macy Gray has been a disturbing spectacle. She committed her heresy on Piers Morgan’s TalkTV show. ‘Just because you go change your parts doesn’t make you a woman’, she said. She did a chopping motion with her hand as she said ‘change your parts’, which was sublime. ‘You feel that?’, asked Morgan. ‘I know that for a fact’, Gray shot back. Instantly, pitchforks were sharpened. Torches were lit. A woman said what a woman is? Unacceptable. The abuse came thick and fast. Your career is over, Gray was told. You’re dead to me, the gender hysterics cried. ‘Fuck you’, armies of white men pretending to be women screamed at her online. Just as women in pre-modern times who said or did anything ‘deviant’ would be marched to the ducking stool, so was Ms Gray ducked by the mobs of Twitter and their verdict swiftly returned – witch.

Strikingly, even Gray’s offer to be polite to men who think they are women was not enough to temper the mob’s fury. She anticipated the witch-hunt. ‘Everyone’s gonna hate me’, she said to Piers Morgan before committing her speechcrime of expressing biological facts. ‘Sorry’, she said after the speechcrime. She said she is more than happy to refer to ‘transwomen’ as ‘she’ and ‘her’. But none of that sufficed. The problem was Gray’s thoughts, the contents of her soul. Outwardly she might say ‘she’ about a man who identifies as a woman, but inwardly, in her heart and mind, she would still be thinking of that man as a man. And in the eyes of the trans set and its noisy allies, that is intolerable. This is how tyrannical the gender cult has become: it demands not only linguistic compliance but full mental and emotional submission. It wants to alter not only how we speak about the world but how we see it, how we understand it.

Clearly, Ms Gray’s mind had to be cleansed, her very nerve endings corrected. That was the task the mob set itself. Using menace and threats – including the threat of wrecking her musical career – the misogynistic mind police set about fixing this uppity miscreant. And they seem to have been successful. Gray has recanted. We don’t call it ‘recanting’ anymore, because we pretend to live in fairer, more tolerant times than our ancestors did. We call it ‘learning’. Following days of sexist vilification, a chastened Gray appeared on the Today show in the US. I have ‘learned a lot’, she said. ‘Being a woman is a vibe’, she continued, no doubt to the glee of her tormentors in the trans lobby who have insisted for years that womanhood is little more than a feeling, and a feeling anyone can have, even people with penises. I’m guessing that Gray’s inner-most thoughts are the same as they were – that a man can never become a woman – but it is highly unlikely she will ever express these thoughts publicly again. Because she knows the consequences now. She knows ruination awaits those who utter this truth.

Some in the ‘unwoke’ set have been uncharitable in their response to Gray’s backtracking. She caved, they say. She’s a wimp. This is far too harsh. It is deeply unpleasant to be the target of the new Witchfinder-Generals. It is understandable that some people choose the quiet life over the prospect of being mauled and defamed by a hysterical mob every time they say perfectly normal things. Save your criticism for Gray’s persecutors, not Gray. More importantly, save your criticism for the ideologies that motored the moral slaying of Macy Gray, and whose vicious and unforgiving nature should now be apparent to everyone. That is, the ideologies of identitarianism and its close cousin, cancel culture.