Cancel culture is a threat to democracy
In the social media age, some subjects are so incendiary it’s much easier to stay quiet than speak out.
Take, for example, sex and gender, transgender sport, and toxic masculinity.
But some conversations are so important they shouldn’t take place in private, even if the repercussions can cost you your friends, your job or your career.
Indeed, for society to move forward, and the rights of everyone to be considered, these conversations have to happen in public.
Dr Carole Hooven, associate at the Harvard Department of Psychology and author of “Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us”, has fearlessly spoken up on the biggest issues around biology and behaviour. And it has had profound professional and personal consequences.
In the first part of our exclusive interview (part 2 on Sex Difference Denial is here and part 3 on The Anti-Masculinity Movement harming boys and young men is here) Dr Hooven explains exactly what it feels like to be “cancelled” after she was forced to take a leave of absence from Harvard following comments she made on US television, how even her most trusted colleagues deserted her in her hour of need, and why a cancel culture society, in which anyone can be ostracised from their career, job and friends for expressing not just an opinion, but established facts, is a real and genuine threat to a truly open, free and progressive liberal democracy.
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Joe Warner, Editor-in-Chief, Unfiltered
