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Niall Ferguson vs. transgender people

Niall Ferguson is a British-American historian who is a key historical figure in the “anti-woke” movement and is deeply involved in numerous anti-trans initiatives.

Background

Niall Campbell Ferguson was born April 16, 1964. in Glasgow, Scotland. After attending The Glasgow Academy, Ferguson graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford. earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree there. Ferguson earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1989. After teaching at Cambridge and Oxford, Ferguson taught at New York University from 2002 to 2004 and at Harvard from 2004 to 2010. After teaching for a year at London School of Eceonomics.

Ferguson has written a number of books and produced a number of documentaries.

Ferguson has been affiliated with the Hoover Institution since 2005.

Ferguson is close friends with anti-trans activist Andrew Sullivan and married anti-trans activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2011.

In 2021, Ferguson co-founded the University of Austin with Bari Weiss, Pano Kanelos, and Joe Lonsdale.

Anti-trans commentary

Ferguson has made disparaging comments about sex and gender minorities, including saying that economist John Maynard Keynes was indifferent to the future because he was gay and childless. Ferguson later apologized.

In a 2021 speech on “The Future of the Anglosphere,” Ferguson complained about the “alarming trend” of gender fluidity:

“For one of the most alarming trends of our time is the rapid spread throughout the Anglosphere of ideas—anti-racism, critical race theory, gender fluidity—and, worse, practices—safe spaces, trigger warnings, deplatformings, cancelations—that seem fundamentally inimical to precisely those characteristics that were supposed to define the Anglosphere, notably reverence for individual liberty, religious tolerance, and common law.”

In an interview with employer The Free Press, Ferguson complained that the “radical left […] weaponized categories like ‘transgender, a tiny minority of people.”

What happened in the last 10 years was that the radical left, having been entirely defeated in the field of economics, decided to adopt a radical identity politics, aiming to transform our understanding of American history and of today’s American society in a way that was deliberately divisive and hostile to individual identity. It reemphasized racial difference, abandoning the notion that a society could be color-blind. It weaponized categories like “transgender,” a tiny minority of people.

All of these things were calculated to create a new and revolutionary cultural environment. This was achieved to a large extent in many universities, but it didn’t really extend very far. And in fact, when one looks at the polling around the last election, you realize that the left of the Democratic Party on a whole range of issues, like, for example, the rights of transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, diverged so far from mainstream opinion that they were almost off the charts. Mainstream opinion, regardless of whether it was the opinion of a white person or a brown person, hadn’t moved nearly as far on those identity issues as the left wanted to go.

So what has happened isn’t really a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.

In a 2024 piece for The Free Press, Ferguson blamed DEI for trans healthcare for minors:

In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”

References

Alterman, Eric (May 9, 2013). Harvard Professor’s Gay Theory for the World’s Economic Problems Is Nothing If Not Novel. Center for American Progress https://www.americanprogress.org/article/harvard-professors-gay-theory-for-the-worlds-economic-problems-is-nothing-if-not-novel/

Harris, Paul (May 4, 2013). Niall Ferguson apologises for remarks about ‘gay and childless’ Keynes. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/04/niall-ferguson-apologises-gay-keynes

Selected publications by Ferguson

Ferguson, Niall (October 18, 2021). The Future of the Anglosphere. https://www.niallferguson.com/journalism/the-future-of-the-anglosphere

Resources

Niall Ferguson (niallferguson.com)

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

The Free Press (thefp.com)

X/Twitter (x.com)

Facebook (facebook.com)

IMDb (imdb.com)