You can’t sit out the culture wars

As if Judy Murray wasn’t already a national treasure. When the tennis coach, mother of Jamie and Sir Andy, heard about a biological male poised to be awarded tour status by the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association, she tweeted:

The replies are what you might imagine but, refreshingly, Murray has not backed down or issued an apology. It’s important to have people as popular and high-profile as Murray speak out on the undermining of women’s sport. If we left it up to professional bodies and sports journalism, we’d get nothing but an endless stream of platitudes and craven championing of men taking women’s spots. It got me to thinking about who speaks out and why.

In his landmark 2018 essay, Andrew Sullivan warned that ‘We All Live on Campus Now’, that the melange of absurdities taught and practised at US colleges – intersectionality and critical race theory, micro-aggressions and safe spaces – were seeping into the mainstream of American society.