Toddler logic is poisoning politics
September 19, 2025
In the media
I first heard about Kirk’s awful murder in Berlin, where I was at the SEGM conference on clinical approaches to gender distress in young people. A local transactivist group, bent on disruption, had put up an Instagram account to help “know your enemy”, and my face was the first one posted.
There’s black-and-white thinking, and a lack of tolerance for ambiguity. There’s a splitting of the world into good or bad objects, along with an inability to think through the consequences of present actions or to care about the future. There’s a fear of sexual development and reproduction; and a failure to distinguish fervent wants from real needs.