Queer goings on at The Lancet

I retired from the higher education sector earlier this year having taught for 32 years in four universities. When people ask if I am enjoying retirement, I recount the various things I still do such as PhD supervision, online teaching on overseas courses and editing an academic journal. But I assure them I am enjoying life as, at last, I am free of marking, meetings and staff development.

The last item, staff development, and the products of those ghastly sessions which were evident around me in meetings—my colleagues who had duly been ‘developed’—were driving me to despair. As a writer, editor and someone who did his Eleven-plus (i.e. educated when education was about learning) I am fussy about the use of language.

I never claim perfection in grammar or sentence structure, but I do claim clarity. As my academic career progressed, and especially as the end was near, I witnessed language being mangled almost to the point of incomprehensibility as a seemingly unstoppable stream of corporate cow droppings emanated from those around me. Thus ‘opportunities’ became ‘low-hanging fruit’; ‘consultation’ became ‘running things up the flagpole’; and there was no ‘in future’ as such, instead we were always ‘moving forward’. I would go on, but the ensuing nausea is not worth it. I am sure you can think of your own examples.

This (mis)use of language is an identity issue. Use it, and you are ‘in’; eschew it—as I invariably did—and you are ‘out’. This, I am convinced, is one of the pillars on which the stool (no double entendre intended) of ‘wokeness’ is supported. It may, indeed, be one of the roots of wokeness. In the same vein personnel directors morphed through human resources directors to become ‘directors of people’. They push the woke agenda like their lives depend on it. On interview panels we need to be ‘non-judgemental’ (so how do we differentiate between candidates?). Rather than ensure that you have the right expertise on an interview panel you must have a panel that is ‘representative’. This means that all male panels are out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that an all female panel would be considered a sign of progress. So much better if it is ‘ethnically diverse’. Note that, while it is ‘principles’ that are proclaimed here—ones of equality and diversity—it is language that drives the agenda.

All this brings me nicely to The Lancet. Once the pinnacle of medical publishing, now it is the epitome, even the epicentre, of wokeness in all things medical. Through a linguistic assault, led by the charismatic, ruthless and left-wing editor Richard Horton, it hi-jacked the medical establishment, medical research and medical education to the ‘global health’ agenda. The expression ‘global health’ is entirely meaningless; I should know as I chaired a Lancet Commission and launched a global nursing initiative. But I always struggled to find, let alone, provide a definition of global health. Only in retrospect did I, along with many others, realise that we had been hoodwinked.

In my daily reading of Global Health NOW published by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (I do these things so others are spared) I was alerted to what I first thought might be a spoof article entitled ‘Queering global health: an urgent call for LGBT+ affirmative practice’. I had to investigate and, of course, this was published in The Lancet. The article is, essentially, about inclusiveness and recognising the special needs of people who are LGBT+ and I have absolutely no problem with that. But I am uncertain if it will make their healthcare better or just make them feel recognised while the rest of us adopt to a whole new set of nouns and verbs ensuring that we do not step on any gay, transgender, bisexual…here my knowledge expires…toes.

It gets worse. And the sub-headings are all you need to read. The first one is ‘Do queer lives matter?’ and, of course the answer is ‘yes’. Do they feel so marginalised as to think that anyone reading it thought otherwise? Having drawn in the reader on a mini guilt trip, they then ‘let rip’ with such a flow of woke baloney that, seriously, you just have to laugh. Take the following.

Under one sub-heading ‘Disrupting hetero-cis-normativity’ the question is asked ‘is this journal—and the field of global health—inadvertently, or otherwise, operating from an epistemic position of hetero-cis-normativity?’ I never found out what that means or what the answer was, but I was assured that ‘queerness remains minoritised, particularised and othered’. I think, if I could make sense of it, that I should be relieved that ‘guidelines became more than mere knowledge outputs; they actively destabilised existing orthodoxies in health care and served as key reference points for broader epistemic disruption’.

Next under the sub-heading ‘Colonial continuities of LGBT+ criminalisation’ I was enlightened to learn that ‘Within this vulnerable geopolitical context, the use of progressive, affirmative health-care guidelines is a radical act of resistance against a colonial, archaic, and anti-LGBT+ agenda. We locate our work within these acts of decolonial resistance.’ It seems, as explicated in the section that followed, that some African counties are less than keen on homosexuals (they may not yet have heard of the more exotic varieties of queerness) and, by some convoluted reasoning, it seems that being anti-colonial is one way of combatting this. How, precisely, is not explained but then I may not fully have grasped what the authors were trying to tell me.

The next section—’Cameroon and Nigeria: precarious possibilities’—expands on how these countries have laws that prohibit homosexuality (have they seen what happens to homosexuals in Saudi Arabia?) and the whole ghastly piece ends with the question ‘Can we queer global health?’ to which my answer is ‘be my guest’, from the linguistic perspective, it can’t get any worse.

I thought I would comfort myself by sorting out my post-retirement tax affairs. But, amongst the first set of questions was this one: ‘Does your gender identity match your sex as registered at birth?’ Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. I give up!