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:

No. Not fair at all. Protect women’s sport. Listen to the facts, the scientists and the medics. This is wrong. https://t.co/bFjlfNSg2v

— judy murray (@JudyMurray) August 20, 2022

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. With them they were bringing an aversion to the free exchange of ideas that proliferates in higher education settings, whether in the form of groupthink, self-censorship, ideological monoculture or the impulse to punish and silence dissenting views. This was, Sullivan wrote:

why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society – the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth – are so besieged.

Sullivan has proved to be the Cassandra of our times on this subject. If anything, he underestimated the speed and scope with which the pathologies of the campus would sweep the western world, from governments and corporations to military bureaucracies and scientific and clinical institutions. The successor ideology, which some call wokeism and I call coercive progressivism, has made such advances thanks to four conditions common to liberal societies.

First, the prevalence of elites who resent the institutions they run and the people they serve, who lack the moral or intellectual brawn – the will – to resist ideological capture. These elites are particularly prone to nicethink words and concepts like ‘anti-racism’ and ‘social justice’ and too feeble to challenge progressivism’s authoritarian theories on race and speech.

Second, the immediacy and reach of social media and its role in disseminating and enforcing the new orthodoxies. If academic theory and culture are the malignancy, social media is the lymphatic system through which its cells spread.

Third, a sincere but superficial desire to be tolerant and a concomitant dread of being on the wrong side of history.

Fourth, the wish for a quiet life.

The last one is perhaps the most powerful. Committed ideologues can capture institutions because they, unlike the rest of us, are committed. Where others seek contentment in family, faith, community and leisure, the project is all the ideologue needs. It gives him his purpose and his rewards. It sustains him.

There is something that has been overlooked in all this. It doesn’t detract from Sullivan’s thesis and nor is it grounds for sudden optimism among liberals. It is simply a counter-impulse worth noting. Yes, quietlife-ism is the preponderant ideology among the masses but only up to a point. There is only so far you can push even the most determined quietlife-ist and when you stray over that boundary you can drive a bystander in the culture wars to enlist on the side of your enemy.

Political, social, corporate and cultural elites may live on campus but most of the population does not and has no wish to. They shake their heads at the latest fad or inanity then shrug it off because, honestly, who needs the hassle? They do not think in the stilted, paradigmatic fashion of academics but instinctually, relying on their gut to tell them when something is tolerable and when someone is taking the piss. They know when they are being pushed around and, in some, a bloody-minded antagonism towards bullies overcomes the impulse to keep their head down. They come to realise there is no alternative but to push back.

We are in the pushback phase of what is called the ‘trans rights debate’ but is properly understood as the elite project to impose gender identity ideology, and especially self-identification, with as little debate or scrutiny as possible. Had this been a debate about arranging accommodations in public services, sport, prisons, facilities, and other areas of life for people suffering gender dysphoria, it would have been over long ago and resolved with sensitivity and compassion. It is because the object is not advancing the interests of dysphoria sufferers or accommodating their needs but the raw exercise of elite power.

Of course, there is a determination to make material reality bend to theory but there is also a certain sadism to be savoured. What could be more delicious than writing women out of womanhood and claiming the mantle of feminism as you do it? Who could forgo a wry smile at the thought of women being told both that their sex-based rights are not affected by gender ideology and that they’re bigots for even bringing those rights up? How must it feel to be able to force people to recite mantras (‘trans women are women’) that both you and they know to be untrue?

It is the sadism – the sadism and the bullying and the gleeful harming of women – that have brought about this pushback. It is why so many women who could have settled for a quite life spoke up instead. It is why JK Rowling has gone from beloved author and philanthropist to being listed by BuzzFeed as a ‘major villain’ alongside Nazi collaborator Philippe Petain and Jim Jones, the cult leader who orchestrated a mass-suicide that killed 900 people. Martina Navratilova could have rested on her laurels and her nine Wimbledon singles titles but, as she puts it, it was the promotion of ‘the cotton ceiling’ – the notion that women’s refusal to have sex with trans women is a form of discrimination – that ‘put me over the edge’.

Judy Murray could have concentrated on coaching and using her charity foundation to give more young people the opportunity to take up tennis. But the thought of a biological male being offered a place in golfing set aside for women was evidently too much for her. The campus can come to the mainstream, it can foist its catechisms on us, it can demand submission and punish heresy but there are always going to be people like Judy Murray who are only prepared to be pushed so far.