Dr Paul Allen

Understanding Anxiety Some find it helpful to contrast anxiety with fear. Fear and anxiety share many of the same symptoms and cause the same reactions. But fear is focused on a present threat, something right before you, like a rattlesnake slithering on the trail.  Anxiety is focused on a possible threat. Fear focuses on what is happening. Anxiety focuses on what might happen. Fear goes as easily as it comes, once the snake slithers away into the brush. Anxiety is far more slippery, far more diffuse, far more difficult to get behind you. Consider a few definitions of anxiety. The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as a “future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat.”1 The American Psychiatric Association says “Anxiety refers to anticipation of a future concern.”2  And here is perhaps the most helpful definition I’ve seen: “Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. . . . Anxiety is meant to capture attentio...

Five years ago, the Oxford City Council in England cancelled me from giving an academic lecture on transgenderism, complaining that it breached the city’s diversity policy. The organizers had timed my address to coincide with Oxford University’s Hilary Term so students could attend; at my lecture, they would hear an alternative to the dogmas of intersectionality they usually encounter in university courses. My lecture was titled: “Feminism Was Women’s Great Enemy — Until Transgenderism Came Along.” That alone was guaranteed to trigger feminists and transgender people in the city of dreaming spires. So, last week, when I saw that Paris City Hall had cancelled two feminists for their book Transmania: enquête sur les dérives de l’idéologie transgenre (Transmania: An Investigation into the Abuses of Transgender Ideology), I felt a rare sense of solidarity with the sisterhood and asked the authors to send me a copy of their 400-page bombshell book. The Kafkaesque World of Transmania Transge...