Book Review: In the Beginning, by Simon Edge

a wicked funny satire

Yesterday (Friday, August 18, 2023), I stopped to check the mail before leaving my apartment to run a few errands before going to an appointment.

Amazon had delivered a book I pre-ordered so long ago that I’d forgotten about it.

I started reading it in the parking lot before my appointment, kept on when I get home, and woke up hours before my alarm to continue. It was impossible to put down, earning the rare (from me) accolade of being good enough to make me do things like make up the bed and cook breakfast one-handed.

I’ve just finished it, and I absolutely cannot recommend it highly enough.

In The Beginning uses the case of a woman who spent seven years in Yemen and then returned to the UK—only to find that her perfectly ordinary, mainstream belief that the world is older than 10,000 years has turned her into a far-right-Nazi-adjacent-white-supremacist-bigot. In just seven years, without changing her beliefs at all, Tara Farrier has gone from a mainstream liberal to a YERF — a “Young Earth Rejecting Fascist.”

If this brings to mind the acronym TERF, which officially means “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” but now, depending on context, just means either “person who doesn’t believe that ‘woman’ is a magical gender essence that sometimes ends up in male bodies” or, in certain company, “generic bad person you have to hate and disclaimer that you hate and don’t agree with, even though the vast majority of you do agree with them,” then you’re in on the joke!

It’s a marvelous, brilliantly written satire of the gender ideology cult and the sorts of people who pretend to believe flatly ridiculous things like that “girldicks” exist and who specialize in rank misogyny, pretending to believe (or worse, actually believing) that transwomen who abuse their intimates every couple of weeks are having periods.

For anyone who has followed the progression of gender ideology madness, it will provide a hilarious and welcome respite from despair at the insanity. You will recognize many parallels and real-life counterparts if you’ve followed the news on this at all, but it’s a wonderful, enjoyable book even if you haven’t kept up with the legal cases much.

The best segments, for me, were the “journalism” and “tweets” that the author invented to show how insane beliefs get laundered (credit to Bret Weinstein for that trenchant metaphor) through the academy and media, into public consciousness through the public interactions of those two institutions with the rest of us.

It’s absolutely marvelous and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I couldn’t put it down—literally—and am going to go directly to audible in hope of an audio version as soon as I click publish on this post.

---

About Me: I’m a data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My specialties are presentations that get stakeholders on board by giving them a solid understanding of the math behind recommendations, building custom reporting tools to suit individual client needs, and building/expanding/improving analytic codebases in Python.

About My Substack: My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

Paid subscribers get access to occasional creative writing posts and, starting with part 2 of the Declaration of Independence, have sole access to a journey I am making to educate myself about United States history. The first entry is not paywalled and is accessible here.

I used to be poor, so this Substack has a standing policy: if you want a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email me at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll give you a freebie.

---