Gender

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Gender in schools, election U-turns and the ‘truth’ about Navalny

Home Pupils will be allowed to change gender at school, according to guidance issued by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary; parents would be consulted, unless there was a safeguarding reason not to, and children would have their preferred pronouns used in the classroom. However, children older than eight would still have to use facilities according to their biological sex. A High Court judge dismissed a challenge to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance last April that single-sex lavatories or changing rooms should be used by people of the same biological sex; the EHRC withdrew its guidance in October, and its revised guidance is being considered by the government. The

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The true villains of our TV crime dramas? The creators

Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain.

Mary Wakefield

The poisonous truth about British universities

This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics, but for politicians in the education business too. For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited another professor, Alice Sullivan,

Wednesday

John Power

Foetal femicide has arrived in Britain

Last summer, the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced a clause to the Crime and Policing Bill that will decriminalise all abortions. Enshrining this ‘right’ into law will mean that a mother could end the life of a baby a week, a day or even an hour before it is due to be born, without facing legal consequences. The bill will go to the House of Lords this month. If there had been proper debate over the proposal, rather than introducing it alongside 1,482 other amendments, parliamentarians might have spotted the flaw: the proposed legislation will enable sex-selective abortions. The NHS normally delays the point at which parents are entitled to

Monday

Sean Thomas

The economic purge of the young white male

I can remember when I first realised that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to ‘make it’ – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t mean the normal vicissitudes of a volatile creative industry. I don’t mean actors ‘resting’ or scripts getting stuck in ‘development hell’. I mean that all jobs, and job opportunities, were abruptly vanishing. Applications went nowhere, CVs were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly cancelled. And white men in Hollywood in their twenties or thirties, who had assumed they

Wednesday

Michael Gove

The 'wickedness' of Labour's gender war

48 min listen

This week: After leaked EHRC guidance threw Labour’s position on biological sex into disarray, Michael and Maddie ask whether Bridget Phillipson is deliberately delaying clarity on the law – and why Wes Streeting appears to be retreating from his once ‘gender-critical’ stance. Is Labour quietly preparing to water down long-awaited guidance? And has the return of puberty-blocker trials pushed the culture war back to square one? Then: Shabana Mahmood unveils her first major moves as Home Secretary. But as the Labour left cries foul and legal challenges loom, Michael and Maddie assess whether her plans will really bring order to the asylum system – or whether Labour’s attachment to ‘process

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why men are the disposable sex

I am a proud father. Both my daughters got good degrees. But better still, they smoke, go to pubs and drink Guinness. I suspect they may sometimes drink rosé or prosecco behind my back, but I soldier on. You see, if you are the lone man in an otherwise all-female family, it’s important to make sure overall testosterone levels don’t decline too far. Kanye West found much the same thing when he lived with the Kardashians. It is a man’s ‘job’ to be stupid – to take rapid, risky decisions with high variance outcomes in the hope that they pay off And at least neither of my daughters likes Taylor

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Transgenderism proves people will believe anything

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organisation whose storm troopers comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head round that. Last year, a trove of intra-organisational emails exposed the recklessness of its indiscriminate promotion of ‘gender-affirming care’ (neither affirmative nor

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The truth about the trans school shooter

True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the

Friday

Arabella Byrne

‘Mankeeping’ is the secret of a successful marriage

Don’t women have a bum deal? Not only do we have to bear children and make our way on the harsh plains where second-wave feminism and rampant neoliberal professionalism meet, but apparently now we must also perform ‘emotional labour’ for our husbands. Sorry: husbands and partners. This emotional labour has been christened ‘mankeeping’, the latest feminist buzzword. Dreamed up by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a psychologist at Stanford, it describes the heavy lifting that women in heterosexual relationships do to keep ‘the family harmony alive’.  And it appears to have struck a chord. ‘Mankeeping: finally, a word to describe the emotional labour of my 38-year marriage,’ declared a recent Telegraph headline. ‘Mankeeping – are you your husband’s BFF, therapist and PA? That’s a whole lot of emotional labour women could do without,’ agreed the Times. It’s

Thursday

Toby Young

Let straight white men write novels!

About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in

Thursday

Toby Young

Pride continues to crumble

In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride pudding’. This turned out to be a rainbow-coloured crumble created in honour of Pride month. ‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, and then noticed a large ‘Progress Pride’ flag behind the counter. Oh dear, I thought. That’ll set the cat among the pigeons. Sure enough, a couple of hours later the GC Cons Peers’ WhatsApp group erupted. This is made up of those dinosaurs who style themselves ‘gender critical’ – i.e. they believe sex is biological, binary and immutable. For the uninitiated, the Progress Pride flag features a large, multicoloured chevron

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The war on normality

Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures that ‘defy the binary, change sex and mirror the spectrum of identities found in the human world’. Adults-only tickets are a mere £18.50, so rush to reserve your place now. We’re presumably to conclude from this racy reveal that because some fish can change sex and hermaphroditic undersea organisms are commonplace, for humans sex is

Gareth Roberts

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough

Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was

Lara Brown

The next front in the gender wars

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation. Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity. The semantic contortions

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Can a conclave be secretive? 

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a permanent or habitual quality. I suppose the people who wrote the news bulletins wanted to make it clear that the existence of the conclave was not a secret. But that is not how secret would be used. After all, we benefit from the secret ballot in Britain, but it is not the holding of the

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why don’t men ask questions?

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn. That sounds too passive. ‘Waiting in vain’ doesn’t begin to summon the way mild pique turns first to incredulity, then actual rage and despair at the man’s apparent lack of interest. ‘Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,’ my husband used to observe quite regularly on date nights in our courting days. ‘Is it because

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The gender frenzy has wrecked language

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The hidden violence behind the trans ruling

It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Let men do the housework!

Why are women still allowed to do housework? The question used to bother me during the years of my marriage when housework became a running sore between us. Perhaps the friction was inevitable. I was born in revolutionary times, the 1960s, and my mother taught me and my siblings to cook, clean and wash up for ourselves. We turned out as independent, self-sufficient adults. I would never ask a woman to make me a cup of coffee any more than I’d ask a bumblebee to build me a lighthouse. And doing jobs around the house suits my life as a writer. During the day I take frequent mini-breaks and do