Spoiled Papers

Anyone who is committed to a thoroughly class-based analysis does have to question both the treatment of J.K. Rowling as a particular authority on gender issues, and the Labour Party’s offer to meet her. We all know why those things are. But we should make them say it.

Yet only Rowling is in a position to take on the exclusion from the publishing industry of authors who, whatever the subject matter of their work, did not toe the line on gender self-identification. And does she still hold a United States visa? The people who issued those would not see the funny side of an endorsement of the Communist Party.

Nor is that the only side to see. Like several other regular contributors on these matters, Rowling bears more than a passing resemblance to the middle-aged, middle-class women who are conspicuous at trans events. Young men tend to be sceptical of this as much as of #MeToo, as well as tending to be very left-wing economically, and strongly anti-war internationally; all those things are connected.

But behind a small number of mostly older male transvestites march hordes of young women, a large minority but still a minority of whom think that they are men. Alongside those young women march a goodly number of their academic instructors and administrators of the same sex, as such instructors and administrators do now tend to be. Whether she likes it or not, Judith Butler is a woman. By some distance, she is the most cited female academic in the world. And who is citing her? Humanities academia is ever more heavily female.

It is the Conservative Government that is presiding over gender self-identification day in and day out. The whole of the public sector and its vast network of contractors now simply presuppose it. It has come to be treated as already the law only since 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of. This has happened entirely under the Conservatives, and without anything so vulgar as a Commons Division. How about one? Labour is right that the spousal veto has been rendered obsolete by same-sex marriage, which the Conservative Party has presented for a decade as the founding event of its present form.

In December 2022, there was a rare television depiction of Margaret Thatcher. In Prince Andrew: The Musical, she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Of course. Gender self-identification is the inexorable logic of the self-made man or the self-made woman, and a figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show. In a generation’s time, everyone will be saying that Tony Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher. Leo Abse wrote eye-opening books on both.

Still in thrall to one the two most androgynous figures ever to have emerged in British public life, who destroyed the stockades of working-class male employment while creating a new ruling elite of middle-class woman funded and empowered by the State, the Right produces almost none of its own gender critics, and of course ignores the absolute soundness of the Morning Star and of Counterfire on gender self-identification, or the fact that both the Alba Party, and the Workers Party of Britain, have been founded in no small measure because of this issue. Instead, a platform is given to ostensible refugees from a Left from which their economic views had often suggested a dislocation, and their foreign policy views even more so, long before anyone remotely mainstream had ever suggested that human beings could change sex, or that biological sex did not exist.

Knowing their new audience and that it paid a lot better than their old one, and manifesting the fact that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, the permitted voices of gender criticism joined gleefully in the takedown of Jeremy Corbyn, broadly hint that they think that Alex Salmond was a rapist, simply call Julian Assange a rapist in so many words, therefore never miss an opportunity to brand George Galloway “a rape apologist”, and parrot the #IBelieveHer case for the genocide of Gaza, a case that several of them have made for every previous neoconservative war, and most of them for at least one.

Those of a certain age have dusted down the file of lurid allegations that they deployed against white working-class men during the Satanic panic of the Thatcher years, and which have been levelled, practically word for word, against every designated enemy since. They join gleefully in the same treatment of racialised communities in Britain, who are today’s Enemy Within, which is why that status will very soon be enjoyed again by the working class in general and by working-class men in particular, insofar as that has ever ceased to be the case. Keir Starmer’s remarks about Bangladeshis should be understood in that light, as should the failure of Hope Not Hate to condemn them.

In the meantime, and speaking of Hope Not Hate, people whose intersection of sex, class and generation matches the gender critics’ perfectly, and who are usually the same colour as well, expel pro-ceasefire students, send in thugs to give them a beating, connive to revoke their visas, and so on. All while driving out or keeping down the gender critics, and while marching with those who threatened them with extreme violence. Those centrist mums and centrist aunties need to have a word with their own peers.