Weesht

As begin both Beowulf and, more or less, The Rule of Saint Benedict.

While I warmly applaud The Women Who Wouldn't Weesht, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the middle-aged, middle-class women who are conspicuous at trans events. When, as Ben Sellers would have it of me, "He put himself at the heart of the Corbyn campaign" (how well did it do once it had broken with me?), then I found that it was the boys who were split down the middle on this issue, while the girls thought that there was nothing to discuss; there must have been exceptions, but I never met one. Make what you will of my experience that the same was true of Brexit and of Greenery.

Nearly a decade later, young men tend to be sceptical of gender ideology as much as of #MeToo, as well as 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.

The last Parliamentary Labour Party contained more women than men, and probably every one of those women would have called herself a feminist. All of two were gender critical, with perhaps half a dozen more who were sympathetic. At least one of that half a dozen has retired at this General Election, and at least one of those two would have struggled to have held her seat after the end of the university year even without the Green candidate that she had not faced in 2019.

Of 14 SNP women MPs, again no doubt feminists all, precisely one was gender critical, and both MPs who left the SNP for the Alba Party were men, as the Workers Party's only MP was a man. 10 of the 15 Liberal Democrat MPs, two thirds, were women. Did any of them ever give anyone cause to call her a TERF? Nor did Plaid Cymru's only woman MP. The only Green MP was a woman, and the most likely Green MP this time is a woman. It can never be said too many times that this whole situation has arisen under the Conservatives, of whom it is Penny Mordaunt rather than Kemi Badenoch who is typical.

And so on.

Gender critical feminists need to have a word with their peers.