Misters and Sisters

Is Mridul even a female name? Mr Idul Wadhwa is a biologically intact male without even so much as a gender recognition certificate, making him as plainly and simply a man in a sari as I would be if I were to don such a garment on a stag night, an image that is now in your mind.

Yet Mridul Wadhwa was appointed to a job that was legally reserved for a woman, and without any professional qualification in the field. But appointed by whom? If Wadhwa is a trustee of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, then he is the only man who ever has been. Few of their names have ever screamed “global majority”, either, and their occupations have been as one would have expected. Wadhwa was appointed and protected by middle-aged, middle-class, white women who were practically indistinguishable from the dreaded TERFs. Likewise, the Russell Group has apologised for having sought, “examples of unlawful speech which universities would be expected to take steps to restrict, including antisemitic, Islamophobic or gender critical speech.” And who runs the Russell Group?

Like several other regular contributors on matters of gender identity, J.K. 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 was a Conservative Government that presided over gender self-identification day in and day out. The public sector and its vast network of contractors simply presupposed it. It came to be treated as already the law only after 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of. This happened entirely under the Conservatives. In 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. 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 out loud that Tony Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher. Leo Abse wrote eye-opening books on both.

Still in thrall to one of 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 women 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. At best, they raise no objection to 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. That said, the General Election campaign revived the Enemy Within of the better part of the last decade, and the role of the likes of Hadley Freeman, previously a catwalk correspondent but apparently now a Reith Lecturer in waiting, gives them no right to complain about the lack of impact of the Cass Review.

The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in its entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”

Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism; there would not be enough time left in this Parliament to change the law on that. It was no wonder that Andrew Feinstein stood against the Leader who had turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party, halving his vote.

Yet the EHRC report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the political debate, and those who revel in that sorry fact are therefore in no position to object that the Cass Report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the popular culture in which these matters are decided. The soaps and the nine o’clock flagship dramas are of course filmed long in advance, but things that are broadcast much sooner after completion, or even live, are making it quite clear that that Report is to be filed alongside those Declarations which the anti-vaxxers used to issue to each other and then assume that everyone had heard of them. Through popular culture, it was immediately made a commonplace that Dr Hilary Cass had disregarded 98 per cent of the literature in the field because it had not matched her preordained conclusion.

Now take a look at who controls the cultural sector. People whose intersection of sex, class and generation matches the gender critics’ perfectly, and who are usually the same colour as well, just like the people who expel pro-ceasefire students, who send in thugs to give them a beating, who 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.