As usual an interesting analysis from Kathleen Stock. What, however, she does not identify is the origin of the desire of so many Tory women to take on board the propaganda of Stonewall. The origin lies in Theresa May’s analysis of what was wrong with the Conservative Party in the wake of yet another electoral failure when she denounced the Party at the Party Conference in October 2002 as the “nasty party”. She had recently been appointed as chairwoman of the party and announced:”Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies,”
Following this a push took place to select more women and minority MPs and to ostentatiously demonstrate empathy and general niceness. As a result swathes of the party became suckers for Stonewall’s propaganda and eager to demonstrate support for a supposedly oppressed minority in a way that would, for the most part, not adversely impact their existing consistency. However, the appalling behaviour of the sort of activists that harassed Kathleen Stock and the real world impact on women of self ID has now become sufficiently apparent to ensure that the vapid support for Stonewall policy by women politicians like Penny Mordaunt has resulted in furious backpedaling and a rewriting of history.
While the Conservative party did need to move from its existing base the championing of May resulted in too many of the wrong sort of feminist gaining positions of influence in the party. However, by looking beyond the traditional Tory the party may, perhaps, be renewed in a sane direction by female politicians like Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braveman and, no doubt, others we have yet to hear about. Here’s hoping.
I have the impression that, whilst many women in the party who fell for Stonewall propaganda have realised their mistake, Mordaunt is still hanging on, or was until this selection process taught her (I hope) a few home truths. I suspect that her twin brother James being gay and a LGBTQI+ activist gives her an understandable bias which can’t be expected to go away. I note that he didn’t get mentioned during the selection process but such good manners won’t last!
Claire D
1 year ago
Caroline Nokes, Penny Mordaunt, Maria Miller et al are pro elite women maintaining power and getting as many working, tax-paying hours out of ordinary women that they can under the cover of ‘Equality’. The pretence that they are promoting women’s interests is a lie. Either that or they are intellectually limited.
They do not care about our safety, we have to make them care.
I would suggest you are right just about the “maintaining power” bit, which includes having those juicy quotas in every sphere (those elite women would be least interested in hard STEM subjects, but are the highest beneficiaries of diversity in high level positions in STEM linked professions like IT or banking for instance) and the non monetary but important privilege of proclaiming their victimhood to all, including most men who have not even 1% of their privilege.
But it’s not a nefarious plot to get working hours out of ordinary women. The bottom line is they couldn’t care about any aspect of the lives of those “other” women, or the damage caused to them (or, say, to ordinary blacks or ordinary muslims) by their “progressiveness”.
It may not be a nefarious plot, but nevertheless I think for politicians such as those named above priority is to get the maximum value out of us, the population.
Encouraging women to work work work and put their families second damages individuals, their relationships, families and society.
Yes, agree. We have become ludicrously unhinged on the idea of promoting ‘equality’ at all costs, including the absurd denial that mothers have, for crashingly obvious biological reasons, a special bond with very young children, and should NOT at that age be forced to go out to work (and later outsourcing childcare to someone else at work!). The current approach may sometimes benefit elite women with high powered careers, it certainly doesn’t the great majority.
Of course you could make this policy gender neutral if you wished, and enable young fathers also to look after the babies, but if left to free choice, it would mostly be the mothers doing so.
Last edited 1 year ago by Andrew Fisher
Margaret Donaldson
1 year ago
I will not be voting for Penny Mordant, being one of the many women voters in the Conservative Party and indeed from all parties who are quietly fighting to restore sanity and reason to this ghastly issue. Thank you Kathleen Stock, for your articles, I thoroughly enjoy them and am wholeheartedly in support. It isn’t just about women: it’s about the way reason, logic and language are being subverted to suit a minority and it ends up closing down freedom of speech.
Kemi is my MP. At local hustings she was calm and composed and handled hoards of baying ‘illiberal elite’ demanding the downfall of rich people while not noticing apparently, that they themselves were privately educated, live in extensive homes with offspring at fee paying schools and banking with Cootes whilst waiting for fortuitous inheritance. Very Saffron Walden. But then I contacted her to discuss woeful GP services for mental health and autism provision- or even understanding. I was continually fobbed off with statements of marvellous achievements and strides forward. Certainly not my lived experience or that of the people I work with. Eventually I sold my soul and tested the waters. I let her know that I was invited to interview with The Daily Express- true- and that I would discuss matters with them. Immediately I received an appointment to speak with her. I was, and am, sad about such predictable behaviour. Since discussing, she renegade on offers of a round table discussion with a leading London autism charity and changed the wording to suggest that I had misunderstood. I am deeply afraid that they are all the same, despite desperately wanting this not to be the case.
Stephen Walsh
1 year ago
Whether Prof. Stock likes it or not, it is only within the Conservative Party that any significant pushback on the Trans agenda has occurred. Specifically, this has come from the Right of the party. Morgan, Miller, Greening and Nokes are all on the Left of the party, and their position is entirely in line with the mainstream view in all the parties to the left of the Tories. In countries like Ireland with no strong conservative party, there has been no political pushback whatsoever. Left wing women who have campaigned on this issue in Britain only got a hearing because a few more conservative outlets were willing to publish them. No such outlets exist in Ireland or many other European countries.
More than anyone else in mainstream UK politics, Liz Truss turned the political tide on this issue, when no other figure had the guts to do so. Not surprisingly, she has attracted a very disproportionate amount of the bile directed at the candidates from “progressive” commentators in the MSM and on social media.
I’m glad to hear that Liz Truss has passed GCSE Biology. It’s a shame that she seems to have failed Geography, History, and pretty much every other subject, though.
It’s a clever jibe, but I’m not sure exactly what things she has said to make you say this, but if so she wouldn’t be the first politician to make silly errors of fact.
However the fight back against the Orwellian evil nonsense of identity politics isn’t just another issue. The inability of our using a shared plain language to make sense of the world will simply destroy our society, as it is already well on the way to doing. We already have hoards of kids jumping on this fashionable bandwagon. No, they do NOT own their pronouns of every fact about themselves.
I think there is some truth to this. Stock is right that there was grass-roots organizing by women on the left, but they have really had to get the message out through media that they did not use in the past. Canada is another country where the Conservative party has been weak in the last decade, and there isn’t much of a mainstream right leaning media, and they have really struggled to get any kind of organized resistance going.
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago
I was watching an interview with an Irish woman on C4 news a few days ago, who was lamenting the lack of abortion services in NI since the referendum there in favour of legalising it. She said how disappointed she was, remembering how she thought when the referendum result was announced “it was a great day for…(pause) people with uteruses”.
So this craziness has seeped into the general population.
It’s clearly seeped into whoever C4 News can find to give an opinion.
Melissa Martin
1 year ago
Nadine Dorries.
“The facts are as they are.
Penny refused to even discuss with Kemi & Liz or myself the changes she was proposing to maternity legislation.
I have a whattsapp exchange from when I tried to reach out where Penny again dismisses the issue of erasing the words ‘mother and woman’ and replacing with person instead urging me to focus not on that, but on the positives.
I called her, she told me that the legal position re equalities act meant a woman could not be referred to as a woman or a mother in legislation.
This was untrue.
I appealed to No10 to intervene. I believe that Liz and Kemi did the same thing. When Liz took over the portfolio and following further pressure from the Lords, the wording was altered (back to Mother).”
Last edited 1 year ago by Melissa Martin
Derek Smith
1 year ago
“ Perhaps then, it’s a different and more hidden ideological commitment of Conservatism, individualism, that explains the attraction to self-ID and associated lunacies: explains how both the party generally and some women MPs in particular could have got so thoroughly behind such a radical and damaging set of reforms without blinking at the consequences.”
Partly correct.
Most Conservatives today are more correctly right-leaning liberals. In many ways they are no different from left-leaning liberals. Their basic commitment is to the centrality of the autonomous choosing self above all else. Under Maggie Thatcher, this would have been seen in the ‘yuppies’ and ‘self-made’ businessmen wanting to climb the social ladder. Today it is has evolved and is more ‘internalised’ – no external constraints on my behaviour (even biology must bow to my will) and no unchosen obligations either. All are ‘oppressive’ and limit me from who I most truly am. This is a recipe for the creation of a society of monsters.
I wouldn’t blame Thatcher, though. This goes back far beyond her.
I would and do blame Thatcher. Yes, the liberal sub-culture of unrestrained individualism had a life before and after her, but it was she who let the genie out of the bottle. It’s only a small jump, after all, from the privatisation of public goods to the privatisation of information, truth, and shared reality itself.
But for some reason the Unherd comments section is also the unofficial Maggie Thatcher fan club, so I don’t expect a warm response.
“It’s only a small jump, after all, from the privatisation of public goods to the privatisation of information, truth, and shared reality itself.”
Quite a claim, that is. Care to expand on it at all?
Many ‘public goods’ that were privatised in the 80s and 90s were themselves the product of private enterprise before nationalisation. Does nationalisation of goods then lead to the state controlling information, truth and a shared reality? Sounds a bit sinister to me.
Information is now a very important commodity – it’s the main product of platforms like Facebook, just as one example.
The claim that everything should be mediated through the market ends up destroying other institutions and values – motherhood, DNA, your personal data, even abstract probabilities.
Whatever that is, it is certainly in no way conservative. It’s really liberalism which has infected almost all the major political parties in at least the English speaking west.
This criticism of liberalism is fair enough as far as it goes, but for the seemingly endlessly complacent attitude to the STATE controlling all this information, instead! The state has a monopoly of power, including physical coercive force, and Google doesn’t – at least not yet. Be careful we don’t go down the China road, towards which we’ve already started, especially during covid.
As one of the ‘enemy within’ I have no brief for Thatcher, but it seems that for many people today all things prior to Her manifested as part of the historically determined process of dilectical materialism, while She somehow sprang spontaneously into existence, unlinked to anything that went before (especially the ‘post-war consensus’ and ‘winter of discontent’) but responsible for all evils thereafter.
Erm, I’d say it was the biggest jump imaginable! In any case it is an absurd caricature of Thatcher, who can’t really at the same time be accused of being a bigoted social conservative (as she is by many) and some sort of forerunner of identity politics! Of course one thing leads to another in an unpredictable way (our attempts at prediction are usually way off) but the word ‘blame’ for that is misapplied. You seem to have a problem with the notion of private goods; of course as history shows collectivising them all has much better outcomes……….
I suppose it was obvious however that at some point some leftwinger would have the brainwave of blaming the Tories, or some Tories, for the evil of identity politics, along with closing the coal mines etc! (Wouldn’t it be great if people actually tried to genuinely understand why ordinary people do vote for the Conservatives? Blair did at least get this).
There are sins of commission, which in this cultural area are carried out overwhelmingly by the Left, which certainly has the drive and determination to endlessly canvass more and more ‘oppressions’ and to capture institutions. The sins of the Right, except for a very few ideologues who have no cultural purchase at all, are largely ones of omission. Yes, the somewhat stupid and complacent but sometimes electorally savvy Tory Party does pick up on fashionable cultural issues, without always realising their implications. Then there is the the fact that most people simply aren’t interested in these (what they would see as nutty) issues until perhaps it is too late. Conservatives generally are much less obsessed with politics, which is both a strength and a weakness.
In the 1950s I read a short story in a book of SciFi stories. It was about a planet humans had colonised and lived inside a dome. Externalley the ‘locals’ were savage and deadly so the humans brought up their children to be savage and deadly in order to exterminate the “locals” ………..nuff said?
Last edited 1 year ago by Jane Williams
Malcolm Knott
1 year ago
I agree with every word of this apart from the side reference to ‘scandalously low rape conviction rates.’
We have trial by jury in this country. Often, when faced with two conflicting accounts of what happened on an alcohol-fuelled encounter some months earlier, juries are not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the woman withheld consent to sex, whatever she may have said, or persuaded herself, the following morning. This is so, even when many of the jurors are women. This will happen, in fact, with any alleged crime, when the verdict turns on the conflicting oral evidence of just two people, the accuser and the accused.
To increase rape convictions you would need to bend the rules of evidence, for example by allowing the prosecution to cross examine the defendant but not allowing the defence to cross examine the complainant. Is that really the sort of change you want? Is that what you would want for your son, if he was accused?
Indeed. Target-based public institutions (aka creating problems where there is none to solve imaginary issues) was something started by the Blairite Trotskyites.
Calling Blairites ‘Trotskyites’ is just pretty stupid name calling. On what conceivable basis, knowing anything about Bolshevism or Trotskyism, could you say this? We are trying to get some precision back in the use of language – especially ‘women’ and ‘men’ and this sort of thing does nothing to advance public discourse, or indeed persuade anyone of your arguments.
Of course that’s probably not the point, it is instead to show to friends and opponents alike which tribe (herd?) you belong to….
I am glad you pushed back on this Malcolm as I too was not comfortable with this assertion. In Australia I understand that many of the cases that would normally not proceed to Court now do, as they have taken away the police work that would normally sort the wheat from the chaff. So more cases go through with very little evidence hence eschewing the statistics – making it look like there are low rape convictions.
A friend of mine recently sat on sat on a jury. The case started as a 9 year old rape allegation then changed to a six year allegation of sex with a minor (she claimed she was 15 at the time) but no one was able to identify when the act allegedly took place.
The case should clearly never have reach trial and the judge should never have allowed the case to go to a jury. “Your tears speak more eloquently than real evidence ever could” springs to mind
I agree. We should be encouraging women to report allegations to the Police. But anyone thinking women never lie or juries are unnecessary should watch Amber Heard’s extraordinary performance & remind themselves that although a single male Judge was fooled by her, a jury wasn’t.
The fact that rape convictions are low in many countries with different kinds of governments suggests that it isn’t really their policies that are the problem.
I suspect that a significant issue is that increased use of technology actually makes it harder to give juries enough information they feel sure about.
I was on a jury in a trial where GBH was allegedly committed by the defendant in two nearby locations – one shortly after the other.
The first was caught on CCTV, and the second was witnessed by multiple reliable witnesses (including an off-duty policeman)
I was very disappointed when the jury refused to find the defendant guilty of the second count.
Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Barton
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
The moral of the story: before jumping on a bandwagon, think carefully about where it is going and who your potential fellow travellers would be. Use your own morals and intellect to deduce where you stand, don’t take evidence at face value just because it is presented by people who sound credible and nice. Do your own research, and follow the money. Think very carefully before staking out your position, and be prepared to change it if the facts, or your understanding or analysis of the facts, change. But stand your ground. Try to avoid attempting to answer enormously complex questions with simplified, morally unambiguous answers. Be humble, be kind, but be courageous and say what you *really* think. Try to keep your ego under control, and get comfortable with it being vulnerable and occasionally hurt. Avoid getting too attached to popular narratives. Don’t be afraid of searching for and speaking uncomfortable truths, or of becoming temporarily unpopular in some circles. You cannot please everyone all of the time.
We sometimes castigate our politicians and other leaders for being dimwitted charlatans. But, in reality, I believe the vast majority of them are actually capable of doing everything above, and more, if they really wanted to. Those who orient themselves towards this authentic approach to politics will, I hope and believe, be able to gain and maintain broad-based support over the medium to long term, and might even do some good in the world.
“ before jumping on a bandwagon, think carefully”. That assumes any thinking has taken place. I suggest this is largely a cultural, subconscious process.
True. But that was, in part, the point I was making – before reacting, try and think (ideally, carefully) and be conscious of your words and actions, rather being washed away by the subconscious cultural processes. That requires strong individuals who know themselves well. The optimist in me believes that most if not all of us – including our politicians – can find that strength and self-knowledge if we look for it.
A leopard does not change its spots. The people she now opposes were her erstwhile colleagues and save for this one issue there is not a fag paper between them.
Julian Farrows
1 year ago
The best way to deal with these people is to refer to them as the opposite gender. If they complain, ask them what it is exactly that makes them awoman. They can’t argue back unless they refute their own logic.
Unfortunately once you enter the realm of believing absurd things there is no difficulty refuting your logic. They identify as women and feel like women just like their trans sisters. No need to refer to the fact that they are also uterus havers. I am what I believe I am is the song they sing.
Frankly, not worth the effort of engaging in these sorts of discussions – you are not going to persuade them with clever language … although it is fun bating them 🙂
I wish UnHerd had a ‘cried laughing’ emoji as well as + -. The seriousness of it all makes me rather hysterical. In the words of the song : I’m glad I’m not young anymore.
Have you tried this? It’s an interesting idea. Perhaps useful on the virtue signalling class. Surely if you are subjectivity perceiving a her as a him, they cannot deny you ‘your truth’? Or something. Pity I’d get sacked if I gave this a go; I’m sure it would be hilarious.
I’m a British student pursuing a doctorate degree in Education in the US. I’m swamped in this stuff, but I’m given lots of leeway because I have outsider ‘immunity’. Two things I’ve noticed in the US: people can’t separate entertaining an opinion from actually holding an opinion, and secondly Americans are completely disarmed by polite but firm disagreement. IMO most people here have a hard time reaching consensus with ‘enemies’ and have a winner-takes-all mentality.
I tell anyone who calls me a “CIS” male that I will report that as a misgendering hate crime. Using THEIR weapons against the is delicious.
William Shaw
1 year ago
“The Tories were in power, but the Opposition offered no hope of relief either – for Labour and the Liberal Democrats enthusiastically agreed with the reforms too.”
Sort of makes the headline meaningless doesn’t it…
Also, aren’t Nicola Stugeon and the SNP supporters?
Maybe the headline should have been Do Any Political Parties Care About Women?
AC Harper
1 year ago
Do the Tories care about women? No. They don’t care about men either.
Like most other parties the Tories care about politics and ordinary people are just fodder for manipulation. It is perhaps a category error to view politics through a non-political lens.
Nigel Watson
1 year ago
It’s no surprise that Mordaunt is supportive of the transgender agenda. She had Bill Gates write her foreword for her book, so she’s probably supportive of transhumanism too. #transhumanism and #transgender have more in common than you might first imagine. https://odysee.com/@nigelwatson19:3/TRANSHUMANISM—TRANSGENDER-ARE-THE-SAME-AGENDA!:3
A key to understanding how and why Tory ladies could have bought into the trans-woke-ideology is to realise how sub-conscious the whole process is.
They will not have noticed that identity-politics had invaded their brain and now forces them to see the world in terms of oppressed groups.
Ths ‘oppression hierarchy’ has trans people near the top, so the kind, understanding, caring person naturally wants to help them.
As this process has mostly happened at the cultural, background, sub-conscious level, the individuals involved have not really ‘decided’ to adopt these ideas. They have not, therefore, gone though the normal mental process of spotting the inevitable side-effects of their actions. Hence the fact that Mordaunt is regning back and denying she said such things.
It seems to be easier for an outsider, like Kemi Badenoch or Konstantin Kisin to notice these things
Arkadian X
1 year ago
It has been mentioned elsewhere before: it all probably started decades ago, but more recently it was Cameron and gay marriage, so as a consequence some/many/all in the Tory party (just like the SNP) thought this would be an easy win to show how progressive indeed the party had become. Then there was an uh-oh when SOME realized this wasn’t such a vote winner.
Marriage was always a way to attach men to children. Now we can do that with 100% accuracy it’s time for the legal institution of marriage to be consigned to history for all to achieve equality. Have whatever ritual you want to celebrate a loving couple of either sex, and enforce responsibility on fathers, but legal marriage is about the Law, and inheritance,not about love!
Not the sort of thing people in long-term happy marriages say. Let’s be honest. If you want to dismantle a proven structure of commitment and sacrifice for one compatible with whatever your feelings are at the moment. Feel free. But don’t force others to dive into your pool of eventual misery.
That sums up the problem with fatherhood as defined today.
It’s not about having the right to spend time with your kids, enjoying their company, helping to bring them up properly, reaching them to be responsible.
Nope, it’s about “enforcing” responsibility, or in other words pay up but you are otherwise not needed (as the African American has showed us) and can be cut off from all access at your wife’s whim and fancy post divorce.
In other words, not “responsibility”, tax. And people figure out how to stop paying tax one way or the other.
It is still odd to think that these policies have worked their way into every crevice of public life in the last decade of Tory government. I think, charitably, that a lot of well meaning people want to appear compassionate and if also deperate to appear on trend with polite company, will go along with anything for a quiet life.
Arkadian X
1 year ago
“the victims of Chris Pincher”
Perhaps we should use different words depending on the alleged offense. If everyone is a victim we are in the Orwellian world you decry.
I know… That’s the other word.
I am a survivor too as I have managed not to die in the deadly heatwave.
John Tyler
1 year ago
“The tories” is term that is fairly meaningless for any discussion of a socio-philosophical issue. No political party or movement has a single standpoint on anything. In fact, I would think the Conservative Party is currently demonstrably split on just about every issue under the sun!
I’m completely unclear on what it is they wish to conserve.
Is it a language, a church, a countryside, an historical tradition? Do they care if British companies are owned by foreign ones? Do they care if an ex-KGB man owns a national newspaper?
Come on, somebody, tell me what ‘conservatives’ want to conserve.
Patrick Tuite
1 year ago
I think you are guilty of stereotyping a bit – there is real hope in women like Kemi Badenoch.
I used to think that. Alas no more. There is no point putting any faith in the Tory party. They are self-serving as always but in a different paradigm.
Margaret TC
1 year ago
Many thanks for this back history Kathleen. I’d just underline what you say about the commitee — ‘most of the Committee still had no real understanding of the potential impacts of gender law reform on the interests of women and girls’ — since it could be said of so many in various institutions who more or less sleep walked into this ideology, no doubt out of a desire/need to do the right thing. Not wishing to cause offence they allowed real harm to be done. The other point worth making is that those women you mention who have been so effective in resisting the ideology have been left politically ‘homeless’ because of the almost total capture of the Labour party.
MJ Reid
1 year ago
It is interesting that, from a Scottish perspective, the SNP have been shouting down self id in Westminster because the Tories suggested it, and yet in Scotland, they are promoting a self id bill. Hopefully the bill in Westminster will disappear up its own orifice, but in Scotland, men will continue to run rape crisis centres and take women’s spaces in sport. Why? Because Nicola Stonewall Sturgeon says transwomen are women and facts mean nowt.
Harry Child
1 year ago
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” Euripides (c. 485-406 B.C.) :or an earlier version ——- he first deprives of reason. Outside of the heated hysteria of the media I see loads of people just getting on with their lives.
So I thought until I looked up the saying on the internet which gave the following examples
“The saying Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, sometimes given in Latin as Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (literally: Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason, or or Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius replaces God or gods with Jupiter. You have a choice
And women getting on with their lives will be severely affected although because they’re not elite women nobody cares. Men in womens prisons, many of whom have committed horrific sexual crimes against women and children are in U.K. womens prisons now. Impregnating women prisoners almost all of whom have experienced awful treatment at the hands of men in their families. Working class care workers with clients with disabilities trying to help them in a toilet with a man LARPing as a woman looking on. Seriously ill women in hospital with catheters etc and a man in the next bed. Elderly women expecting a female carer to help them in their home and getting a man in a nurses uniform. I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.
The transactivists told us to “educate ourselves “ and we did…….Women will be back to the urinary leash, Moslem and Orthodox Jewish women particularly affected. Wake all those men who say there are more important things to worry about. Not for this woman, this is the hill I will die on!
“Men in womens prisons, many of whom have committed horrific sexual crimes against women and children are in U.K. womens prisons now. Impregnating women prisoners almost all of whom have experienced awful treatment at the hands of men in their families.” You do not know any of this is true “Working class care workers with clients with disabilities trying to help them in a toilet with a man LARPing as a woman looking on.” In the scheme of things this is not the biggest issue and why are only working class careers affected. “Seriously ill women in hospital with catheters etc and a man in the next bed. Elderly women expecting a female carer to help them in their home and getting a man in a nurses uniform. I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.” I will not even start on the indignities that are heaped on male patients in our health care system. “I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.” I know the abuse that generations of boys have suffered at the hands of a female dominated education system. “Women will be back to the urinary leash, Moslem and Orthodox Jewish women particularly affected.” precisely how do you reckon that one? “Wake all those men who say there are more important things to worry about. Not for this woman, this is the hill I will die on!” You built the hill and you are welcome to it
To paraphrase The Godfather, men can afford to be foolish about this, women & children cannot. Giving males who demand it female levels of access to females & infants is popular with exactly the type of men you would expect. They generally try to stifle dissent with accusations of hysteria.
Good luck with that.
polidori redux
1 year ago
I hope that the Tory Party elects Penny Mordaunt. Well, let’s get it over with.
When you are in the grip of the near certain conviction that you are going insane, you will double down in order to persuade yourself that it really does all make sense. Self-ID is of a piece with the Party’s Net Zero lunacy.
The Party needs to go The Full Monty before we can call in the men in white coats.
I thought the same thing about the Lib Dems and Layla Moran. But where they swerved total lunacy to cling on as a semi-respectable party, so the Tories may actually take the leap and elect this person. Still not as bad as the appalling Tugenhat or Hunt, but that is very small mercy.
Gordon Black
1 year ago
Yesterday, when I saw the last four candidates for Prime Minister my thought was ‘… indifferent to half the population’. This morning, opening this essay, the photo caption is ‘ … indifferent to half the population’. Is the Tory Party indifferent to everybody?
Antony Hirst
1 year ago
They are working from the build back better script handed to them. They are mearly campaigning for perks and riches. It makes no difference who wins.
Last edited 1 year ago by Antony Hirst
Dougie Undersub
1 year ago
Is Mordaunt’s current difficulty a tribute to the lefty “grassroots women’s resistance” or the common sense of the grassroots Tory Party membership, to whom Penny suddenly has to genuflect?
…the second, obviously. If she wants to be PM, she can’t prioritise being the “Tame Tory” at trendy Islington “kitchen suppers” any more…
Maureen Finucane
1 year ago
Trans women’s rights simply are not the same as women’s rights. Do they need maternity care and maternity leave? Do they need access to safe abortion? Do they need cervical smears, testing for breast cancer and other female medical conditions that are exclusive to biological women. So why lump them in with biological females?
R S Foster
1 year ago
…I suspect that because of their physical, social and cultural closeness to the metropolitan chattering classes SOME Tory MPs, hailing from, and representing, the more “progressive” areas of the Country…might be swallowing this tripe wholesale…especially if none too bright (Step forward Ms Mordaunt)…with a rather larger number making the right noises…
…however, I’m remain sure that most of them…and practically all of their supporters…can readily tell the difference between an actual Woman…and a bloke in a frock called Trevor with a rather peculiar disposition…
…I am pretty much certain that practically ALL Labour MP’s buy into this egregious nonsense wholesale, and those that don’t will be very careful not to breach “party discipline” or “solidarity” by letting their views be known.
And furthermore the modern Labour Party is much more inclined to treat its own supporters as an irritation and an embarassment than most local Conservative Associations would tolerate…bear in mind just how ready they were to impose a second referendum on their many Brexit-voting supporters…and to give full throated backing to an anti-British anti-Semite, despite the quiet patriotism of vast numbers of “Flag,Faith and Family” Labour folk…
…in the end Women’s rights will be safer with people of a conservative disposition who vote Tory…than with any representative of a party now pretty much wholly dominated by Woke Social Justice Warriors at the most demented end of a spectrum that starts at “completely crackers” and rapidly becomes more unhinged week by week…
Last edited 1 year ago by R S Foster
Iris C
1 year ago
It is time the Ministry for Women and Equality was scrapped.. They have to look for something to do and we have ended up with all this gender palaver. Think of the saving that would be made if the whole department was scrapped. It is the private sector that always has to lift the tab when bureaucracy is expanded. . .
Last edited 1 year ago by Iris C
Mark Whitehead
1 year ago
Hi Kathleen, very interesting piece. You seem to be arguing that logically speaking the trans ideology ought to appeal more to people on the right than the left and you describe clearly how some Tory women were vigorously promoting it, albeit now furiously backpeddling. Absolutely. However, one’s perception is that generally speaking trans ideology has been taken up much more forcefully by the left, in particular Labour Party leaders and activists (cf pictures of “left wing” Jeremy Corbyn hugging a tranny, leadership candidates unable to say what a woman is, Angela Rayner’s recent comments etc.). Not only the LP though – I noticed that the Socialist Workers Party are also to be seen prominently at pro-trans demos with their placards. The “right”, more generally, have been better defenders of scientific fact regarding the human (sexual) species – this appears to be especially true in the US. So there is a paradox here: the trans ideology is a very right-wing, hyper individualistic ideology. Why would it appeal to so-called left-wingers? Your suggestion that it’s because left wingers like “sexily complicated-sounding ideology, and partly as an attraction to reforming existing cultural traditions generally” certainly rings true but surely cannot be the full answer. I would suggest the following: On the left there is a very fundamental split between “idealists” (who put ideas above material reality) and “materialists” (the other way round. Or more precisely posit a dialectical relationship between the two). Non-marxist left wingers are inclined to embrace what seems like an “inclusive” and “kind” attitude towards the trans ideology without question. Marxists on the other hand would reject as anti-scientific the idea that a human can change their sex and would take into account how “trans rights” threatens the rights of others ie women. So for “left wingers” read “social democratic left wing idealists”. Or something like that, what do you think?
Jeremy Poynton
1 year ago
Ms. Stock. Don’t confuse the official PARTY with conservative people. All of whom deplore what is happening.
Fraser Bailey
1 year ago
I guess one might describe Penny Mourdant as a ‘debating person’.
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Bring back Boris, all is forgiven!
John William
1 year ago
ABM (Anyone But Mordaunt).
We have just got rid of one liar, don’t want another.
Last edited 1 year ago by John William
Christine Hankinson
1 year ago
Surely the biggest gaff, and it made me step well back from the Lib dems as I was disillusioned by Labour…was Swinsons 2019 election bid where she was very confident that trans ideology was popular:
Gender self-identification largely existed at the moment, she said, and her party’s proposed changes would “formalise” this and “remove existing barriers that end up creating discrimination on a very vulnerable group of people”.
She said women needed protection from those acting in a predatory or anti-social way. But she did not want to get to a place where women had to have swipe cards to access female changing rooms in leisure facilities or there had to be some public “inspections” of gender.
During her Today interview, she said that while she was a feminist she did not believe in “some hierarchy of equality”.
“Implicit in all of this is an assumption that trans women are, in some way, more likely to be violent. It is just not borne out. I think there is a demonisation of a community going on here and I often find the media is complicit in that.”
What are the other parties proposing?
Labour says it is also committed to reforming the 2004 Act, which it introduced, to introduce self-declaration for transgender people.
It is promising to take action to eliminate remaining areas of discrimination in the law, including mandatory LGBT+ inclusive relationships and sex education lessons in school.
There is no specific mention of the Gender Recognition Act in the Conservative manifesto. The party says it is committed to “vigorously combating” harassment and violence against LGBT people and hosting the UK government’s first ever LGBT international conference.
The Green Party also want to update the act and remove the “spousal veto”.
So I am surprised that it was apparently coming from the conservatives.
And hurrah for Liz Truss. She got a ppe at Oxford but her geography at Leeds comprehensive was obvounot good enough.
Jonathan Story
1 year ago
I would suggest that there is no point in asking the articles’ lead question. The Gender Act was passed under May’s Premiership, ad was the Surrender Act. Says it all : the worst PM this country has ever had. Unable to distinguish fact from fiction and guilty of treachery to boot.
Kirsten Walstedt
1 year ago
Brava! We need you and more women to keep speaking out about this.
Maureen Finucane
1 year ago
The Telegraph reported a man in the changing rooms of a big store covertly filming a woman undressing. Presumably he was there as the store gave him permission to enter. These are the crimes that women will be exposed to.
M. Jamieson
1 year ago
I’m not sure this is Stock’s best piece. I think she’s been too kind to the left and a little unreasonable in her approach to the right.
Things like “the disproportionate effect of cost of living problems for women”. In many ways that is the kind of thinking that gets the left into these identarian problems in the first place. Yes, more women may be poor, and so it may in that gross sense affect more women. But in truth COL issues affect all kinds of people because for all kinds of reasons they are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Women aren’t more important because you can group them together in a bloc. If it is a problem for society to deal with, it’s just as much on account of the white males struggling with COL as the women or any other minority group.
I mean just think, would anyone say, oh, who cares if white men are screwed because of this policy approach, they don’t count as an oppressed class. Screw them. Which is the flip side of the idea that we should care because it affects a lot of women. We can gain useful information by looking at all kinds of demographic analysis, and it can inform policy, but that’s quite different than this values approach.
The main reason some Tory politicians fell prey to the thinking on self-id is because they fell prey to this type of thinking which came from identarian sources just like their counterparts in Labour, and because they were desperate to look like they were open-minded. The vast majority of regular people of most political persuasions saw that it was problematic early on or when the scope of it became clear.
Problem is the UK has never had a real female woman as PM. Liz Truss won’t change that: but Penny Mordaunt might.. ouch! I just got stuck with a pitchfork there..
…an unfair jibe at Margaret Thatcher…she was much fancied amongst the UK political class, most famously by Alan Clark (a notorious swordsman in his day)…but also admired by such unlikely figures as Ken Livingstone! And although I forget the details, at least one of her European antagonists described her eyes and lips as “seductive..!”…and she certainly made a very considerable impression on both Reagan and Gorbachev…
As usual an interesting analysis from Kathleen Stock. What, however, she does not identify is the origin of the desire of so many Tory women to take on board the propaganda of Stonewall. The origin lies in Theresa May’s analysis of what was wrong with the Conservative Party in the wake of yet another electoral failure when she denounced the Party at the Party Conference in October 2002 as the “nasty party”. She had recently been appointed as chairwoman of the party and announced:”Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies,”
Following this a push took place to select more women and minority MPs and to ostentatiously demonstrate empathy and general niceness. As a result swathes of the party became suckers for Stonewall’s propaganda and eager to demonstrate support for a supposedly oppressed minority in a way that would, for the most part, not adversely impact their existing consistency. However, the appalling behaviour of the sort of activists that harassed Kathleen Stock and the real world impact on women of self ID has now become sufficiently apparent to ensure that the vapid support for Stonewall policy by women politicians like Penny Mordaunt has resulted in furious backpedaling and a rewriting of history.
While the Conservative party did need to move from its existing base the championing of May resulted in too many of the wrong sort of feminist gaining positions of influence in the party. However, by looking beyond the traditional Tory the party may, perhaps, be renewed in a sane direction by female politicians like Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braveman and, no doubt, others we have yet to hear about. Here’s hoping.
“
Indeed.
Of course, the politician who actually did broaden their voter base was Johnson.
I have the impression that, whilst many women in the party who fell for Stonewall propaganda have realised their mistake, Mordaunt is still hanging on, or was until this selection process taught her (I hope) a few home truths. I suspect that her twin brother James being gay and a LGBTQI+ activist gives her an understandable bias which can’t be expected to go away. I note that he didn’t get mentioned during the selection process but such good manners won’t last!
Caroline Nokes, Penny Mordaunt, Maria Miller et al are pro elite women maintaining power and getting as many working, tax-paying hours out of ordinary women that they can under the cover of ‘Equality’. The pretence that they are promoting women’s interests is a lie. Either that or they are intellectually limited.
They do not care about our safety, we have to make them care.
I would only disagree with you in so far as the options you present are neither a binary choice nor mutually exclusive.
True.
I would suggest you are right just about the “maintaining power” bit, which includes having those juicy quotas in every sphere (those elite women would be least interested in hard STEM subjects, but are the highest beneficiaries of diversity in high level positions in STEM linked professions like IT or banking for instance) and the non monetary but important privilege of proclaiming their victimhood to all, including most men who have not even 1% of their privilege.
But it’s not a nefarious plot to get working hours out of ordinary women. The bottom line is they couldn’t care about any aspect of the lives of those “other” women, or the damage caused to them (or, say, to ordinary blacks or ordinary muslims) by their “progressiveness”.
It may not be a nefarious plot, but nevertheless I think for politicians such as those named above priority is to get the maximum value out of us, the population.
Encouraging women to work work work and put their families second damages individuals, their relationships, families and society.
Yes, agree. We have become ludicrously unhinged on the idea of promoting ‘equality’ at all costs, including the absurd denial that mothers have, for crashingly obvious biological reasons, a special bond with very young children, and should NOT at that age be forced to go out to work (and later outsourcing childcare to someone else at work!). The current approach may sometimes benefit elite women with high powered careers, it certainly doesn’t the great majority.
Of course you could make this policy gender neutral if you wished, and enable young fathers also to look after the babies, but if left to free choice, it would mostly be the mothers doing so.
I will not be voting for Penny Mordant, being one of the many women voters in the Conservative Party and indeed from all parties who are quietly fighting to restore sanity and reason to this ghastly issue. Thank you Kathleen Stock, for your articles, I thoroughly enjoy them and am wholeheartedly in support. It isn’t just about women: it’s about the way reason, logic and language are being subverted to suit a minority and it ends up closing down freedom of speech.
Kemi for PM!
Erm … nope!
Well I up voted you
Ms. Badenoch is out. Lost opportunity.
If whoever wins has any sense she will be Home Secretary
She’s gone. Suprise suprise. She was talking a dangerous amount of sense.
Now its simply a case of ‘what mask would you like your train driver to wear as they take you along the preordained journey’
Kemi is my MP. At local hustings she was calm and composed and handled hoards of baying ‘illiberal elite’ demanding the downfall of rich people while not noticing apparently, that they themselves were privately educated, live in extensive homes with offspring at fee paying schools and banking with Cootes whilst waiting for fortuitous inheritance. Very Saffron Walden. But then I contacted her to discuss woeful GP services for mental health and autism provision- or even understanding. I was continually fobbed off with statements of marvellous achievements and strides forward. Certainly not my lived experience or that of the people I work with. Eventually I sold my soul and tested the waters. I let her know that I was invited to interview with The Daily Express- true- and that I would discuss matters with them. Immediately I received an appointment to speak with her. I was, and am, sad about such predictable behaviour. Since discussing, she renegade on offers of a round table discussion with a leading London autism charity and changed the wording to suggest that I had misunderstood. I am deeply afraid that they are all the same, despite desperately wanting this not to be the case.
Whether Prof. Stock likes it or not, it is only within the Conservative Party that any significant pushback on the Trans agenda has occurred. Specifically, this has come from the Right of the party. Morgan, Miller, Greening and Nokes are all on the Left of the party, and their position is entirely in line with the mainstream view in all the parties to the left of the Tories. In countries like Ireland with no strong conservative party, there has been no political pushback whatsoever. Left wing women who have campaigned on this issue in Britain only got a hearing because a few more conservative outlets were willing to publish them. No such outlets exist in Ireland or many other European countries.
More than anyone else in mainstream UK politics, Liz Truss turned the political tide on this issue, when no other figure had the guts to do so. Not surprisingly, she has attracted a very disproportionate amount of the bile directed at the candidates from “progressive” commentators in the MSM and on social media.
I’m glad to hear that Liz Truss has passed GCSE Biology. It’s a shame that she seems to have failed Geography, History, and pretty much every other subject, though.
Is it the Baltic or the Black Sea?
It’s a clever jibe, but I’m not sure exactly what things she has said to make you say this, but if so she wouldn’t be the first politician to make silly errors of fact.
However the fight back against the Orwellian evil nonsense of identity politics isn’t just another issue. The inability of our using a shared plain language to make sense of the world will simply destroy our society, as it is already well on the way to doing. We already have hoards of kids jumping on this fashionable bandwagon. No, they do NOT own their pronouns of every fact about themselves.
I think there is some truth to this. Stock is right that there was grass-roots organizing by women on the left, but they have really had to get the message out through media that they did not use in the past. Canada is another country where the Conservative party has been weak in the last decade, and there isn’t much of a mainstream right leaning media, and they have really struggled to get any kind of organized resistance going.
I was watching an interview with an Irish woman on C4 news a few days ago, who was lamenting the lack of abortion services in NI since the referendum there in favour of legalising it. She said how disappointed she was, remembering how she thought when the referendum result was announced “it was a great day for…(pause) people with uteruses”.
So this craziness has seeped into the general population.
Especially to those who manage to get any publicity.
It’s clearly seeped into whoever C4 News can find to give an opinion.
Nadine Dorries.
“The facts are as they are.
Penny refused to even discuss with Kemi & Liz or myself the changes she was proposing to maternity legislation.
I have a whattsapp exchange from when I tried to reach out where Penny again dismisses the issue of erasing the words ‘mother and woman’ and replacing with person instead urging me to focus not on that, but on the positives.
I called her, she told me that the legal position re equalities act meant a woman could not be referred to as a woman or a mother in legislation.
This was untrue.
I appealed to No10 to intervene. I believe that Liz and Kemi did the same thing. When Liz took over the portfolio and following further pressure from the Lords, the wording was altered (back to Mother).”
“ Perhaps then, it’s a different and more hidden ideological commitment of Conservatism, individualism, that explains the attraction to self-ID and associated lunacies: explains how both the party generally and some women MPs in particular could have got so thoroughly behind such a radical and damaging set of reforms without blinking at the consequences.”
Partly correct.
Most Conservatives today are more correctly right-leaning liberals. In many ways they are no different from left-leaning liberals. Their basic commitment is to the centrality of the autonomous choosing self above all else. Under Maggie Thatcher, this would have been seen in the ‘yuppies’ and ‘self-made’ businessmen wanting to climb the social ladder. Today it is has evolved and is more ‘internalised’ – no external constraints on my behaviour (even biology must bow to my will) and no unchosen obligations either. All are ‘oppressive’ and limit me from who I most truly am. This is a recipe for the creation of a society of monsters.
I wouldn’t blame Thatcher, though. This goes back far beyond her.
I would and do blame Thatcher. Yes, the liberal sub-culture of unrestrained individualism had a life before and after her, but it was she who let the genie out of the bottle. It’s only a small jump, after all, from the privatisation of public goods to the privatisation of information, truth, and shared reality itself.
But for some reason the Unherd comments section is also the unofficial Maggie Thatcher fan club, so I don’t expect a warm response.
“It’s only a small jump, after all, from the privatisation of public goods to the privatisation of information, truth, and shared reality itself.”
Quite a claim, that is. Care to expand on it at all?
Many ‘public goods’ that were privatised in the 80s and 90s were themselves the product of private enterprise before nationalisation. Does nationalisation of goods then lead to the state controlling information, truth and a shared reality? Sounds a bit sinister to me.
Information is now a very important commodity – it’s the main product of platforms like Facebook, just as one example.
The claim that everything should be mediated through the market ends up destroying other institutions and values – motherhood, DNA, your personal data, even abstract probabilities.
Whatever that is, it is certainly in no way conservative. It’s really liberalism which has infected almost all the major political parties in at least the English speaking west.
This criticism of liberalism is fair enough as far as it goes, but for the seemingly endlessly complacent attitude to the STATE controlling all this information, instead! The state has a monopoly of power, including physical coercive force, and Google doesn’t – at least not yet. Be careful we don’t go down the China road, towards which we’ve already started, especially during covid.
Individualism, even unrestrained, does not allow the laws of nature to be subverted. That is an absurd supposition
As one of the ‘enemy within’ I have no brief for Thatcher, but it seems that for many people today all things prior to Her manifested as part of the historically determined process of dilectical materialism, while She somehow sprang spontaneously into existence, unlinked to anything that went before (especially the ‘post-war consensus’ and ‘winter of discontent’) but responsible for all evils thereafter.
Erm, I’d say it was the biggest jump imaginable! In any case it is an absurd caricature of Thatcher, who can’t really at the same time be accused of being a bigoted social conservative (as she is by many) and some sort of forerunner of identity politics! Of course one thing leads to another in an unpredictable way (our attempts at prediction are usually way off) but the word ‘blame’ for that is misapplied. You seem to have a problem with the notion of private goods; of course as history shows collectivising them all has much better outcomes……….
I suppose it was obvious however that at some point some leftwinger would have the brainwave of blaming the Tories, or some Tories, for the evil of identity politics, along with closing the coal mines etc! (Wouldn’t it be great if people actually tried to genuinely understand why ordinary people do vote for the Conservatives? Blair did at least get this).
There are sins of commission, which in this cultural area are carried out overwhelmingly by the Left, which certainly has the drive and determination to endlessly canvass more and more ‘oppressions’ and to capture institutions. The sins of the Right, except for a very few ideologues who have no cultural purchase at all, are largely ones of omission. Yes, the somewhat stupid and complacent but sometimes electorally savvy Tory Party does pick up on fashionable cultural issues, without always realising their implications. Then there is the the fact that most people simply aren’t interested in these (what they would see as nutty) issues until perhaps it is too late. Conservatives generally are much less obsessed with politics, which is both a strength and a weakness.
In the 1950s I read a short story in a book of SciFi stories. It was about a planet humans had colonised and lived inside a dome. Externalley the ‘locals’ were savage and deadly so the humans brought up their children to be savage and deadly in order to exterminate the “locals” ………..nuff said?
I agree with every word of this apart from the side reference to ‘scandalously low rape conviction rates.’
We have trial by jury in this country. Often, when faced with two conflicting accounts of what happened on an alcohol-fuelled encounter some months earlier, juries are not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the woman withheld consent to sex, whatever she may have said, or persuaded herself, the following morning. This is so, even when many of the jurors are women. This will happen, in fact, with any alleged crime, when the verdict turns on the conflicting oral evidence of just two people, the accuser and the accused.
To increase rape convictions you would need to bend the rules of evidence, for example by allowing the prosecution to cross examine the defendant but not allowing the defence to cross examine the complainant. Is that really the sort of change you want? Is that what you would want for your son, if he was accused?
Indeed. Target-based public institutions (aka creating problems where there is none to solve imaginary issues) was something started by the Blairite Trotskyites.
Calling Blairites ‘Trotskyites’ is just pretty stupid name calling. On what conceivable basis, knowing anything about Bolshevism or Trotskyism, could you say this? We are trying to get some precision back in the use of language – especially ‘women’ and ‘men’ and this sort of thing does nothing to advance public discourse, or indeed persuade anyone of your arguments.
Of course that’s probably not the point, it is instead to show to friends and opponents alike which tribe (herd?) you belong to….
I am glad you pushed back on this Malcolm as I too was not comfortable with this assertion. In Australia I understand that many of the cases that would normally not proceed to Court now do, as they have taken away the police work that would normally sort the wheat from the chaff. So more cases go through with very little evidence hence eschewing the statistics – making it look like there are low rape convictions.
A friend of mine recently sat on sat on a jury. The case started as a 9 year old rape allegation then changed to a six year allegation of sex with a minor (she claimed she was 15 at the time) but no one was able to identify when the act allegedly took place.
The case should clearly never have reach trial and the judge should never have allowed the case to go to a jury. “Your tears speak more eloquently than real evidence ever could” springs to mind
I agree. We should be encouraging women to report allegations to the Police. But anyone thinking women never lie or juries are unnecessary should watch Amber Heard’s extraordinary performance & remind themselves that although a single male Judge was fooled by her, a jury wasn’t.
The fact that rape convictions are low in many countries with different kinds of governments suggests that it isn’t really their policies that are the problem.
I suspect that a significant issue is that increased use of technology actually makes it harder to give juries enough information they feel sure about.
I was on a jury in a trial where GBH was allegedly committed by the defendant in two nearby locations – one shortly after the other.
The first was caught on CCTV, and the second was witnessed by multiple reliable witnesses (including an off-duty policeman)
I was very disappointed when the jury refused to find the defendant guilty of the second count.
The moral of the story: before jumping on a bandwagon, think carefully about where it is going and who your potential fellow travellers would be. Use your own morals and intellect to deduce where you stand, don’t take evidence at face value just because it is presented by people who sound credible and nice. Do your own research, and follow the money. Think very carefully before staking out your position, and be prepared to change it if the facts, or your understanding or analysis of the facts, change. But stand your ground. Try to avoid attempting to answer enormously complex questions with simplified, morally unambiguous answers. Be humble, be kind, but be courageous and say what you *really* think. Try to keep your ego under control, and get comfortable with it being vulnerable and occasionally hurt. Avoid getting too attached to popular narratives. Don’t be afraid of searching for and speaking uncomfortable truths, or of becoming temporarily unpopular in some circles. You cannot please everyone all of the time.
We sometimes castigate our politicians and other leaders for being dimwitted charlatans. But, in reality, I believe the vast majority of them are actually capable of doing everything above, and more, if they really wanted to. Those who orient themselves towards this authentic approach to politics will, I hope and believe, be able to gain and maintain broad-based support over the medium to long term, and might even do some good in the world.
“ before jumping on a bandwagon, think carefully”. That assumes any thinking has taken place. I suggest this is largely a cultural, subconscious process.
True. But that was, in part, the point I was making – before reacting, try and think (ideally, carefully) and be conscious of your words and actions, rather being washed away by the subconscious cultural processes. That requires strong individuals who know themselves well. The optimist in me believes that most if not all of us – including our politicians – can find that strength and self-knowledge if we look for it.
A wise overview – thank you. Another Desiderata to cut out and keep.
Kathleen, you are an unlikely heroine for an old conservative Labourite man like me; but bravo, another excellent piece.
A leopard does not change its spots. The people she now opposes were her erstwhile colleagues and save for this one issue there is not a fag paper between them.
The best way to deal with these people is to refer to them as the opposite gender. If they complain, ask them what it is exactly that makes them a woman. They can’t argue back unless they refute their own logic.
Unfortunately once you enter the realm of believing absurd things there is no difficulty refuting your logic. They identify as women and feel like women just like their trans sisters. No need to refer to the fact that they are also uterus havers. I am what I believe I am is the song they sing.
Opposite sex, Julian, the conflation of these terms is a huge part of the problem!!!
Yes, Alison. Gender is something German nouns have.
Indeed, but then again ‘misgendering’ is already considered tantamount to a crime a violence.
Frankly, not worth the effort of engaging in these sorts of discussions – you are not going to persuade them with clever language … although it is fun bating them 🙂
I wish UnHerd had a ‘cried laughing’ emoji as well as + -. The seriousness of it all makes me rather hysterical. In the words of the song : I’m glad I’m not young anymore.
Have you tried this? It’s an interesting idea. Perhaps useful on the virtue signalling class. Surely if you are subjectivity perceiving a her as a him, they cannot deny you ‘your truth’? Or something. Pity I’d get sacked if I gave this a go; I’m sure it would be hilarious.
I’m a British student pursuing a doctorate degree in Education in the US. I’m swamped in this stuff, but I’m given lots of leeway because I have outsider ‘immunity’. Two things I’ve noticed in the US: people can’t separate entertaining an opinion from actually holding an opinion, and secondly Americans are completely disarmed by polite but firm disagreement. IMO most people here have a hard time reaching consensus with ‘enemies’ and have a winner-takes-all mentality.
I tell anyone who calls me a “CIS” male that I will report that as a misgendering hate crime. Using THEIR weapons against the is delicious.
“The Tories were in power, but the Opposition offered no hope of relief either – for Labour and the Liberal Democrats enthusiastically agreed with the reforms too.”
Sort of makes the headline meaningless doesn’t it…
Also, aren’t Nicola Stugeon and the SNP supporters?
Maybe the headline should have been Do Any Political Parties Care About Women?
Do the Tories care about women? No. They don’t care about men either.
Like most other parties the Tories care about politics and ordinary people are just fodder for manipulation. It is perhaps a category error to view politics through a non-political lens.
It’s no surprise that Mordaunt is supportive of the transgender agenda. She had Bill Gates write her foreword for her book, so she’s probably supportive of transhumanism too. #transhumanism and #transgender have more in common than you might first imagine. https://odysee.com/@nigelwatson19:3/TRANSHUMANISM—TRANSGENDER-ARE-THE-SAME-AGENDA!:3
Anyone who has had anything to do with Bill Gates should be immediately disbarred from high office.
You are back then?
Good to see you commenting again Fraser.
Agree it’s very frightening!
A key to understanding how and why Tory ladies could have bought into the trans-woke-ideology is to realise how sub-conscious the whole process is.
They will not have noticed that identity-politics had invaded their brain and now forces them to see the world in terms of oppressed groups.
Ths ‘oppression hierarchy’ has trans people near the top, so the kind, understanding, caring person naturally wants to help them.
As this process has mostly happened at the cultural, background, sub-conscious level, the individuals involved have not really ‘decided’ to adopt these ideas. They have not, therefore, gone though the normal mental process of spotting the inevitable side-effects of their actions. Hence the fact that Mordaunt is regning back and denying she said such things.
It seems to be easier for an outsider, like Kemi Badenoch or Konstantin Kisin to notice these things
It has been mentioned elsewhere before: it all probably started decades ago, but more recently it was Cameron and gay marriage, so as a consequence some/many/all in the Tory party (just like the SNP) thought this would be an easy win to show how progressive indeed the party had become. Then there was an uh-oh when SOME realized this wasn’t such a vote winner.
Marriage was always a way to attach men to children. Now we can do that with 100% accuracy it’s time for the legal institution of marriage to be consigned to history for all to achieve equality. Have whatever ritual you want to celebrate a loving couple of either sex, and enforce responsibility on fathers, but legal marriage is about the Law, and inheritance,not about love!
Not the sort of thing people in long-term happy marriages say. Let’s be honest. If you want to dismantle a proven structure of commitment and sacrifice for one compatible with whatever your feelings are at the moment. Feel free. But don’t force others to dive into your pool of eventual misery.
That sums up the problem with fatherhood as defined today.
It’s not about having the right to spend time with your kids, enjoying their company, helping to bring them up properly, reaching them to be responsible.
Nope, it’s about “enforcing” responsibility, or in other words pay up but you are otherwise not needed (as the African American has showed us) and can be cut off from all access at your wife’s whim and fancy post divorce.
In other words, not “responsibility”, tax. And people figure out how to stop paying tax one way or the other.
Surely not when you have abortion
It is still odd to think that these policies have worked their way into every crevice of public life in the last decade of Tory government. I think, charitably, that a lot of well meaning people want to appear compassionate and if also deperate to appear on trend with polite company, will go along with anything for a quiet life.
“the victims of Chris Pincher”
Perhaps we should use different words depending on the alleged offense. If everyone is a victim we are in the Orwellian world you decry.
They are not victims but survivors of Chris Pincher – lol
Having read what he was doing I’m shocked he wasn’t taken away in an ambulance.
I know… That’s the other word.
I am a survivor too as I have managed not to die in the deadly heatwave.
“The tories” is term that is fairly meaningless for any discussion of a socio-philosophical issue. No political party or movement has a single standpoint on anything. In fact, I would think the Conservative Party is currently demonstrably split on just about every issue under the sun!
I’m completely unclear on what it is they wish to conserve.
Is it a language, a church, a countryside, an historical tradition? Do they care if British companies are owned by foreign ones? Do they care if an ex-KGB man owns a national newspaper?
Come on, somebody, tell me what ‘conservatives’ want to conserve.
I think you are guilty of stereotyping a bit – there is real hope in women like Kemi Badenoch.
I used to think that. Alas no more. There is no point putting any faith in the Tory party. They are self-serving as always but in a different paradigm.
Many thanks for this back history Kathleen. I’d just underline what you say about the commitee — ‘most of the Committee still had no real understanding of the potential impacts of gender law reform on the interests of women and girls’ — since it could be said of so many in various institutions who more or less sleep walked into this ideology, no doubt out of a desire/need to do the right thing. Not wishing to cause offence they allowed real harm to be done. The other point worth making is that those women you mention who have been so effective in resisting the ideology have been left politically ‘homeless’ because of the almost total capture of the Labour party.
It is interesting that, from a Scottish perspective, the SNP have been shouting down self id in Westminster because the Tories suggested it, and yet in Scotland, they are promoting a self id bill. Hopefully the bill in Westminster will disappear up its own orifice, but in Scotland, men will continue to run rape crisis centres and take women’s spaces in sport. Why? Because Nicola Stonewall Sturgeon says transwomen are women and facts mean nowt.
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” Euripides (c. 485-406 B.C.) :or an earlier version ——- he first deprives of reason. Outside of the heated hysteria of the media I see loads of people just getting on with their lives.
Surely it was ‘Gods’ not God?
Or at least that renowned classical scholar the late Enoch Powell thought so.
So I thought until I looked up the saying on the internet which gave the following examples
“The saying Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, sometimes given in Latin as Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (literally: Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason, or or Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius replaces God or gods with Jupiter.
You have a choice
And women getting on with their lives will be severely affected although because they’re not elite women nobody cares. Men in womens prisons, many of whom have committed horrific sexual crimes against women and children are in U.K. womens prisons now. Impregnating women prisoners almost all of whom have experienced awful treatment at the hands of men in their families. Working class care workers with clients with disabilities trying to help them in a toilet with a man LARPing as a woman looking on. Seriously ill women in hospital with catheters etc and a man in the next bed. Elderly women expecting a female carer to help them in their home and getting a man in a nurses uniform. I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.
The transactivists told us to “educate ourselves “ and we did…….Women will be back to the urinary leash, Moslem and Orthodox Jewish women particularly affected. Wake all those men who say there are more important things to worry about. Not for this woman, this is the hill I will die on!
Well said Alison.
“Men in womens prisons, many of whom have committed horrific sexual crimes against women and children are in U.K. womens prisons now. Impregnating women prisoners almost all of whom have experienced awful treatment at the hands of men in their families.”
You do not know any of this is true
“Working class care workers with clients with disabilities trying to help them in a toilet with a man LARPing as a woman looking on.”
In the scheme of things this is not the biggest issue and why are only working class careers affected.
“Seriously ill women in hospital with catheters etc and a man in the next bed. Elderly women expecting a female carer to help them in their home and getting a man in a nurses uniform. I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.”
I will not even start on the indignities that are heaped on male patients in our health care system.
“I won’t even start on what is happening to children in our schools.”
I know the abuse that generations of boys have suffered at the hands of a female dominated education system.
“Women will be back to the urinary leash, Moslem and Orthodox Jewish women particularly affected.”
precisely how do you reckon that one?
“Wake all those men who say there are more important things to worry about. Not for this woman, this is the hill I will die on!”
You built the hill and you are welcome to it
To paraphrase The Godfather, men can afford to be foolish about this, women & children cannot. Giving males who demand it female levels of access to females & infants is popular with exactly the type of men you would expect. They generally try to stifle dissent with accusations of hysteria.
Good luck with that.
I hope that the Tory Party elects Penny Mordaunt. Well, let’s get it over with.
When you are in the grip of the near certain conviction that you are going insane, you will double down in order to persuade yourself that it really does all make sense. Self-ID is of a piece with the Party’s Net Zero lunacy.
The Party needs to go The Full Monty before we can call in the men in white coats.
I thought the same thing about the Lib Dems and Layla Moran. But where they swerved total lunacy to cling on as a semi-respectable party, so the Tories may actually take the leap and elect this person. Still not as bad as the appalling Tugenhat or Hunt, but that is very small mercy.
Yesterday, when I saw the last four candidates for Prime Minister my thought was ‘… indifferent to half the population’. This morning, opening this essay, the photo caption is ‘ … indifferent to half the population’. Is the Tory Party indifferent to everybody?
They are working from the build back better script handed to them. They are mearly campaigning for perks and riches. It makes no difference who wins.
Is Mordaunt’s current difficulty a tribute to the lefty “grassroots women’s resistance” or the common sense of the grassroots Tory Party membership, to whom Penny suddenly has to genuflect?
…the second, obviously. If she wants to be PM, she can’t prioritise being the “Tame Tory” at trendy Islington “kitchen suppers” any more…
Trans women’s rights simply are not the same as women’s rights. Do they need maternity care and maternity leave? Do they need access to safe abortion? Do they need cervical smears, testing for breast cancer and other female medical conditions that are exclusive to biological women. So why lump them in with biological females?
…I suspect that because of their physical, social and cultural closeness to the metropolitan chattering classes SOME Tory MPs, hailing from, and representing, the more “progressive” areas of the Country…might be swallowing this tripe wholesale…especially if none too bright (Step forward Ms Mordaunt)…with a rather larger number making the right noises…
…however, I’m remain sure that most of them…and practically all of their supporters…can readily tell the difference between an actual Woman…and a bloke in a frock called Trevor with a rather peculiar disposition…
…I am pretty much certain that practically ALL Labour MP’s buy into this egregious nonsense wholesale, and those that don’t will be very careful not to breach “party discipline” or “solidarity” by letting their views be known.
And furthermore the modern Labour Party is much more inclined to treat its own supporters as an irritation and an embarassment than most local Conservative Associations would tolerate…bear in mind just how ready they were to impose a second referendum on their many Brexit-voting supporters…and to give full throated backing to an anti-British anti-Semite, despite the quiet patriotism of vast numbers of “Flag,Faith and Family” Labour folk…
…in the end Women’s rights will be safer with people of a conservative disposition who vote Tory…than with any representative of a party now pretty much wholly dominated by Woke Social Justice Warriors at the most demented end of a spectrum that starts at “completely crackers” and rapidly becomes more unhinged week by week…
It is time the Ministry for Women and Equality was scrapped.. They have to look for something to do and we have ended up with all this gender palaver. Think of the saving that would be made if the whole department was scrapped. It is the private sector that always has to lift the tab when bureaucracy is expanded. . .
Hi Kathleen, very interesting piece. You seem to be arguing that logically speaking the trans ideology ought to appeal more to people on the right than the left and you describe clearly how some Tory women were vigorously promoting it, albeit now furiously backpeddling. Absolutely. However, one’s perception is that generally speaking trans ideology has been taken up much more forcefully by the left, in particular Labour Party leaders and activists (cf pictures of “left wing” Jeremy Corbyn hugging a tranny, leadership candidates unable to say what a woman is, Angela Rayner’s recent comments etc.). Not only the LP though – I noticed that the Socialist Workers Party are also to be seen prominently at pro-trans demos with their placards. The “right”, more generally, have been better defenders of scientific fact regarding the human (sexual) species – this appears to be especially true in the US. So there is a paradox here: the trans ideology is a very right-wing, hyper individualistic ideology. Why would it appeal to so-called left-wingers? Your suggestion that it’s because left wingers like “sexily complicated-sounding ideology, and partly as an attraction to reforming existing cultural traditions generally” certainly rings true but surely cannot be the full answer. I would suggest the following: On the left there is a very fundamental split between “idealists” (who put ideas above material reality) and “materialists” (the other way round. Or more precisely posit a dialectical relationship between the two). Non-marxist left wingers are inclined to embrace what seems like an “inclusive” and “kind” attitude towards the trans ideology without question. Marxists on the other hand would reject as anti-scientific the idea that a human can change their sex and would take into account how “trans rights” threatens the rights of others ie women. So for “left wingers” read “social democratic left wing idealists”. Or something like that, what do you think?
Ms. Stock. Don’t confuse the official PARTY with conservative people. All of whom deplore what is happening.
I guess one might describe Penny Mourdant as a ‘debating person’.
Bring back Boris, all is forgiven!
ABM (Anyone But Mordaunt).
We have just got rid of one liar, don’t want another.
Surely the biggest gaff, and it made me step well back from the Lib dems as I was disillusioned by Labour…was Swinsons 2019 election bid where she was very confident that trans ideology was popular:
Gender self-identification largely existed at the moment, she said, and her party’s proposed changes would “formalise” this and “remove existing barriers that end up creating discrimination on a very vulnerable group of people”.
She said women needed protection from those acting in a predatory or anti-social way. But she did not want to get to a place where women had to have swipe cards to access female changing rooms in leisure facilities or there had to be some public “inspections” of gender.
During her Today interview, she said that while she was a feminist she did not believe in “some hierarchy of equality”.
“Implicit in all of this is an assumption that trans women are, in some way, more likely to be violent. It is just not borne out. I think there is a demonisation of a community going on here and I often find the media is complicit in that.”
What are the other parties proposing?
Labour says it is also committed to reforming the 2004 Act, which it introduced, to introduce self-declaration for transgender people.
It is promising to take action to eliminate remaining areas of discrimination in the law, including mandatory LGBT+ inclusive relationships and sex education lessons in school.
There is no specific mention of the Gender Recognition Act in the Conservative manifesto. The party says it is committed to “vigorously combating” harassment and violence against LGBT people and hosting the UK government’s first ever LGBT international conference.
The Green Party also want to update the act and remove the “spousal veto”.
So I am surprised that it was apparently coming from the conservatives.
And hurrah for Liz Truss. She got a ppe at Oxford but her geography at Leeds comprehensive was obvounot good enough.
I would suggest that there is no point in asking the articles’ lead question. The Gender Act was passed under May’s Premiership, ad was the Surrender Act. Says it all : the worst PM this country has ever had. Unable to distinguish fact from fiction and guilty of treachery to boot.
Brava! We need you and more women to keep speaking out about this.
The Telegraph reported a man in the changing rooms of a big store covertly filming a woman undressing. Presumably he was there as the store gave him permission to enter. These are the crimes that women will be exposed to.
I’m not sure this is Stock’s best piece. I think she’s been too kind to the left and a little unreasonable in her approach to the right.
Things like “the disproportionate effect of cost of living problems for women”. In many ways that is the kind of thinking that gets the left into these identarian problems in the first place. Yes, more women may be poor, and so it may in that gross sense affect more women. But in truth COL issues affect all kinds of people because for all kinds of reasons they are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Women aren’t more important because you can group them together in a bloc. If it is a problem for society to deal with, it’s just as much on account of the white males struggling with COL as the women or any other minority group.
I mean just think, would anyone say, oh, who cares if white men are screwed because of this policy approach, they don’t count as an oppressed class. Screw them. Which is the flip side of the idea that we should care because it affects a lot of women. We can gain useful information by looking at all kinds of demographic analysis, and it can inform policy, but that’s quite different than this values approach.
The main reason some Tory politicians fell prey to the thinking on self-id is because they fell prey to this type of thinking which came from identarian sources just like their counterparts in Labour, and because they were desperate to look like they were open-minded. The vast majority of regular people of most political persuasions saw that it was problematic early on or when the scope of it became clear.
Exactly
Kemi’s been and gone; Kemi was just an exercise in trolling. Welcome to the UK’s fake #democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvkra76soI&t=72s
Problem is the UK has never had a real female woman as PM. Liz Truss won’t change that: but Penny Mordaunt might.. ouch! I just got stuck with a pitchfork there..
…an unfair jibe at Margaret Thatcher…she was much fancied amongst the UK political class, most famously by Alan Clark (a notorious swordsman in his day)…but also admired by such unlikely figures as Ken Livingstone! And although I forget the details, at least one of her European antagonists described her eyes and lips as “seductive..!”…and she certainly made a very considerable impression on both Reagan and Gorbachev…