Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.

What is it that produces such childish regression in the initiates of the new gender religion? At least part of the answer seems to have to do with the example set by Stonewall. For years now, the charity has acted like a demented primary school teacher gone rogue, encouraging all sorts of unsavoury habits in those under its influence. Via the use of an elaborate reward chart — otherwise known as the UK Workplace Equality Index — it has sown widespread misunderstanding within hundreds of institutions about the actual state of equality law. It has scared people silly with lurid fairytales of murder, suicide threats, and the hate crime of “misgendering”. No wonder the more impressionable are now getting so worked up.

The latest example of Stonewall’s wayward moral leadership came at the weekend, when it was revealed that its flounce from the government’s scheduled “Safe To Be Me” LGBT rights conference will cost the taxpayer at least £650,000, and probably more. Having previously been paid to co-organise the conference, Stonewall’s withdrawal statement was larded with the usual purple prose: hearts were heavy about the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy, trust was shattered, and so on. You would think the government had just announced compulsory heterosexuality for all, and not a pause in legislation threatening to criminalise talking therapies for gender-questioning people, including for gay adolescents at risk of starting a medicalised pathway they might later regret.

Many of those fighting Stonewall’s agenda are mothers — or as the Stonewalled maternity hospital where I gave birth twice would now have it, “pregnant people”. Since the opposition seem desperate to project their serious mummy issues onto us anyway, I reckon we should just lean into it. As most mums know, it’s important to have a few strategies ready for when things get tricky. So — with a nod in solidarity to beleaguered adults across the land having to deal with transactivist drama in their organisations, homes, and friend groups — here are five supernanny-style rules from me.

1. Encourage them to use their words

As with toddlers, in transactivism there is a lot of shouting and stamping and strutting about, but not a lot of thinking. When next a transactivist intones a Stonewall-approved mantra or slogan at you, gently encourage them to use their words and unpack it a bit. For instance, you might ask: if any male who feels like a woman is a transwoman, and transwomen are women, what then is a woman? Don’t be put off by furious complaints that you must be a bigot for asking such a thing — this is a distraction.

Equally, you could ask them: if, as Stonewall tells us, “to be nonbinary is to exist outside of society’s confines and expectations”, then what does this mean for the countless gay people who have spent their lives facing discrimination and sometimes violence because they don’t fit heterosexual norms? How does having an interesting haircut stack up against that, exactly?

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By Kathleen Stock

Or if, as Stonewall’s new campaign on behalf of “asexuals” tells us, a “grey-asexual” is someone who “may experience sexual attraction very rarely or only under specific circumstances”,  while “demisexual people only experience sexual attraction after developing a strong emotional bond with someone”, then in fact, aren’t most of us either grey-asexual or demisexual? And more to the point, how on earth does any of this count as a political campaign worthy of large amounts of taxpayers’ money?

2. Praise the good

When raising offspring, it’s important to positively reinforce good behaviour when you see it. This can be an effective strategy with difficult people generally. Transactivists frequently claim that they want to break down regressive stereotypes about how males and females should be. If so, tell them this is fantastic! Give them lots of praise for it — though you might also ask them how they plan to smash stereotypes, when they also seem to think that playing with dolls and wearing dresses might turn a male child into a girl.

3. Set boundaries

This appears to be a particularly hard one for transactivists to accept, tending as they do to think that all boundaries are fascist — so start small. Begin by casually saying things like “apples can’t be oranges” and “tables can’t be chairs”. (If they get cross and start calling you the “fruit police” or the “furniture police”, calmly ignore). Eventually, work your way up to males and females in non-human species on earth: “bucks are not does”, “bulls are not heifers”, and so on.

Once that information is well-tolerated, gently introduce the idea that humans are a sexually dimorphic species too; and that, as with other species, we need mutually exclusive names for the two human sexes in order to talk clearly about them. And after this radical idea has taken root, you could perhaps start to talk about other kinds of boundary too.

For instance, you could talk about the physical boundaries of women’s changing rooms and dormitories and refuges, and what those boundaries are actually supposed to do to protect their occupants from male predation. Or you could talk about the personal boundaries of women who say they don’t want men in public spaces where they undress.

At all times throughout this process, maintain your own boundaries by example. A firm and consistent “no” will be your friend.

4. Ignore derailing attempts

Kids like to copy what you just said and repeat it back to you (“no, YOU are!”). Sometimes they do it just to annoy you. At other times, it’s because they want to argue the toss but don’t know how, so just parrot a version of what you just said in the hope it will stick. In a similar vein, some transactivists like to take points originally made by gender-critical feminists and throw them back, only lightly altered.

For instance, gender-critical feminists often express concerns about the lack of safe-guarding in self-ID policies, and about the negative effects of such policies on female survivors of male sexual violence. Not to be outdone, last week my former colleague and fervent transactivist Professor Alison Phipps wrote on twitter that: “When I go in a public toilet I am incredibly vigilant — I scrutinise every woman I come across and wonder whether she is a “gender-critical feminist”. Their obsession with what’s in everyone’s pants is frightening and as a cis woman and survivor, it makes me feel very unsafe”. Now, either this displays a level of paranoia on a par with Q-Anon worries about lizard people in the White House, or it’s an unsubtle attempt to wind gender-critical feminists up.

Or take Professor Grace Lavery of Berkeley University, in the UK to punt a new book about her penis on Woman’s Hour, and who gave a talk at UCL a few weeks ago. Lavery’s talk was entitled “The Gender Critical Movement Is the Biggest Threat to Academic Freedom in a Generation”. I am told that in the talk, my name came up — you know, that former Professor who got harassed out of her job for saying that biological sex matters —  as someone supposedly personally responsible for recent serious declines in academic freedom of thought.

As with the more junior version, mindless “no YOU ares” like those of Phipps and Lavery are likely to drag you into pointless back-and-forths, which is probably the intention. Try not to let it get to you. Do what mums have done since time immemorial and pour yourself a large gin. Take a swig and read this marvellously warm, perceptive, and witty piece by English scholars Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, written in response to an attempt of Grace Lavery — you know, that Professor who is Very Keen to protect academic freedom — to cancel them in 2018 for allegedly enabling transphobic “fascism” in their writing. (Their alleged crime, according to Lavery, was to defend the sometime use of trans birthnames and accurate sexed pronouns. And the cancellation attempt was eventually successful: the pair later released an abject apology, terrifying for its newly-leaden, generically contrite prose as much as for anything else.)

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By Hadley Freeman

In particular, as you read Castiglia and Reed’s piece, linger over these prescient words: “what we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself”.

5. Get them out in the fresh air

This final one is simple enough. Get your transactivist troublemaker away from their screen or phone and into the great outdoors. Inhibit the flow of crazy pronouncements flying into innocent minds via LGBT organisations and bluetick accounts on Twitter. Encourage them instead to run around, take their shoes off and paddle, get muddy and out-of-breath, and generally to reconnect with their physical bodies and the natural world.

And if a member of the opposite sex is around, why not encourage them to arm-wrestle each other, or have a throwing contest? They both might learn something interesting. Perhaps this teaching moment could even feed into later conversations about transwomen in women’s sport

As a piece of messaging, “no jab, no job” has much going for it. Like its progenitors “no hard hat, no work” and “no mask, no entry”, it takes an instance of risk-aversion most of us can at least see the sense in, frames it as a value-free universal truth, and adopts the threatening syntax of officialdom to convey its contempt for the public. Add to that the phrase’s enchanting monosyllabic alliteration, as well as the fact that many people will find the idea completely outrageous, and it becomes hard not to see it catching on.

But is it discriminatory? Having an unequal effect that correlates with a “protected characteristic” is not the only way for a policy to be bad, of course. But a claim on those grounds is a nuclear weapon in Employment Law — and a way for employees with less than two years’ service to attack an unfair dismissal — so it’s a good place to start.

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By Adam King

The Equality Act says there’s no discrimination if a requirement is “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. One such aim might be the requirement in Section 3 of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 — alluded to by both Mullins and the Telegraph’s Cabinet source — to look out for anyone whose health might be negatively affected by your firm’s activities. As for proportionality, perhaps there’ll be an exemption for pregnant women and Christian Scientists — although presumably not for BAME people, who, for reasons no one has yet plausibly explained, are on average considerably less keen on the idea of this vaccine.

But the trickiest question in the discrimination issue is the same one raised by those who would object to a ‘no jab, no job’ policy altogether: namely, is the increased risk of Covid-harm from unvaccinated plumbers sufficient to justify sacking people for refusing to undergo a medical procedure they don’t want?

Now, if we were only talking about, say, doctors and nurses, there might be a stronger argument for compulsory vaccination: the increased risk to others is greater in their case; they’re a small minority of the population; and there are, after all, many other ways to earn a living. Let’s not forget, it has long been impossible for most doctors in the UK to do their jobs without being inoculated against Hepatitis B. But it isn’t only doctors and nurses, and it isn’t only plumbers.

Almost every employer will want to reduce the risk of transmission among its customers and staff — out of an admirable sense of public duty no doubt, and also out of a desire for protection against legal claims, reduced sickness absence, and competitive advantage. And if every employer adopts the “no jab, no job” mantra, Mullins’ argument that workers who don’t comply can “go and work for someone else” rather loses its force.

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And the fact that the ‘no jab, no job’ rule could be applied to almost everyone is a strong indication that it has no intrinsic connection to most people’s jobs at all. Yes, unvaccinated plumbers, and shop assistants, and bus drivers — even tree surgeons — increase the risk of spreading the disease. But so do unvaccinated podcasters with private incomes when they stand in the queue at the post office. Why should the latter be the only kind of person we allow to make a genuinely free choice about the vaccine?

At this point we might start to wonder whether the rubric of employment law — depending as it does on a motley national collection of badly written policy documents and one-sided contracts — is really the appropriate field for planting public health requirements. Might it not be more honest for our Government to use instead the traditional system for the administration of life-ruining penalties: the criminal law?

Statutes create crimes by saying that something is “an offence”. And while those magic words open the door to harsh consequences (although mostly less harsh than being made permanently unemployable — only 5-10% of sentencings each year involve custody) they also guarantee various protections far beyond what’s available at the Employment Tribunal, let alone at an internal disciplinary hearing. The big difference is the higher standard of proof (‘sure’ rather than ‘on the balance of probabilities’) but there are many others, all of which make it much harder to convict someone of a crime than to sack them.

And it’s noteworthy in this context that the criminal law, by means of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, seeks to mitigate the dire consequence of unemployability. You can go to prison for six months and a couple of years later, if you apply for a job, you are entitled to tell them nothing about it. “How long will it be on my record?” is a question all white-collar clients ask when they’re offered a plea deal. If they were facing the sack, outside of the criminal jurisdiction — for, say, refusing a medical procedure — the answer might very well be “forever”.

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There’s a clear analogy here, isn’t there, with Free Speech. If everyone you might conceivably work for — manufacturers of everything from ice-cream to razor blades, every ancient Public School, every guardian of the nation’s architectural heritage – requires you to uphold “their” “values” in all visible areas of your life, you will have little choice but to comply. It might start with a particular company, or industry, with a particular need to maintain strict speech codes. Soon, others, noticing the benefits of such policies, follow suit. Before long a deep-sea diver loses his livelihood for sharing an edgy meme on Facebook.

Of course, a plumber with a barbarous social media output might not be as dangerous as a plumber with a higher-than-average chance of carrying Covid, but the principle and the process are the same: individual employers seek to reduce a potential harm by threatening dismissal, and the collective effect is of a national rule. That rule applies across the social spectrum, with potentially life-ruining consequences for transgression — though accusers need not prove anything beyond reasonable doubt — and often with little prospect of rehabilitation.

I have represented, in Professional Disciplinary Tribunals, many men and women who have said — or sent — inappropriate things. Some manage to hang on, some don’t. Those that don’t are often just as devastated by the consequences as the criminal client who has to leave the dock by the back stairs after a guilty verdict. But almost none of them have done anything they could sensibly be prosecuted for. The ever-reducing frequency with which that fatuous free-speech stick-man strip gets posted suggests that the downside of this phenomenon is beginning to sink in.

To treat these issues as something for employers’ discretion rather than as a matter of Public Law not only deprives us of the appropriate protections in the trial process, but also — and more worryingly — evades proper consideration (public and parliamentary) of the balances to be struck.

When it comes to free speech, the Law Commission is currently considering responses to its consultation on Hate Crime legislation. Some of the proposals provoked considerable alarm across the political spectrum —  particularly regarding the plan to extend hate-crime laws into private homes — but as the Chief Executive of the Index on Censorship Ruth Smeeth said, “We need to have a proper national debate if we are going to start putting restrictions on language like this.” Well quite.

As with Free Speech, so with vaccines. I hope Charlie Mullins was right when he said, winsomely, “the entire thing will very soon be a non-issue”. But in case he’s wrong, we must not allow compulsory vaccination to be quietly smuggled in through the back door in ten thousand workplace health policies. The Telegraph reported a Government source as saying that where there is an “unjustified” fear of the jab, “we have got to help people get into the right place”. I do hope that isn’t a euphemism for “force them to take it”. But if it is, there’s a right and a wrong way to attempt to do it.

Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world… Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”

In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.

I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.

The Black Lives Matter summer has revealed the extent of this phenomenon. We had the frankly bizarre spectacle of British footballers and rugby league players being compelled to kneel before they started playing, in obeisance to a protest movement that began in another country, on another continent, in response to something that barely ever happens in the UK. A number of police chiefs also took the knee, including Alan Pughsley of Kent Police. Art galleries and theatres and universities rushed to signal that they too were supportive of BLM, with many rushing out statements confessing that they were guilty of institutional racism.

Meanwhile, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, the Scottish women’s football team Glasgow City will play the entire 2020-21 season in a strip adorned with her name. In support of this gesture, the club manager stated that “We champion change and equality”. What a dilemma for Glasgow City players who favour an originalist approach to interpretation of the US Constitution.

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Manners maketh the society

By Niall Gooch

These developments should be highly disturbing to all those who favour a free and open society. Such societies cannot function without mediating institutions, i.e. civic organisations that exist independently of the state and are devoted to non-political purposes. These groups are of many different kinds but the one thing they have in common is that exist as an end in themselves, not as a means to something else.

People come together to form, say, a chess club because they wish to play chess together, not because they wish to oppose Brexit or lower the voting age. A chess club which limited its membership to socialists, or to monarchists, would in an important sense no longer be a chess club. A constant feature of totalitarian regimes — of both the Left and the Right — is a strong hostility to groups that exist for their own sake, and independent of state ideology. They recognise, rightly, that such organisations represent alternative focal points for loyalty and affiliation, and that they are places where ideology is subdued and put in its proper place.

Consider, for example, the crushing of independent trade unions in the Soviet bloc — hence the bitter struggles over Solidarnosc in Poland — or the way in which Nazi Germany refused to tolerate any competitors to the Hitler Youth. Scouting, with its strong emphasis on internationalism, has frequently been suppressed under dictatorships.

Obviously modern Britain is not any kind of authoritarian regime; by comparison with most countries, we retain a healthy and vibrant civil society. However, it does not follow from this that we need not be concerned about the encroachment of politics on voluntary associations that have, or should have, what Roger Scruton called “purposes internal to themselves”, rather than existing to promote a particular view of how the world should be organised. When a police force in Wales can insist that a male-voice choir made up of police employees should no longer officially associate itself with the police because they do not accept women as members, it is not unduly alarmist to think that we might have a problem.

Opportunities for people to come together outside of political commitments are hugely important because it is in such contexts that we get to know each other as individuals, rather than as bundles of ideas or opinions, and to develop the social capital and trust that makes such a difference to whether countries are pleasant places to live or not. The independent institution is a little haven of peace away from the rancour that inevitably accompanies politics.

It is a chance for us to focus on one thing, not many things, and this is healthy for both individuals and the wider society because it encourages the pursuit of excellence and the development of virtues. At the cricket club, our aim and purpose is to become the best cricketers we can be, and to build fellowship with others through that process. It is not a failure of a cricket club’s purpose if it does not have a position on Black Lives Matter or the nationalisation of utilities.

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For some people the very idea of a non-ideological sphere, or a non-political space, is effectively a myth. A standard progressive reply to the kind of argument I am making here is that what looks like an absence of ideology is often nothing of the sort, and that conservatives tend to ignore the ideologies embedded in established or existing practices and norms. The status quo is political, so by not challenging the status quo you are already taking a political stance whether you like it or not. “Silence is violence”, as one of the slogans of the past summer, has it. If you do not state your support for whatever movement is currently demanding it, then you are effectively throwing your weight behind whatever injustice — real or purported — the movement claims to oppose. Black Lives Matter supporters agree with President George W Bush: You’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.

Nevertheless, there is clearly a need for spaces where political demands can be ignored as not relevant, as not part of the purpose of that space, for the reasons noted above. And there is plainly an important distinction between the ideological and the non-ideological, even if by non-ideological what we really mean is “minimally ideological”. To take a political or ideological view of an event or organisation, of an utterance or argument, is to view it through the lens of an organising principle, to consider it primarily as an instance of a general rule and to allow our conclusions to be dominated by already existing prescriptive commitments.

The non-ideological approach to life, by contrast, approaches each case on its own merits; it considers, as the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “the thing itself”. It is humanist, seeing people and their situations as standing alone rather being slotted into a neat pre-existing box. It also recognises the existence and importance of customs, traditions, institutions and ways of living that are beyond the reach of organised compulsion. It is the basis of authentic pluralism, because it enables us to carve out room for minorities and dissenters.

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This of course is anathema to the dominant modern way of thinking. Liberalism today is fervently universalising, hence the ever-expanding empire of “human rights”, and the “equality duty” imposed on all public bodies by the 2010 Equality Act. It is this equality duty that is at the bottom of so many cases of once-neutral or apolitical institutions feeling compelled to wade into political areas where they do not really belong. The Act has given a rocket boost to Conquest’s Second Law: “Any organisation not explicitly Right-wing sooner or later becomes Left-wing”.

What we have seen this summer is the continuation of an attack — not necessarily intentional or co-ordinated, but an attack nevertheless — on the very idea of the independent institution or body, that can stand apart from political debates because politics is not part of its function and nature. The demand is, as it were, that everything is about everything all the time. This is not healthy, and it is not conducive to building the kind of society where people of many different backgrounds and opinions can rub along together harmoniously.

We need to have domains where politics — that is, debates about how the nation as a whole lives together, how the government should or shouldn’t act, what we must and must not be compelled to do — can be put to one side, and we focus on the particular, not the general. There is a great swathe of life that is not political, and there is so much joy and richness to be found away from politics and away from ideology; history and the arts and sport, hobbies and films and family life. If we bow to the demand that all human activity must be understood and mediated through a political lens, we will live to regret it.