February 2, 2024 - 6:00pm
London Bridge Station
Calling women “sluts”, “bimbos”, “bitches” and “cows” is the sort of sexism that might prompt London’s Mayor to say “Maaate”. It’s certainly not the sort of language one might expect from a champion of inclusion and diversity, nor of a man dubbed a role model in his industry. Yet Shane Andrews MBE — chair of Archway, Network Rail’s employee network for promoting LGBT inclusion — has been accused of using these very words to denigrate women on social media.
Today a large poster with screenshots of now-deleted posts apparently made by Andrews was displayed as part of a protest at London Bridge Station. At around 11am, scores of supporters of Let Women Speak (LWS) converged at the base of the newly erected “Pride Pillar”, described by Network Rail as “an art installation aimed at educating people about LGBT+ flags and communities”.
The LWS activists aimed not only to bring attention to Andrews’s sexist comments, but to make a broader point about his employer, Network Rail. The infrastructure giant’s decision to plant a (literal) flag on the trans activist side of the national debate around women’s rights has angered many.
It was there, with a backdrop of flags celebrating “pansexual”, “polyamorous” and “demisexual” identities, that the female activists burst into song before giving speeches about the heavy irony of feeling excluded by measures which purport to champion inclusion.
A LWS organiser told me after the event that “this headache of a display doesn’t represent women who do not believe in gender ideology — in other words, women who believe in biological reality, and in particular lesbians who are branded bigots for not wanting to date men who pretend to be lesbians.”
Yet it seems Network Rail has failed to pick up on signal changes around sex and gender, though the company has had plenty of opportunities to educate itself over the years.
In 2020, when Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen paid for a billboard at Edinburgh Waverley station reading “I ♥ JK Rowling”, it was removed following online complaints of transphobia. At the time, Network Rail Scotland said on X, “We do not allow advertising that is likely to support or promote one viewpoint over another.” This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed in the recent commentary provoked by the Pride Pillar.
In the years since the removal of the Rowling poster, numerous court cases have confirmed that people have the right to publicly disagree with the Stonewall-approved line that “transwomen are women”. Yet Network Rail, (listed within the top 100 Stonewall Equality Workplace Index of 2023) has failed to recognise that displaying flags promoting transgender ideology and identities is inherently political.
While Network Rail hasn’t moved, vast swathes of the public have now woken up to the threats from transgender ideology as promoted by lobby groups like Stonewall. Findings from the most recent British Social Attitudes survey show that the proportion thinking someone who identifies as the opposite sex should be allowed to change their birth certificate has fallen by 23 percentage points — from 53% to 30% — since 2019.
Grisly accounts of male rapists being placed in women’s prisons, and of children with gender confusion being put on experimental drugs, have made many question whether accepting someone’s identity above the reality of their sex really is the “be kind” option. What’s more, thanks to recent legal rulings, human resources departments are beginning to recognise that employees and indeed service users have the right to reject trans ideology. While this is framed as a gender-critical belief, it might more accurately be described as “trans atheism”.
It would be comforting to imagine the people who oversee Britain’s rail infrastructure would be adept at spotting such signs and signals. But it seems Network Rail runs on a single track: what Stonewall says goes.
In its corporate bumf celebrating the “Pride Pillar”, Network Rail said:
We hope displaying the flags will help prevent confusion and misunderstanding about identity. We also hope it will act as a discussion point to tackle LBGT issues, promote conversation and serve an educational focal point.
- Network Rail
In this regard, the display has been effective. No doubt as time passes and the importance of material reality reasserts itself, the Pride Pillar will be looked upon as a monument to institutional stupidity, a gaudy reminder of a time when women’s rights were dismissed as an impediment to the identities of men.
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SubscribeWould that be Shane Andrews
MBE….
Male-Bodied Exclusionist ?
Mansplaining Bit*h-slapping Extremist ?
Mammary-averse Bol*ocked (non)Evidentialist ?
Male Bimbo Exceptionalist ?
Come on, help me out.
Massive Bl00dy Eejit as you might say in Scotchland?
Ah, the joys of the English language, where letters and groups of letters are not pronounced. Just to confuse foreigners.
So: MBE = Male Bchauvinist Epig
Brilliant article (again!!) Jo many thanks. I have no idea what most of those flags are supposed to represent other that the rainbow (LGB) and the sex-denialist baby pink blue white trans flag and their cursed child the “Pride Progress” flag hanging everywhere in our towns and cities. Which makes me feel incredibly excluded and I’m one of the 51% of the population who are told that the feelings of a man are more important than my privacy safety and dignity.
Manipulative Binary Exhibitionist.
The sheer banality of that statement. Which “LGBT issues”, did they have in mind, specifically? How would displaying many and various multi-coloured flags “prevent confusion”? This corporate lying is an example of the insidious destruction and theft of meaning from words, which renders people defenceless to protect themselves through reason and through the law against the most powerful thing around. Imagine if they wrote a train signal operating manual like that. Carnage would ensue.
So enough of this nonsense. Challenge meaningless speech and empty symbolism wherever you see it. Ask “what does it mean”? What does it mean, to “identify” as a particular gender and what do you mean by “gender”? If someone is transgender, and their gender is, and always has been, what they identify as and biology doesn’t matter, why are they “trans” – which means from one thing to another? Or does it mean that? If not what does it mean?
We really are living in the most extraordinary time, when the mildest reproof to reality is met with hate and exclusion. No wonder people are burying their heads in the sand and just waiting for it all to pass and not trying to confront it. This disruptive epidemic of false information is very destabilising, fantasy game theory being projected onto and swallowed by the West.
Where are the strong leaders to challenge it? Nowhere. This ally- ship of our institutions is the most dangerous.
The few people well respected, in the public eye, who have stood up are relentlessly pilloried.
Politicians are scared, only the mainstream media who are willing to be labelled and mocked as extremely right wing are willing to write about the issue with any truth. We are made to believe that all centrists and progressives believe in the fantasy that we are not male or female biologically.
Throughput time people have dressed up snd played, never before has the general public been forced to believe them, it has always been out of courtesy when relevant, and depending on the non threatening behaviour of the participants. No hate, just live and let live, keeping hold of reality, of sanity. All this is being destroyed.
Everyone who can see it must make even the smallest effort to resist, in reality ‘we are the many..’ before we are all sent insane.
One if the insanities is how people who still voice the truth of biological sex, irrespective of cultural fashions, are called ‘gender critical’ not ‘ biological realists’.
This is an enormous game being played and we better get sharp.
It is grotesque that large companies can secure MBEs and OBEs for well paid careerists and sycophants in their organisations who have performed no public service whatsoever. Meanwhile those who quietly care for parents with dementia, or for children with special needs, never get a look in, but can, through their taxes and train fares, fund the “Pride Pillar” and the corporate DEI industry it represents. Such misallocation of State honours and resources is breathtaking in its decadence.
MBE: Malign Bias Exemplified
Let kids be kids, as Billboard Chris says. And let companies be companies. Boeing’s mission should be engineering excellence and safety. Nothing else. Every dollar spent on ideology is a dollar not spent on engineering and safety. Likewise Network Rail: every pound spent on pride pillars is a pound not spent on rail safety. Once companies whose core mission is safety lose focus, bad things can happen.
TQ lobby are deeply illiberal. They use their idea of “inclusion” to silence dissent and get their “allies” in public bodies to promote their agenda.
Only today our local Nextdoor site carried an advertisement placed by our county council, proclaiming with great enthusiasm Pride LGBTQ+ history month (month? Oh dear). Within minutes the comments from exasperated Council Tax payers came rolling in. How can money be wasted on these ridiculous things when services for all are being cut? There were one or two “be kind” comments, but they were very much in the minority. I was just gearing myself up for my own pithy comment when the entire thread disappeared, apparently at the advertiser’s request. This is how ordinary people are silenced.
‘ LGBTQ+ history month’
It’s only one month of the year! One month out of 12!
With 11 months of the year devoted to explaining the horrors of cis-gendered toxic masculinity and the evils of TERFs, surely you don’t begrudge that there is one month of the year explaining how kind and welcoming and inclusive the LGBTQ+ community is.
It’s increasingly obvious that there is really no “LBGTQ+community”
The “TQ+” seem to be increasingly and diametrically opposed expecially to the “L”.
As for trans campaigners being “kind and welcoming and inclusive”, don’t make me laugh. Many of them are the complete opposite, bullies who call anyone who says you cannot make human biology go away to suit your agenda “evil” and worse. And mutilating confused teenagers is not “kind”.
I’m not sure if you mean to be ironic or sarcastic but I would point out that there’s also a ‘pride’ month too, in June. Heck, Christmas only lasts a fortnight and Easter just a weekend.
“the evils of TERFs”???? These are to claim the right to think our own thoughts, to meet other women. to escape male violence and change our clothing in a space without men, to date other women. Feel free to play around with your gender – I personally have been arguing for that for the last 50 years – but please stop trying to erase our sex. “I am WOMAN, hear me roar!”
What ‘evils’ are you referring to in relation to ‘TERFS’?
I thought Steven Carr was being ironic? That it was sarcasm, a joke. No one in their right mind would write that seriously. Steven you need to clarify.
My sons elementary school in BC Canada has a very large trans flag hung in a prominent place just inside the entrance. I voiced my opposition, and my reasons, to no avail. Now the Principal will not meet my eye when we pass by one another.
How come Stonewall is allowed to wield such influence unchallenged?
How I miss the Prides of the 80’s and early 90’s. Run by lesbians and gays, for lesbians and gays. People who are attracted to the same sex. But by the 2000’s Pride went corporate and the numbers went from 30,000 to 300,000. Now our flag has been ambushed by people who do not believe in sex, only gender; the trans triangle is lined in black and is on top, cutting through and dividing our gay colours. That flag does not represent unity. It is oppressive and should not be allowed to fly anywhere.