After 13 years of decimating everything once good about Britain, trans culture wars are all the Tories have left
14 April 2023, 12:05
When some archaeologist from the year 2176 digs up newspapers from the past couple of weeks, they’ll have no idea we were living through a continuing cost of living crisis, causing record numbers of British people to lose their homes and livelihoods.
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They won’t read about the sewage being dumped into our rivers and seas, making them unsafe to swim in. They won’t be able to learn about the ongoing consequences of Brexit, which is largely responsible for the poor performance of the UK economy.
No, they’ll think the most pressing issue we were all grappling with in 2023 was where trans women should pee and whether or not they should be allowed to model sports bras on their own Instagram accounts.
To the latter, first. If you’ve somehow managed to miss the spittle-flecked outrage – A trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney was given some money by Nike to wear their garms on her Instagram page.
In other words, a brand saw a person with a large online following and asked them to make content about their products or services in return for free stuff and/or money.
You know, as happens every single day with no one outside the model’s sphere of influence noticing or commenting.
The way the tabloids/right wing TV stations reacted, however, you’d think Nike had put a billboard up in Times Square reading ‘Cis women: Shop elsewhere’.
Former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies led a boycott of the brand. A gender critical tiktoker filmed herself burning her Nike sportsbra.
The Daily Mail called it ‘offensive’ and the ‘ultimate in WOKE’. (NB the dictionary definition of woke is ‘to be alert to injustice in society: Particularly racism’. If the writer had done even the most basic of research they’d realise they’d paid Nike a compliment).
All of this is happening concurrently with proposed changes to the law by the EHRC and our somehow-Minister for Women and Equalities, the menopause-ridiculing, racism-denying Kemi Badenoch. Under the proposals, access to single-sex spaces would not be determined by an individual’s legal sex, but by their so-called ‘biological sex’.
The problem is, there’s no legal definition of ‘biological sex’. The closest was a 1969 divorce case in which a judge deemed that it was determined by a combination of hormones, genitals and chromosomes.
However, there’s a great deal of variation in these three things between humans.
In places where a similar change in law to the one the EHRC proposes have been rolled out, a whole underclass of ‘sexless’ people, with no gender-specific protections under the law, have been created.
You could simply define it as the sex on your birth certificate, I suppose, but having to carry one’s birth certificate around in order to be granted access to the loo doesn’t exactly feel like a win for women’s freedoms.
Neither, incidentally, does forcing trans women to share spaces with cis men when they are four times more vulnerable to physical and sexual assault than cis women. Or indeed forcing trans men (who were assigned female at birth) to share spaces with cis women.
The other ‘solution’ is to have self-appointed gender-police patrolling changing rooms and toilets.
You’d hope they won’t be granted permission to check everyone’s genitals, so they’ll have to guess who is trans and who isn’t.
And as an almost six-foot, broad-shouldered cis woman who has been mistaken for trans on more than one occasion, you can appreciate why I’m not thrilled by that idea, either. In fact, footage of vigilante groups of gender-critical men assaulting cis women in toilets, because they have short hair, or big feet, or whatever other ridiculous, Disney-adjacent ideas about gender these idiots have decided, excludes them from womanhood, fills me with horror.
Thinking about it for more than ten seconds (something Badenoch and the EHRC have apparently failed to do) will lead you inexorably to the conclusion that there’s only one logical way to determine who is allowed in single-sex spaces and that’s by legal sex, i.e. the system we’ve had for decades.
To summarise, the Nike story is a distraction from the EHRC/Badenoch proposals.
And the EHRC/Badenoch proposals are a distraction from *gestures at everything else and the state of the country*. Lee ‘30p’ Anderson predicted the 2024 general election would be fought on ‘trans issues’.
That’s because, frankly, after thirteen years of blithely decimating everything once good about Britain, the Tories have nothing else left.
Don’t fall for it.
