Mick Hartley

Oxfam has embraced "inclusive language". Tomiwa Owolade in the Times:

In its obsession with a particular kind of unintelligible social justice rhetoric, Oxfam has undermined the clarity with which it has previously distinguished itself. In its fascination with purely symbolic gestures against inequality and injustice, it has lost sight of what actually challenges those forces: the material, the pragmatic, the real.

Oxfam is pursuing a disastrous culture war and pretending it is not. Describing sex as “assigned” by society rather than biology is not an objective scientific fact but a contentious ideological claim. Reducing women to their biology is divisive. Invoking the jargon of American social justice is not inclusive but the very opposite; alienating to anyone unfamiliar with the latest trends on social media and academia, it furnishes those who use it with a condescending outlook….

Apart from anything else, these issues should be debated because the advocates for these changes are so confused in their thinking. The inclusive language guidelines claim, for instance, that “whilst the majority of the time we use the spelling ‘women’, in some contexts it may be appropriate to use ‘womxn’, which can be seen as a mark of inclusion and solidarity”. If you think that is the end of it, you would be wrong: “some trans people”, it continues, “object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of ‘womxn’ might suggest otherwise”.

So we should use “women” most of the time, but other times we might use “womxn”’ to be inclusive, but using “womxn” might in fact be discriminatory, in which case we should use “women”. They say we should avoid terms like “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic) and “BME” (black and minority ethnic), and instead use BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of colour) and POC (people of colour). Those former terms are “outdated”. The guidelines are dense enough to give the most robust mind a migraine; opaque enough to frustrate the most discerning eye.

The inclusive language guide claims to be “a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end”. But how can it achieve such aims when it uses such garbled language?

The guide is counterproductive. But it is also wrong. It says, “we further recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality”, as though English can only be reduced to an instrument of colonial oppression, rather than also being the language of Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth.

Deprived people around the world are not helped by this turn towards obscurantism. Neither are trans people or ethnic minorities or any other group Oxfam claims to speak in defence of. The case for social justice needs to be grounded in truth and clear language or it will wither like spoilt fruit. Oxfam was founded to fight poverty, not to relitigate the meaning of a woman.

If charities and organisations continue to wage a culture war against reality, all of us have a duty to respond by affirming the importance of truth in genuinely guaranteeing the dignity of every man and woman; this will ensure the legacy of the original Oxfam does not go to waste.

It's probably too late. Oxfam has already disgraced itself with all the stories of sexual exploitation. This is the sound of a once important organisation disappearing up its own backside.