Mick Hartley

Graham Linehan wrote in The Critic some weeks back on Ian Hislop and Private Eye, where the issue of gender ideology has been completely ignored despite the obvious point that – you'd think – it should be right up the Eye's street to expose surely the greatest medical scandal of recent times and an extraordinarily powerful and perverse cultural phenomenon. It's a source of endless ridiculous situations of the kind the Eye would normally relish, where people indulge in self-evident absurdities in the name of a "progressive" ideology: cheering on hulking great men winning in women's sport, police and media reports on women rapists and female penises, lesbians being told they're like sexual racists for not sleeping with these new lesbians-with-a-dick. But no, nothing. Britain's leading satirical magazine just isn't interested. Is it because of Hislop's long-standing and no doubt highly remunerative BBC gig on Have I Got News for You? Or doesn't he care?

Now there's this from the latest issue 1627, out today:

The disdain – "avid TERFs" – is palpable.

The repeal of the Gender Recognition Act is, apparently, only for reactionary transphobes and the likes of Orban. But the GRA dates from a different era, when it seemed the decent thing to do. Alas it hasn't aged well, having been massively abused by trans activists as a passport for inserting themselves into women-only spaces – as Victoria Smith notes in The Critic today, in her piece on Why Labour doesn’t understand the gender wars:

Years ago, gender self-ID was a Tory cause, with former Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller insisting the only opposition came from women “purporting to be feminists”. If that sounds confusing now, it is only because the male-dominated left’s enthusiasm for sex denialism eventually became — as many of us warned it would — an open goal for the right. In the period leading up to this, though, you got the sense that many Tories saw “trans rights” as a low-cost way of looking progressive — a kind of super-charged version of gay rights, with none of the inconveniences that come with supporting single mothers, women fleeing violent relationships or those facing pensions inequality. They loved women, the Tories, so much so, anyone could be one….

Starmer, just like Harriet Harman, cannot admit that what we know now is completely different to what was known during the passing of the GRA in 2004 and the Equality Act in 2010. Apart from the few prescient feminist voices out there, I doubt many people were anticipating that soon there would be claims that trans women could menstruate and breastfeed, or that lesbians would be told by Stonewall to overcome their genital preferences, or that women in general would end up being rebranded vagina owners, uterus havers, bleeders and the like. Likewise, little attention was paid to the tremendous influence of misogyny-soaked porn on the self-perception of trans-identified males. The trans woman for whom the GRA was written was Coronation Street’s Hayley Cropper, the post-operative trans woman who never once told Roy that “sissy porn made me trans” or that she liked nothing better than being “treated like a piece of meat”. Today, we know how male people behave when it is made easier for them to identify as women. It is not like Hayley Cropper.

So yes, there's a genuine problem: the issue of men being legally able to claim that they've changed sex has not worked out well for women. Not that the Eye cares.

Another Eye column mentions the Starmer – Rosie Duffield disagreement:

Why the obsession with what's in people's pants? Bluntly, because Rishi Sunak knows it reliably generates him favourable headlines on GB News and in right-wing papers.

Hmm. Clear enough, I think. Gender-critical is just right-wing obfuscation.