Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times, on NHS Fife and diversity officers:

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Martin Luther King Jr said that, a man I’d hope Isla Bumba, NHS Fife’s equality and human rights lead officer, had heard of, considering her job is improving diversity. Although given Bumba admitted last week that she wasn’t entirely sure if she was a woman, it’s probably best not to make assumptions….

MLK Jr never met a diversity officer, because they only became a fixture of workplaces in the past five years. But I can’t better his description of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” when summing up Bumba, who testified on Wednesday she didn’t know her own sex, because “no one knows what their chromosomes are” (reminder again: these people work in a hospital). Despite being asked for advice about trans policies “frequently, once a week”, Bumba said, she didn’t actually have an official policy, and so just asked other diversity officers what they did. It’s like the mafia, but with rainbow lanyards.

I had two takeaways from this exchange: first, nothing has been worse for the gender movement than the cleansing light of the courts. Again and again, gender activists have lost because while the public are all for supporting vulnerable minorities, they tend to do a double take when they hear claims like “It’s transphobic to say a lesbian can’t have a penis”. The law isn’t infallible, but it does at least offer the detergent of sunlight.

Second, no job has more of the whiff of 2020 than the diversity officer. They exist to confirm their employer’s moral purity by “improving diversity and inclusion”, and they do this by quantifying minorities and gamifying vulnerabilities, keeping track of which disabilities are up and which are down, as if the human condition were a stock market. Does dyslexia need its own awareness day, as the diversity officer at one friend’s workplace decided? How about making pronouns on work emails mandatory? Is a man who identifies as a woman more deserving of protection than an actual woman? These are the kinds of hard questions the diversity officer must puzzle over daily, meaning those who apply for the job tend to have few talents other than scolding their colleagues….