Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph on the Darlington nurses, confronted by a cross-dressing man in the women’s changing room:

As you might expect, they turned to their union. One of them had been paying subs to Unison for 35 years. The response was not to side with the nurses, or even hear their case, but to automatically side with “Rose” as the ultimate victim in all this. Steve North, the former president of Unison, tweeted about the nurses’ “anti-trans bigotry”.

The nurses then set up their own union, the Darlington Nurses Union. And who can blame them? What are the 75 per cent of Unison members who are female paying subs for?

Who is standing up for working-class women? Certainly not unions captured by this insane middle-class gender ideology, which they seem to defend at all costs. We saw the same thing in the Sandie Peggie case. HR departments are circle jerks of self-righteous fools who write policy for each other without understanding the law or having any conception of competing rights.

Single-sex changing rooms – something we have long taken for granted – exist because women have fought for sex-based rights. No decent man would want to be in a space where he made women feel uncomfortable. But we are not talking about decent men here, are we? We are talking about men whose overriding need to see themselves as female overrules basic respect and protections for women. They are then backed up in this false belief by their management.

Every time this happens, brave women are forced to go through lengthy and costly tribunals, often disclosing distressing sexual assaults in the past, while being pilloried as transphobic in public, to make very basic points about their working conditions. Their tiny demands consist of not having to get undressed in front of male-bodied people. How on earth did we end up here, and why are our unions not embarrassed? Who do they now represent? The men who ID as women and think nothing of using female NHS changing rooms?

Even after the judgement last week, Unison was unbowed in its support of trans rights, and silent on the Darlington nurses.

It turns out that if you are female, then the union will throw you under a bus, or worse, send you for “re-education”. Wherever gender ideology goes, it pushes its ill-thought-out, post-grad beliefs on to working-class women who have to live with the reality of being treated like scum precisely because they do understand that they do have some rights.

If the unions abandon women, then women will abandon them. It’s already happening.

Yes, gender ideology is middle class in the sense that it originated in the universities, but it’s since become another left boilerplate belief – and unions leaders are nothing if not spouters of left boilerplate. It’s what they do. It’s what gets them elected by the tiny proportion of activists who bother to vote in union elections.