Mick Hartley

From JK Rowling – An Update to My Essay of June 2020:

The response I often get when talking about any of this is, ‘and how does any of that hurt you?’

It’s true, of course, that trans activism doesn’t impact all women negatively. In fact, the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasn’t noticeably affected my life. Nor does it hurt wealthy women who repost the vogueish mantras while sitting in dressing rooms guarded by private security guards. It doesn’t hurt women in the upper echelons of media, publishing and academia, who don’t need a changing room at work and who feel a snobbish disdain for working class women who don’t want to strip off in front of heterosexual males who’ve ‘identified’ into the women’s changing room. Trans activism doesn’t hurt headline-hungry female politicians whose attitude to women’s rights is ‘whatever is good for me personally’. On the contrary, trans activism has been good for those women. It’s fashionable, and keeps them popular with their progressive tribe, and costs them, personally, absolutely nothing.

Even outside those women’s cultural bubble, you’ll find plenty of people – particularly men – denying that trans activism poses any threat to women or to fundamental freedoms of speech and belief. On the contrary, it’s just one more champion-the-underdog cause, right?

Well, no, I don’t believe it is. Are there vulnerable trans people? Without question. But the current, dominant strain of trans activism bears no resemblance whatsoever to the great social justice movements of the twentieth century.

When it came to civil, gay and women’s rights, ordinary people who had little to no individual power organised at a grassroots level to challenge powerful institutions, from government downwards, on their entrenched prejudices, and campaigned to change harmful, discriminatory treatment.

Twenty-first century trans activism is the very inverse of those movements. It is elitist to its core. Spawned in philosophy and gender studies departments, it has taken over cultural, political and state-run institutions, which have then attempted to impose it, top down, on regular people who never voted for it and, as all available polls show, do not believe in it. Powerful, well-funded lobby groups such as Stonewall, which have received sizeable amounts of British tax-payer money in the past, have succeeded in convincing both corporations and state institutions that women no longer have a right to single-sex spaces, and that the desire of trans-identified men to access those spaces is the progressive cause du jour.

And this:

Gender ideology remains so entrenched among swathes of the management and political class that women are still having to fight for their rights in law. These have included nurses protesting at having to change their clothes in front of heterosexual, cross-dressing men; rape survivors stigmatised for protesting at the presence of males in their support groups or crisis centres; women investigated and persecuted at work for even questioning the approved gender mantras; parents whose daughters are having to share primary school toilets with boys as they approach puberty; and incarcerated women, already with a high likelihood of sexual violence in their pasts, forced to share intimate facilities with trans identified males.

None of these people ever imagined that women’s and girls’ rights could be removed at the whim of employers and the state and, unfortunately, women can no longer rely on what would once have been their obvious champions: trade unions.

One possible reason for the fact that unions have been so ineffective in addressing women’s concerns and defending the rights of female members is offered by the government’s most recent statistics on union membership.  This reveals that higher earners and higher educated employees are both more likely to be trade union members. As mentioned above, gender ideology has taken far greater hold in elite institutions and professions, which have then sought to impose it downwards. Union leaders these days appear to have abandoned their historic role as defenders of the working class, in favour of defending their own luxury beliefs.

Finally:

As George Orwell said, ‘freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.’ If a man can be a woman, there is no such thing as a woman. That might not matter to you personally, but it matters to millions of women who don’t have the luxury of pretending that their sex doesn’t matter. I remain on their side.

As ever, eloquent and to the point.