When women said they were concerned about the danger of allowing males into single sex spaces in places like prisons and hospitals, they were demonised by the holier-than-thou crowd as ‘bigots’ and ‘transphobes’.
When women said that allowing males into female sport would be unfair, some laughed and said they needed be ‘kinder’.
When women said they wanted Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems and the SNP to protect women’s rights the parties all responded with, ‘What is a woman?’
This week we have seen yet more of the rotten outcomes produced by the gender ideology creed, and my worry is it is only going to get worse unless someone – and it will probably have to be a man because women apparently can’t be trusted to talk about their own safety – puts an end to this utter madness.
Yesterday, during a debate in the Lords about the controversial Annex B policy, which allows patients to be placed on single-sex wards according to the gender with which they identify, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne revealed the horrendous lies of a hospital board which deliberately hid the fact that a woman had been raped by a trans woman.
‘’She was raped and she naturally reported it to the police,’ Nicholson told the House. ‘The police spoke to the hospital, which informed them that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened.’
It was only thanks to the evidence of whistleblowers – and the existence of CCTV – that 12 months later the Board was forced to backtrack and admit that there was indeed a male patient on the single sex ward, allowing the police to get on with the job of investigating a heinous sex attack.
The psychological toll on the victim has been intolerable. As Baroness Nicholson noted: ‘She has almost come to the edge of a nervous breakdown because being disbelieved about being raped in hospital has been such an appalling shock.’
How have we got to the point where a hospital trust would cover up a rape simply to protect gender ideology? This is a double violation of the poor woman who should have been protected when she was most vulnerable.
Meanwhile, in the US we’ve seen a fine example of the injustices that arise when male-bodied athletes are allowed to compete in female sports.
On Thursday, Lia Thomas, a transwoman who only made the B swimming team as a male, won the 500-yards freestyle swim at the National College (NCAA) swimming and diving championship.
On Thomas’s journey to the finals, records have been broken and the controversy and anger has steadily grown. Most galling of all is that other swimmers have been told not to speak out, lest they be painted as bigots. They aren’t even allowed to complain about the fact that Thomas – who remains biologically intact – gets dressed in their changing room.
Thomas insists: ‘I am a woman so I belong on the women’s team.’
The fact that people are angry yet – incredibly – still feel unable to speak about this issue became clear when Thomas’s victory was met with silence by spectators. There was only applause when Emma Weyant, an Olympic silver medallist, reached the end a second later.
In a photograph which tells a thousand words, on the winning podium Thomas stands at one end hugging a gong; Weyant and the college students who came third and fourth are at the opposite end hugging each other.
Of course, transgender people should be able to live safely and be protected from prejudice, and sporting bodies need to come up with a way for trans athletes to play competitive sport. But pretending that trans women are exactly the same as biological women is insisting that people swallow a lie.
Caitlyn Jenner, who won an Olympic gold medal as a male before transitioning in 2015, speaks with particular authority on this issue: ‘The world’s gone mad, it was never meant to be like this,’ she says. ‘I don’t think biological boys should compete in women’s sports. We have to protect women’s sports.’
I’ve talked to lots of trans women and most of them know this and have no desire to trample on women’s rights. This is often being done by radical activists in their name, as can be seen at an important employment tribunal which started in London this week, in which the demands of the gender lobby activists have been exposed.
Maya Forstater is suing her former employer, a thinktank called the Centre for Global Development, for refusing to renew her contract as a visiting fellow for what they deemed the use of ‘offensive and exclusionary language’. Why? Because she stated her belief that a person’s sex is a material reality, however they identify.
This tribunal (she lost the first) comes after an appeal judge found that her ‘gender critical’ views were protected under the Equality Act.
Among the absolute zingers in the case (which is being live tweeted here), it has emerged that Forstater’s colleagues were offended that she called businessman Philip Bunce a man and a cross dresser – even though Bunce has never described himself as a woman. They also believed her opinion – and one backed up by most scientists – that sex is biological and cannot be changed was ‘absolutist’ and ‘offensive’.
What is both absolutist and offensive is the idea that women are bigots for speaking up for their rights – whether it be for safe spaces, in sport or in policy. But with most of our political parties unable to even say what a woman is, and so many of our institutions ‘captured’ by this insane creed, I wonder how many rapes, how many unjust sporting victories and how many unfair dismissals it will take before something is done about it.
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