I cannot specifically remember the first Women’s Liberation Conference, but I know that I benefited from its effects. I was ten and was soon to go to an all-girls’ grammar school where many of our teachers; Old Girls of the School had, themselves, been taught by former suffragettes. The Equal Pay Act had come into being in 1970 and the message given to us at school was that women; or, at least, educated women who had been to the Retford County High School for Girls, could do and be anything.
If I had gone into the workforce at 16, I would have been one of the first working women to benefit from the Sex Discrimination Act although, when I did go into the workforce, as a civil servant in 1981, things were certainly not perfect. Women were not allowed to pay into the dependants’ element of the Civil Service Pension Scheme and part timers were not part of the Scheme at all. In my department, MAFF, women were not allowed on fishing vessels and very few were promoted beyond HEO. Nevertheless, and particularly in my work as a NUCPS rep, I could feel that things were changing, and was excited to be part of it.
Fast forward to 2020 and the current Permanent Secretary of Defra, and her two predecessors, have all been women. For educated women in the public sector, at least, the battle for Women’s Liberation, which has mostly been a legal one, feels as if it has been largely won. We should now be working to ensure that the benefits that we have fought for are felt by all women; that carers and teaching assistants are properly paid and valued for their work, and that free childcare and family friendly workplaces are available to all parents. We should be winning cases for women discriminated against because of menstruation or the menopause and fighting for improved facilities for women and girls dealing with those physical realities in the public sphere. Instead, rather than fighting for further advances for women as females, we are fighting a rearguard action against the ‘gender’ cult and accusations of ‘transphobia’. This is a fight that we must win.
When the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act were drafted by the last Labour Government, there was the assumption that there would be a small number of people who suffered from a mental illness that made them believe that they were ‘really’ the other sex and, for whom, medical professionals had decided that cosmetic surgery to ape the physical attributes of the other sex was appropriate treatment. There were also people with genuine, physical intersex conditions who had been brought up as one sex but had later discovered, or decided, that they were ‘really the other one.
People were prepared to be tolerant and accepting of these people because they were anomalies, outliers. The binary sexual distinction, which everyone knew applied to humans along with all other mammals, was not under threat. ‘Gender’ ideology changed all that.
If I had gone into the workforce at 16, I would have been one of the first working women to benefit from the Sex Discrimination Act although, when I did go into the workforce, as a civil servant in 1981, things were certainly not perfect. Women were not allowed to pay into the dependants’ element of the Civil Service Pension Scheme and part timers were not part of the Scheme at all. In my department, MAFF, women were not allowed on fishing vessels and very few were promoted beyond HEO. Nevertheless, and particularly in my work as a NUCPS rep, I could feel that things were changing, and was excited to be part of it.
Fast forward to 2020 and the current Permanent Secretary of Defra, and her two predecessors, have all been women. For educated women in the public sector, at least, the battle for Women’s Liberation, which has mostly been a legal one, feels as if it has been largely won. We should now be working to ensure that the benefits that we have fought for are felt by all women; that carers and teaching assistants are properly paid and valued for their work, and that free childcare and family friendly workplaces are available to all parents. We should be winning cases for women discriminated against because of menstruation or the menopause and fighting for improved facilities for women and girls dealing with those physical realities in the public sphere. Instead, rather than fighting for further advances for women as females, we are fighting a rearguard action against the ‘gender’ cult and accusations of ‘transphobia’. This is a fight that we must win.
When the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act were drafted by the last Labour Government, there was the assumption that there would be a small number of people who suffered from a mental illness that made them believe that they were ‘really’ the other sex and, for whom, medical professionals had decided that cosmetic surgery to ape the physical attributes of the other sex was appropriate treatment. There were also people with genuine, physical intersex conditions who had been brought up as one sex but had later discovered, or decided, that they were ‘really the other one.
People were prepared to be tolerant and accepting of these people because they were anomalies, outliers. The binary sexual distinction, which everyone knew applied to humans along with all other mammals, was not under threat. ‘Gender’ ideology changed all that.
This ideology; now widely accepted in universities and public sector bodies, tells us that sex is a social construct and that regressive ‘gender’ roles are what matters. People are no longer allowed to rebel against stereotypes as themselves, but are expected to have themselves mutilated to fit another set of oppressive cultural stereotypes.
Rather than being split along a physically determined binary, but with equal rights for both sexes, the ‘gender’ cult wants a culturally determined binary with those who don’t fit the rules on one side forcibly pushed over the line into the other team. Needless to say, those who least fit the culturally determined binary are often gay men and lesbian women. Taken to its logical conclusion, the ‘gender’ cult outlaws homosexuality.
Equality, in law, began as creating a level playing field for people who were disadvantaged because of physical attributes over which they had no control; sex, race and disability. It became generally accepted across society, certainly by the 1990s, that such equality was right and desirable.
Once ‘identity’ rears its head, however, the concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘a level playing field’, are called into question. If women (or those who ‘identify’ as women) are naturally more nurturing and domestic, for example, perhaps they should be corralled into low-paid, domestic jobs, or expelled from the workforce altogether. Echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale. And, it is impossible to ascertain whether equality, as currently required by the law, is being practised when statistics are gathered on the basis of ‘identity’, rather than physical reality.
A young woman said to me recently that ‘transgenderism’ was a good thing, because it ‘allowed women to identify out of oppressive gender roles’. What?! The brave women who set up the first Women’s Liberation Conference didn’t want to ‘identify out of oppressive gender roles’, they wanted to fight and overturn them; as women, for women. If the suffragettes had ‘identified as men’, women wouldn’t now have the vote.
‘Gender’ ideology, and its bastard child, the ‘transgender’ cult, are an evil, right wing, misogynistic, homophobic men’s rights movement, funded by the American Christian Right and pharmaceutical companies. It is the duty of every feminist on the Left to fight them with every fibre of our combined being. Everything that happened in The Handmaid’s Tale was an abuse that had already been perpetrated against women somewhere in the world. The ‘gender’ cult is ours.
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