Ideological sausage festival

Picture a trans activist. You probably imagine a teenage furry raging from his gaming chair, or a self-consciously zany librarian with infected-looking piercings. Not seven men, as grey as their suits, gathered round a boardroom table.

Yet when the Government drew back the rainbow curtain this week, that was what it revealed: not the usual online oddballs, nor the much-derided liberal white women supposedly responsible for every progressive folly, but a group that looked more like insurance brokers than gender revolutionaries.

On Tuesday, the Office for Equality and Opportunity posted photographs on LinkedIn of a lobbying session, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the men “driving forward the Government’s progress for LGBT+ people”. The now-deleted post boasted of the OEO’s “commitment to banning harmful Conversion Practices, and delivering a successful European IDAHOBIT+ Forum in 2027.”

The LGBT+ stakeholders included Simon Lightwood MP, the Equalities Minister, and Lord Collins, the UK’s Special Envoy for LGBT+ Rights. 

To TERF Times readers, this pasty sausage stew may be redolent of the ‘manel’: the all-male panel which the feminists of the 2010s railed against. But there are signs this casual dismissal of women is becoming the new normal, creeping across government departments. As Akua Reindorf KC noted on X, of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, while complaints about white men can be inane, a government group “containing 8 such people out of 12 members, and only 2 women (both peers), does not feel propitious.” Tellingly, the Mermaids-lovin’ trans activist Alex Sobel MP now heads the JSC.

Depressing it may be, but it now seems clear that if left unattended, organisations do not drift towards merit or equality. They revert to the old arrangement: male bums on committee chairs, male hands collecting the prizes and male voices setting the terms on which women may participate.

To reactionaries, this is the natural result of male superiority: women’s role is to lie back and take it. To progressives, meanwhile, noticing sex is taboo.

But for any reader who has not yet spotted the pattern, male egos and needs are routinely prioritised by both sexes. Consider Karen Danson, a nurse with a history of childhood abuse. When she begged not to have “Rose”, the trans-identifying male colleague at the centre of her workplace complaint, involved in her gynaecological surgery, a female theatre manager told her: “You are not my concern, my concern is Rose.”

Sheila Jeffreys was on the money when she called transgenderism “a male sexual rights movement”. Men lose very little from policies such as gender self-identification, but have much to gain. This is not to diminish the legions of female footsoldiers who believe they are being kind. But the much-derided “liberal white women” are not the ones with power, as the OEO photograph so neatly illustrated.

Ultimately, the problem goes beyond sex to the ideological monoculture within policy making. There were no representatives around that table from the grassroots LGB groups which have sprung up in opposition to the well-funded and top-down trans initiatives.

No voices from LGB Alliance, Gay Men’s Network, the Lesbian Project or any of the scores of organisations fighting for the basic recognition of biological reality. There was no one to point out that the price of the ignorance and indifference of men like Lightwood and Collins will be paid for with the healthy breast tissue of young lesbians who believe themselves to be men. Or that the conversion practices ban they’re so proud to champion will mean parents risk being criminalised for trying to protect their own children. 

Curiously, when the picture spread online, the philosopher kings of X, so swift to blame white liberal women for the collapse of civilisation, kept silent. They did not conclude that male trans activists plotting a rights powergrab ‘to be kind’ ought to mean men should lose the vote. Such measures are reserved for women. 

The OEO picture was more than a PR failure. It exposed not just who is in the trans driving seat, but how power works, and how transgenderism rubs along very comfortably with male domination. At every level, from ministers and civil servants to activists, what benefits men is instinctively treated as the common good, by both men and women. And so, men’s sexual desires become rights while the objections of uppity women become bigotry. 

On Wednesday, the OEO said it would tell TERF Times who attended the LGBT+ stakeholder meeting “as soon as possible”. There has been no response.