Gender ideology is so obviously ludicrous that we are all aware of the architecture of free speech suppression that is required to keep it in place.
First, the Equality Act makes ‘gender reassignment’ a protected characteristic. You cannot discriminate against someone based on a protected characteristic.
Then, astonishingly, the protected characteristic is not narrowly defined to apply to that tiny group of individuals who have gone to the lengths of obtaining a gender recognition certificate. You do not even need to begin a ‘process of transition’. You only need to be ‘proposing’ to do so. In effect, say that you have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, and you have it.
Next comes the ‘Public Sector Equality Duty’, also within the Equality Act. This requires public authorities to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those with different protected characteristics.
Over time, these pieces of law have come to be interpreted to mean that you cannot tell a bloke that he is a bloke – that is discrimination. Nor can you prevent him from using the women’s changing rooms – that is not fostering good relations.
If you test this, the edifice of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ from the College of Policing comes into play. Call a spade a spade and you might get a visit from the police, be told to ‘check your thinking’ and have a note placed on your police record. If you are a nurse working for the NHS and you describe a bloke as a bloke because he is requiring sex-specific treatment you may find yourself subject to disciplinary proceedings and your fitness to practice as a nurse publicly questioned.
This architecture has proved so successful at costing many people their jobs and livelihoods and maintaining gender ideology in place across our institutions that it seems surprising that the ‘gender lobby’ feels much need for anything else.
That is why the silly charts are perplexing. What are they for? I first pondered this when I came across this silly chart shared by the NHS. Considering the subjects of gender identity and sexual orientation, it shows you how a person attending a medical appointment might first share his or her personal data: at home, or at the front desk, or later on.
Dumbfounded by its silliness, I was reminded of other silly charts, tables and extensive bullet points relating to the same subject.
The Financial Conduct Authority ran an EDI consultation in 2023 wherein it suggested that firms across the entire financial services sector should collect staff’s gender identity on a voluntary basis, but with a view to making this mandatory (let that sink in). The consultation included this table:
The Stonewall Workplace Equality Index (WEI) contains page after page of silly charts and growing numbers of bullets. Which bit is peak madness? “For B, funding a bi-specific strand of an LGBTQ+ Pride event”… Get your head around bullet point seven.
Also from the Stonewall WEI. Dare we say H?:
Also from the Stonewall WEI. Note the inclusion of Ace and Aro-spectrum. Points for the extra bullet, but does it render the previous charts Ace-and-Aro-phobic?:
My favourite flowchart is this, from the Sex Education Forum:
What is it all about?
Those who ponder gender ideology often look for poignant warnings from Orwell or Huxley or Milan Kundera. However, I am not sure whether Winston Smith, or Bernard Marx, or Tomas and Teresa from The Unbearable Lightness of Being were required to wrestle with this particular form of stupidity. But the title of the last gives the clue. The silly charts are designed to confer weight. Weight and legitimacy. Of course they fail miserably.
Yet there are real people in EDI jobs in large corporations and the public sector, today, who are required to spend their day wading through those Stonewall WEI charts. Do they dare to laugh? People who work at the Sex Education Forum have stood up at training sessions and explained the menstruator flow diagram to teachers. Do they keep a straight face? Yes – because the money follows.
There is a vast architecture and edifice of piffle in place designed to prop up gender ideology. Right at its base is one simple idea: men are women. But no new arrow in a flowchart, no additional bullet, no number of silly charts can make it so.
Caroline ffiske is a Director of Conservatives for Women. Find her on X.
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What I would love to understand is where this came from and why. It seems to have a life of its own – most people go along, thinking it’s bollocks, for fear of whatever – but why are “most people” worried if they are in the majority?
It makes you wonder how man ever invented the steam engine or space rocket if this is a demonstration of how thick people are today.
Mind you, I’m very confident that if you travelled back in time to the 17th century ( and beyond ) nobody, educated or poor, would have trouble defining the word ‘man’ or ‘woman’. It really is a pathetic sign of the times.
I saw something the other day that DID suggest people were getting thicker. No great surprise given the far left have taken over much of the
indoctrinationer education system. Proof comes in the move to use an outdated technology from the 4th century to power our 21st century economies. The ecofascists keep trying to push the ‘anthropocene’ for their global warming fantasy but I think currently the west is in the ‘retardocene’.I suspect that tightly cohesive societies (particularly the strongly religious and patriotic), are more immune from changing trends, than loosely coupled ones (multicultural, multi-ethnic, like ours).
I think the emperor’s new clothes syndrome probably has a lot to do with it. But also cognitive dissonance, sheer bloody mindedness, messiah complexes, gullibility, guilt, and a host of other emotional complexities.
All of which means, that we are in a state of constant churn. Of course, as soon as these stupidities arise, so they eventually disappear.
I think your suspicion is well founded, though I still find it baffling.
As I have said before on here, the Western abandonment of Christianity and all its inherent logical, obvious and beneficial thinking has meant that people accept all manner of bizarre and egregious propositions. Add to that a spineless fear of not being ‘loved or accepted socially and you arrive at the situation in which we find ourselves today: the government tell you that people can legally identify as cats, dogs, teapots etc, and if you don’t accept it, you’ll be prosecuted.
Perhaps to do with what Jeffrey Tucker’s Sceptic article the other days summed up as…
…Legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news”.
Maybe also to do with that Windows PC that first plopped onto my work desk 30 years ago, ending the BC era (“Before Computer”), and facilitating the metropolitan madness of The Ministry of Silly Charts that’s run increasingly amok ever since.
Yes but why would the legacy media and the administrative state care so much about some tiny minority of unusual people?
Perverse way of distorting reality and exerting control over the majority? May not fall for it, but through media capture end up going along with it – mass-gaslighting?
Yes
All facilitated by over-respect for perceived authority – not enough cussed sceptics pushing back!
A tiny ideological minority (following the Foucaults of this world) hate the world, and in particular they hate God’s sole prerogative of creating the reality they despise pathologically. This is not the minority of the confused, but a separate narcissistic minority able to weaponise that other minority.
So they have progressively broken down social divisions (aka “queering”), eg between “family” and “non-family”, sex and marriage, sex and procreation, up to the point where they can seem rational to be denying created reality itself. At that point they consider themselves gods who can outvote the Creator.
All this was accompanied by a mastery of propaganda and strategic power-plays, so that kif’s disorientated public, and especially the mal-educated movers and shakers, allowed themselves to be increasingly deceived until they can no longer see even the bleeding obvious.
Where the original hatred of God and the world came from is another matter, and may, perhaps, involve the demonic rather than the merely human.
Yes, that is also a good explanation.
A tiny ideological minority (following the Foucaults of this world) hate the world
You’re right. As part of a course years back, I read some Foucault. A right dodgy character.
What I would love to understand is where this came from and why
I think it derives from the madleft’s need to have a subservient client group that will give it the revolution Marx promised to the middle-class Left. The “problem” the madleft is trying to solve is the failure of the white working class to embrace socialism. This failure is the reason the madleft has abandoned the white working class. At the same time the madleft is trying to create a new “revolutionary” class from minorities and “oppressed” groups. This accounts for the attempt to create such a “revolutionary class” by merging gays, transgenders, racial minorities, women, illegal immigrants, invaders, colonists, criminals, Muslims, drug addicts, and anti-whitists into a single group. This is why these groups now have “protected” status – i.e. they are now placed beyond criticism.
Indeed – what Steve Sailer I think called “The coalition of the fringes”.
I think the middle class Left are really just a bunch of people who get satisfaction from telling other people what to do.
Maybe they’re in for a shock when their kids start answering back, or do they just breed more of the same?
Yeah I would definitely take issue with the inclusion of ‘women’ in you list of “protected” groups, given that gender ideology is a direct threat to women and the female sex. They’re trying to erase us, along with any biological differences between the sexes, in case you hadn’t noticed. There’s enough articles featured and shared on this site which illustrate this point perfectly.
I see what you mean. And I have noticed the attempt to erase women. But I think that the madleft’s attempt to erase women springs from the need to merge them in a “revolutionary class” of the “oppressed” – which of course will be under the control of the madleft.
If “men are women”, and laws back this up, then all bets are off. We cease to have any sex based rights or any protection and we cease to even be recognised as females in our own right. The current court cases for the nurses in Darlington and Scotland are an example of this, as are many sporting events where males have infiltrated women’s events. We are basically cancelled as a sex.
I wonder how many dads would be happy about their daughters sharing a communal changing room at the swimming baths with this particular ‘woman’, because they sure as hell won’t be afforded any protection or privacy just because they’re female;
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1904667267436003821
It seems to me that the man-woman distinction was the first soft point for the ideologues to “queer” the world. Not only were there genuine injustices (as there will always be in human activity), but women, constituting over 50% of the population, have influence in every family.
Simone de Beauvoir’s approach to feminism, via denying biological distinctions, became accepted with insufficient questioning. And so the queering juggernaut could move on to other targets.
But since women do constitute over 50% of the population, and are self-evidently different from men, they then (along with men) became the enemy once their usefulness to the project had passed.
I guess it’s a similar process to how, at an earlier stage, “equality for the workers” slowly became enmity towards them for daring to be what they are, rather than what the ideologues want them to be. Hence just as “democracy” talk pays lip service to class equality, “women” as a protected category pays lip service to women’s rights, but is treated in reality as a vestigial organ.
They’re trying to erase us, along with any biological differences between the sexes
Yes, they are. This must be resisted.
The “problem” the madleft is trying to solve is the failure of the white working class to embrace socialism.
Spot on.
I guess we are at the end of an Elite cycle, elite jobs are scarce because too many of the Old Elite Children are chasing them, so we get fanciful made up ‘elite’ jobs to keep the Gravy Train going. It is yet another version of the courtiers wearing bigger and bigger wigs to draw the attention and patronage of the Emperor. Bigwigs, indeed.
Good theory – this could be why private schools are so supportive of this nonsense – they are training the new elite
But they don’t, the private schools are being destroyed
How boring it is to feel compelled to remind myself and readers that this all took hold under the Conservative Party who ensured tax payer funding and a legal basis for it all.
“Conservative”
LOL
I was duped, I’ll admit.
Yes, a lot of people are still fooled by Blue Labour.
Not boring at all. The reason the conservatives got away with it for so long is that people believed conservatives were not and never would be part of the global gaslighting.
we were wrong. If you are wrong you have to admit it, or you are just another fantasist.
kicking them out of office was a good sign that people had woken up.
mea culpa in this sense, but no more!
They could take to throwing money about in the streets and I would still never ever vote for them again.
They could take to throwing money about in the streets and I would still never ever vote for them again
Me too.
I haven’t forgotten Tory treachery.
I dare anyone in the NHS or anywhere else to ask me what “gender” I “identify as”.
“What do you mean by “gender”?”
“Your sex.”
“OK… so… what do you mean by “identify as”?”
“The sex you have decided you are.”
“I didn’t decide my sex. I don’t believe anyone did. Are you asking me to whip out my tackle? I’m not sure that’s appropriate here and now.”
Where is the new Monty Python when we need it?!
I envisage a situation where a baby boy is assigned a female gender at birth by his progressive parents, but (as in the Who song) is fully aware during childhood that he’s male. That is, until he gets to school where he’s indoctrinated into gender ideology, and embraces the transgender cause.
And so he was assigned female gender at birth, and fully identifies as a woman. But despite the match on the NHS form he’s still going to die from undiagnosed prostate cancer.
Or George Carlin.
He was brilliant.
This is stuff is cult like, like Germans transfixed in front of Hitler, not for a moment asking themselves questions about anything he said. Anybody that did step out of line was beaten down, imprisoned. One day this spell will break also.
The image headline prompted me to revisit the Ministry for Silly Walks sketch.
Genuine humour, which made the rest of the article even more depressingly bonkers.
In his White House address yesterday, Trump reminded the watching millions that he has passed an Executive Order declaring that there are only two genders, male and female, and you are born one or the other. He clearly stated that every chromosome was either male or female and no amount of surgery or drugs would ever make someone with male chromosomes into a woman.
Hallelujah.
I spent much of my working life in the financial services industry. It was recognised that men live shorter lives, on average, than women and therefore men could receive slightly higher annuities than women.
So if a woman wishes to declare herself a man, can she sue for discrimination if the annuity company refuses to give her enhanced terms on the grounds that, biologically, she’s female?
I favour the Donal Trump and the Majority of non mentally-deficient people’s view that there are in the main only two genders. I understand there are a very few people who are born with elements of both genders and these people should be able to decide if they want to be one of the two genders and receive whatever help is available for that, or to be described as something else. People born as clearly one gender should not be able to decide they are the other gender and be accepted as that. I’m not saying they should not dress or behave other than the gender they want to be, but that should not mean the rest of the population should be required to treat them as anything other than what they are.