RAF plans skirt ban ... to avoid upsetting its transgender pilots
WOMEN in the RAF will be banned from wearing skirts on parade to avoid upsetting transgender and Muslim personnel.
Diversity officials at the Ministry of Defence want to enforce a trouser-only rule for ceremonial parades to make the service more inclusive.
But there is resistance – with some calling it ‘political correctness gone mad’. Despite this, the change is set to be implemented.
Under current rules, women normally wear skirts on parade.
But under the new proposals, RAF women would have to wear trousers on military parades at barracks and during public displays and events.
They would be allowed to wear skirts on other occasions, such as official engagements when they are not marching.
The change was discussed at a summit of RAF chiefs who deal with issues such as diversity, inclusion and uniform policy.
Defence sources said they will enforce a trousers-only rule partly due to an increase in transgender personnel. There are also concerns that women with tattooed calves cannot wear skirts on parade as the designs would be visible.
The MoD has also been trying to recruit more Muslims to the military. RAF officials have raised concerns that Muslim women may not wish to wear skirts.
As everyone on parade should look the same, some officials have pointed out, that means if Muslim women choose to wear trousers,
‘Everyone is livid, it’s ridiculous’
all women should wear trousers. If the RAF implements the change, the Army and Navy could follow suit, sources said.
It is understood that MoD diversity officials had pointed out that it was not inclusive to force all women to wear skirts because of the ‘psychological effects’ on transgender staff.
Defence sources said: ‘There are concerns that by forcing RAF personnel to wear skirts it is discriminatory towards a variety of people, such as those with tattoos and transgender personnel.’
Servicewomen were said to be angry about the changes. One told the Sun: ‘We’ve been told women can no longer wear skirts on parade. Everyone’s livid. We’ve been wearing skirts since World War Two. It feels like political correctness. The world’s going mad.’
Another serviceman said: ‘Hopefully someone with their nonpolitically correct head will realise how ridiculous this is and let people wear what they want.’ The RAF has around 32,000 personnel – of whom 14 per cent are women. It is not known how many are transgender but it is thought to be very few.
Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of UK forces, said: ‘There are obviously too many people in the RAF with too little to do if they have time to agonise over whether or not women should wear skirts in ceremonial uniform.’
The RAF said: ‘Uniform regulations, including dress for formal parades, are regularly reviewed. No decisions have been made to make any changes.’
WOMEN have made great strides in the RAF in recent decades. The first female operational pilot took off in 1990. A woman joined the world famous Red Arrows display team in 2009. And two years later the first female pilot took the controls of a Typhoon fighter-bomber.
But yesterday, the advancement of women took an extraordinary turn when it was revealed the RAF is planning to ban women from wearing skirts on the parade ground.
It’s not, as you might imagine, a response to a clamour from feminists among the 4,400 women in the RAF. No, the pressure comes from the increasingly powerful transgender lobby.
A Ministry of Defence source says: ‘There are concerns that by forcing RAF personnel to wear skirts it’s discriminatory towards a variety of people, such as those with tattoos and transgender personnel.
‘It’s about being inclusive, and any changes would be for all the right reasons.’
How does pandering to a tiny, but vocal minority constitute the ‘right’ reasons?
Last year, Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee estimated 650,000 British people are ‘likely to be gender incongruent to some degree’.
Gender incongruent people, a (modern) dictionary will tell you, are convinced their true gender is different from the one indicated by their body, or the one that has been ‘assigned’ to them as babies.
For its part, the Government’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission estimates the figure at 500,000. In other words, less than one per cent of the 65.3 million population.
Translate that to the RAF and the number is less than 300 out of the 32,000 personnel, with only a handful of those having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
Yet the RAF is just the latest of our institutions buckling under pressure from the trans minority.
Town halls, education authorities and even some nurseries seem to be in thrall to the gender thought police.
Vicious
A primary school in East Sussex, for example, is set to have gender neutral toilets for pupils to tackle transphobia. And that is for children who haven’t reached puberty.
The pace of change is proving too fast even for some feminist Labour MPs, such as former minister Caroline Flint.
She says MPs should not forget their responsibility to ‘protect women from male violence in gender neutral environments’.
In other words, in places where, thanks to enlightened new thinking, women might find themselves sharing a toilet area, for example, with a man.
Perhaps inevitably, in an increasingly febrile world, Caroline Flint was subjected to vicious online abuse.
But back in the real world, we learn boys who believe they are girls are being allowed to join the Guides under radical changes to the organisation’s single-sex policy.
The British Medical Association, long hijacked by Left-wing militants, has joined the bandwagon, announcing pregnant women should not be called expectant ‘mothers’ in case it offends transgender people.
Instead, they should call them ‘pregnant people’ so as not to ‘upset intersex and transgender men’.
It’s hardly Mary and Joseph in the stable, is it?
So how the trans lobby become so influential? The answer lies in the fact that in the past 20 years, gay people have become more mainstream, with civil partnerships and gay weddings widely accepted.
Not everyone, though, was content to let gays like me — who came out in the Eighties and fought for equality — enjoy our new-found freedoms.
The extremists among us became bored by what had effectively become conventional mainstream lifestyles.
Rebels without a cause, they had to find a new one. And they did: gender politics.
So it is that they have spawned a baffling array of acronyms for what used to be called the LGBT community — that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans.
Rights
Now, there is much talk of the rights of the LGBTQ community, or even LGBTIQAA.
Confused? ‘I’ is for intersex (born with both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics).
Some say ‘Q’ is for queer (that an old-fashioned term for gays), others insist it’s for questioning. ‘A’ can mean asexual (feeling no desire for either gender) or androsexual — primarily attracted to men.
Frankly, until a couple of years ago I’d never even heard of someone being ‘gender fluid’, which is defined as ‘a person who may identify as male, female or any other combination of identities. The gender may also vary at random or vary in response to different circumstances’.
Facebook offers 56 varieties of gender category to choose from on your profile, including ‘gender fluid’, ‘androsexual’ and ‘demisexual’ (when you are only sexually attracted to someone if there is an emotional connection).
Mock this as self-indulgent claptrap at your peril. For the reach and power of gender politics is awesome. And its advocates are becoming more aggressive and intolerant. Novelist Ian McEwan discovered this when he compared the politics of new identities to consumerism.
‘The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number,’ he said.
‘For example, some men in full possession of a penis are “identifying” as women and demanding entry to womenonly colleges and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms. Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.’
Any reasonable person could see McEwan wasn’t seeking to denigrate men and women who feel trapped in the wrong body.
He was merely expressing a view that — in biological terms — a penis is a strong indicator of being a man.
But there was a predictable social media outcry, with the author branded a bigot, ignoramus and an ill-informed transphobe. For those of us who passionately believe in free speech, who have campaigned for better rights for gay and trans people, it was an ugly backlash.
Of course, I bitterly regret the fact that any trans people feel persecuted, with some reports suggesting half of young people who feel trapped in the wrong body have considered or attempted suicide.
But surely there has to be balance in this debate?
Inevitably, the Green Party is involved in the clamour for every gender and sexual identity to be given rights.
The party’s manifesto details: ‘Welcome to the LGBTIQA+ website of the Green Party.
‘Our mission is to advance the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer and Asexual people.’
Indulgent
More indulgent acronyms are on their way. In the U.S., at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, they have created ‘LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM’, which looks like a Scrabble rack.
It actually stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexual, asexual, genderf**k, polyamorous, bondage/ discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism’.
It’s enough to give The Donald the vapours.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the trans caravan rolls on.
The RAF argue it is doing the right thing by listening to diversity advisers. But it’s paying heed to the wrong people.
On the BBC yesterday, Caroline Paige, 55, the first openly transgender officer to serve on the military front line, was asked if she agreed with the skirt ban.
A former RAF officer, who used to live her life as a man, she replied: ‘I think it’s wrong to take away someone’s right to be proud of their gender.’
She added: ‘I’d like to see girls given the option if they want to wear a skirt.’
Quite.