This is the moment we reached peak gender insanity
‘This cloakroom may be used by any person, regardless of gender identity or expression,” reads a notice on the lavatory door of the bar I’m in on Saturday night. This is designed to give me a hit of selfimportance. I have choices, options, both in terms of who I am and how I decide to express that self to the world: a world waiting with bated breath for me to tell them why I’m special.
And, yet, I don’t feel reassured by this open-minded lavatory, because everyone in the bar is drunk, the corridor it’s situated in is dimly lit – and the only other people queuing outside it are men. So, instead, what I feel is uneasy, undignified, unsafe.
I’m guessing that younger women are getting used to the feeling of vulnerability I felt so acutely. Just as British schoolgirls are getting used to their Mao-esque, gender-neutral uniforms, and “holding it in” all day at school (with the risk of contracting infections), anything to avoid using the gender-neutral loos. According to a report this month, an increasing number are so ashamed and fearful of sharing cubicles with male pupils that they’re skipping the entire thing.
British brands, meanwhile, are getting used to being bullied by the trans lobby, with Flora one of the first to capitulate, pulling their ads from Mumsnet following accusations that the parenting website was transphobic. On Saturday, Procter & Gamble’s Always sanitary towels caved, agreeing to remove the Venus symbol from the wrapping after LGBT groups complained that not everyone who has periods identifies as a woman. Which would almost be laughable – look how far we’ve come: fighting over ownership of sanitary towels! – if it weren’t for a more devastating capitulation the very next day.
This time, it was the police, who were forced to reveal on Sunday that suspected and convicted rapists are now being logged as female when arrested, if that is how they choose to identify themselves.
South Yorkshire Police admitted: “We will accept the details that an individual provides us and treat them according[ly].” For its part, Thames Valley Police agreed that in a situation where a rapist is brought in, “a male-born person self-identifying as female should be recorded as female on our source system”.
Got it. Never mind that the legal definition of rape involves non-consensual penetration with a penis, and that by denying the existence of that penis you’re denying the existence of the weaponry used to commit that crime.
Never mind that, as Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, pointed out: “It would
be highly offensive to a woman who was raped to have it written down that her attacker was a female.” We’re way too far gone for common sense or logic.
I’ve always maintained in this column that children are the biggest victims of the gender fad, and avoided looking too closely at the impact on women because… well, because feminists were top of the victimometer for so long that I became like a parent who had tuned out the constant whining. And because when Radio 4’s Jane Garvey tried to shed some light on the famous feminist trans feud by hosting a series of debates last year, both sides came off so appallingly that I shut them out of my mind.
But this is an attack on women. And I don’t think that Julie Bindel, the leading feminist campaigner, was exaggerating when she said on Sunday: “We’re now moving towards the total elimination of women’s biology.”
This isn’t about feminists, activists, sociologists and the deliberately impenetrable jargon they all choose to use in their public duels. And it’s not about who gets to claim periods, with all their paraphernalia, either (but have them, please, along with stretch marks, menopause, and the certainty that you’ve been ripped off by every MOT guy you’ve come across).
This is about fragile young girls, still struggling to come to terms with their own changing bodies, being forced into preposterous intimacy with boys. It’s about transgender athletes like Rachel Mckinnon – who won the World Masters Track Cycling Championships on Sunday for the second year running – killing women’s sports.
It’s about the series of future assaults and intimidations that will have to happen before someone works out that having a load of drunk men and women using the same toilets in bars and clubs was Not A Smart Move. It’s about rapists being indulged and coddled by the police while their victims are effectively mocked.
And it’s about knowing when we’ve reached peak gender insanity. Please God, let this be it.