Allison Pearson on Brits abroad
Rude Britannia
Plans for my US book tour next year, to promote How Hard Can It Be?, are hotting up. Yesterday, I got an email from one event organiser. “I’ve been asked if you have any food allergies,” she wrote, “and what’s your personal pronoun of choice?” Without pausing to consider, I replied: “I’m still identifying as a woman, but I’ll keep you posted.”
When I told a New Yorker friend about this exchange, she warned me: “Don’t make jokes about that binary stuff, even if you think they’re totally crazy.” Thus, it has been decreed that there shall be no laughing about the gender absurdities foisted on us by the cultural commissars, even though laughter is the only sane response.
What happens across the Atlantic soon travels here. Sure enough, the NHS has announced that, from 2019, it will be asking all patients aged 16 or over whether they are “straight, gay, bisexual or other” every time they visit a GP or a hospital. Medical professionals are instructed to keep a record of the patient’s answer and to make a note if they refuse to give one. This despite recent findings by the Information Commissioner that a third of all NHS patient records are not secure. Jacob Rees-mogg is spot on when he describes the plan as “intrusive and Orwellian”.
A spokesman for NHS England explained: “All health bodies and local authorities with responsibility for adult social care are required under the Equality Act to ensure that no patient is discriminated against.” Fair enough – but if a doctor doesn’t know our sexual orientation, how can they discriminate against us? By giving the authorities that information, doesn’t it make it much easier to discriminate – or am I missing something?
There were dark times, at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, when gay men needed to keep their sexuality a secret in order to get insurance or a mortgage. Many may feel uneasy being asked to come out at the surgery when they have just popped to the GP with a chest infection. If there is a medical reason for them to disclose their sexual orientation, there is nothing to stop them doing so now. Equally, why should an elderly lady with a bladder infection be faced with such impertinence?
“People do not have to answer the questions, and it will have no impact on the care they receive,” says NHS England. So what the hell is the point, then, other than permitting the state to meddle in people’s private business and to virtue-signal in a tedious and wasteful manner? You can bet these attempts at social engineering won’t end there. The NHS is already looking into asking all patients whether they are transgender or “non-binary”. Yes, I know, Marjorie – we still think non-binary is the days the rubbish men don’t come. Oops, sorry, rubbish persons.
All this fuss, even though such people make up only the teeniest sliver of our population of 65.4million. There are more Britons who keep guinea pigs than who identify as transgender. Yet a huge amount of social policy is being driven through to cater solely for the latter.
Dismayingly, Conservatives – whose instinct should be to resist change for change’s sake – are at the forefront of the lunacy. Justine Greening, the Education Secretary, proposed a Gender Recognition Act to make it easier for adults to change their birth certificates at will. “This Government is committed to building an inclusive society that works for everyone, no matter what their gender or sexuality,” Greening blathered. “We will [...] tackle some of the historic prejudices that still persist in our laws, giving LGBT people a real say on the issues affecting them.” What about the rights of children not to wake up one day to find that the father on their birth certificate has never existed? Nobody seems to care about them in this brave new transgender world.
Earlier this month, the Office for National Statistics caused jaws to drop with the news that it was considering making it optional to say whether we are male or female at the next census in 2021. According to an internal report, the question is “considered to be irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive, particularly to trans participants, due to asking about sex rather than gender”.
Considered by whom? I doubt that the male/female question is considered irrelevant or unacceptable by most British people whose taxes pay, among other things, for the Office for National Statistics. Imagine all those future series of Who Do You Think You Are?, a hundred years hence, where the poor celebrity can’t even find out if their long-lost relative was a boy or a girl.
So, on the one hand, we have the ONS deciding that asking whether we are male or female for a vital census is intrusive, while the NHS is allowed to ask who we go to bed with.
It’s clear that spineless politicians, pathetically eager to be on-trend, are being manipulated by lobby groups such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Foundation, a “charity” reportedly behind the new NHS policy. The foundation receives annual grants of £500,000 from local councils and £234,800 from the Department of Health to pay for such vital services as “fetish workshops” and a “trans changing room” with “free make-up” during the Manchester Pride festival. Nice to know our money is being well spent, eh?
It’s tempting to laugh. But what’s at stake here is nothing less than our millennia-old understanding of human beings. Organisations that should know better have allowed themselves to be infiltrated by a warped ideology that dares to call the fundamental truths of biological science lies. So terrified are people in power of accusations of “transphobia” that they increasingly allow a tiny minority to dictate to the majority.
The headmistress of the prestigious all-girls’ school, James Allen’s in London, admitted recently that she now refers to students as “they” rather than “she”, because she wants to avoid embarrassing or upsetting “those who might be considering a sex change”.
Seriously. These people have got to be stopped before it’s too late.