The Brits are the proof: women are being erased

You don’t have to win a Brit Award to get ahead in the music industry. Just being nominated is usually enough to sell a fair few more albums. But now a change to the awards categories has resulted in only one kind of person being nominated for the top prize: men.

In a virtue-signalling effort to appeal to its “yooful” audience, the Brits decided to scrap the male and female categories for artist of the year to make it a “gender-neutral” event. This followed Sam Smith, the singer, coming out as non-binary.

But the result of the shift is a binary one: all of this year’s best artist nominees are male, while the album of the year category is also dominated by men, with Wet Leg the only female act out of the contenders.

There is a rising chorus calling for similar moves elsewhere in the entertainment industry. The director Sir Sam Mendes this week declared that gender-neutral Oscars were “inevitable”. Never mind that there are credible fears that in Hollywood, too, all the gongs will end up going to men.

Women who have worried about the encroachment of extreme trans ideology have been denounced as TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), scaremongers and even conspiracy theorists. But they have long feared that one of the consequences of giving in to some of the more radical demands of the gender ideologues will be the opposite of “inclusive”.

And their fears are fast becoming reality. In health, we are already witnessing the erasure even of the word “women” in favour of insulting terms such as “people who menstruate” and “chest feeders” – with potentially devastating consequences for people going for health screening.

This has always been about balancing rights, and in too many areas the rights of women are being sacrificed for those of a tiny minority.