The Guardian poisons the well in the usual way.

An artist whose work will no longer be available in the Royal Academy’s gift shop after views she expressed in a blogpost were deemed transphobic has said she is considering legal action against the institution.

It’s a bad sentence to begin with: too many separate bits of information with no punctuation between them. But setting that aside, note the “were deemed transphobic” – by whom, you damn fool? God? The entire world? Knowledgeable people? Or eight sniveling censors who don’t give a shit about art but just like silencing women?

It was the latter, of course, so what the hell is the Guardian doing insinuating that it’s some kind of authoritative “deeming” as opposed to a spiteful campaign against feminists and feminism? It is not good journalism to treat 8 nasty gossips as some kind of official body.

The RA confirmed Jess de Wahls’ embroidery work would no longer be stocked after a 2019 post – in which she outlined her views on gender identity politics – was determined to be transphobic by the RA.

That’s not what happened. The 8 censors whined to the RA and the RA panicked. They didn’t pause to “determine” anything, they just jumped when the censors said jump.

De Wahls told the Guardian that she is considering legal action. “I don’t know yet, but something’s going to give. They’re gonna have to say something at some point. If they hope that this is just going to go away, it’s not going to go away,” she said.

That “gonna” is a sneer, too.

The artist also refused to accept that denying trans women are women was transphobic, saying: “There has to be place for people to disagree respectfully and not validating someone’s felt identity, to me, I’m sorry, that’s not a hate crime.”

There also has to be a place for people to tell the truth. Trans women are men by definition.

Veteran LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity.

“If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

What’s it got to do with Peter Tatchell? Why ask him? Why not ask, for instance, a woman? Why ask a man with a long record of bullying women on this subject?

Because they’re in the tank, I suppose.

And here she is.

The woman cheated out of a place at the Olympics by a man pretending to be a woman.

A couple of weeks ago:

Allowing transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the women’s competition at the Tokyo Olympics would be like letting athletes dope and may set a dangerous precedent for future Games, Samoa’s weightlifting boss told Reuters.

Like letting athletes dope only worse, because it’s 37 years of more testosterone.

Tuaopepe Jerry Wallwork coaches Samoa’s Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers and is concerned Hubbard’s presence in the super-heavyweight division at Tokyo could deny the small island nation its second Olympic medal.

Sorry, small island nations go to the wall.

The IOC has said it is committed to inclusion regardless of gender identity and sexual characteristics but is also updating its guidelines.

This stupid word “inclusion” needs to be banished from discussions of this kind. Sport is all about exclusion, by its nature – there is winning and there is losing. Sport is competitive, and with competition you get exclusion. The IOC isn’t “committed to inclusion” at all – it doesn’t include everyone. A very small select few get to compete in the Olympic games; they’re about as exclusive as it gets.

So why are they carving out an exception for one man who claims to be trans? (I don’t believe he is trans, I think he’s just taking advantage.) Why is just this one purported mental state an exception to the rule that otherwise governs billions of people? They never say, they just repeat the stupid words.

Wallwork coached Samoa’s only Olympic medallist Ele Opeloge to weightlifting silver at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Doping robbed Opeloge and Samoa of the podium moment, however, with the medal only awarded eight years later after a re-analysis of drug test samples disqualified the bronze and silver medallists.

Ah that’s nice, so now the IOC is doing it to them all over again.

John McWhorter argues that it’s fine to call the Ibram Kendi-type anti-racism “Critical Race Theory” even though it’s not the actual law school Critical Race Theory, in part because people who say it isn’t fine are just playing rhetorical games. I’m still not convinced, but he says some interesting things (as he always does).

Since a year ago, CRT-infused members of The Elect, traditionally overrepresented in the world of schools of education, have sought to take the opportunity furnished by our “racial reckoning” to turn American schools into academies of “antiracist” indoctrination.

Schools of education – that’s one of the interesting things. From what I’ve read they can be quite faddy and at the same time anti-intellectual. If they’re full of Robin DiAngelos then I at least see what he’s getting at.

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.

However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it “CRT” in shorthand when:

1) these developments are descended from its teachings and

2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

Not a tort but not useful either, I think.

Now – are there some among critics of today’s CRT who just want us to stop talking about race at all? Are some of them the kind of white person who thinks racism of any note basically ended in the 1960s and that today we need to “stop stirring all of that stuff up”? Likely. But the evidence that this is the heart, the primum mobile, of resistance to “CRT” in our schools is comic book stuff.

Is anyone taken seriously actually proposing that students should learn nothing of slavery in school, or that students should never be taught that racism is anything but cross-burning and the N-word? Or, is it that a certain kind of person goes about ever hungry to accuse people of this aim, in order to fulfill their duty of identifying racism wherever they can find it?

Ok wait a second. In general I don’t have the temerity to challenge McWhorter, but there I think he’s doing a bit of fancy footwork himself. It depends what you mean by “taken seriously.” Of course there are people who are taken seriously who propose that or similar versions of it, it’s just that they’re taken seriously by people who vote for the MTGs and Gaetzs and Trumps.

In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.

Ok but maybe there should be significantly more teaching about oppression than there has been in the past?

I don’t know for sure. Maybe in practice it’s a bad idea, maybe it only makes things worse. But I think there’s still an awfully big lump under the rug.

Again with the shuffling and hemming and ending up in the same place:

New Zealand’s government and the country’s top sporting body have backed her inclusion for the upcoming Olympics.

“As well as being among the world’s best for her event, Laurel has met the IWF eligibility criteria, including those based on IOC Consensus Statement guidelines for transgender athletes,” New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive Kereyn Smith said.

But Hubbard is among the world’s best for the event only if he is counted as a woman. He’s not among the world’s best men for the event. Saying he’s the best in [the women’s] event to justify allowing him to compete in the women’s event is begging the question, to put it mildly.

“We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play,” he added.

We acknowledge it so that we can go ahead and ignore it by allowing Hubbard to steal a place from a woman.

“As the New Zealand team, we have a strong culture of ‘manaaki’ (respect) and inclusion and respect for all.”

I know I objected to that yesterday but I’m going to do it all over again today. Letting men cheat women out of places in sport is not respect or inclusion. It’s contempt for and exclusion of women. If you thought women counted at all you wouldn’t say it’s respect and inclusion to cheat them out of places on their own team.

Do they have amateur athletics in New Zealand? Does anyone there consider it respect and inclusion for a team to replace one of the players with a professional?

Do they have athletics for children and for teenagers? Does anyone there consider it respect and inclusion for a team to replace one of the players with an adult?

Including a man in a women’s competition isn’t inclusion it’s cheating. Cheating cheating cheating.

And while everyone is squawking about the critical race theorist under the bed, kindergarten children are being instructed on Special Pronouns.

About that Andrew Sullivan piece on what he calls “Critical Race Theory” –

How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.

Isn’t that silly of the mainstream media, says Andrew Mainstream Sullivan. But here’s a fun fact: it actually does matter what we call things. It really is worth getting the labels right. Critical Race Theory is not synonymous with every stupid fad idea people come up with.

I’m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely…And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.

But that’s not a reason to call that kind of indoctrination Critical Race Theory when that’s not what it is. It’s not a reason to get the labels wrong.

And no, 6-year-olds are not being taught Derrick Bell — or forced to read Judith Butler, or God help them, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Of course they aren’t — and I don’t know anyone who says they are. 

Exactly, and that’s why inept school programs should not be labeled incorrectly.

But they are being taught popularized terms, new words, and a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory.

Ahhhh “downstream” is it. Well that excuses everything then. Except it doesn’t.

Let me draw an analogy to another kind of education. In Catholic kindergarten, kids are not taught Aquinas, the debates about the Trinity in the early church, or the intricacies of transubstantiation. But they are taught that they were created by God, in his image, and that they should love one another. All of this is part of Catholicism. But the former is abstract and esoteric; the latter is the practical, downstream application of these truths — accessible to children, to direct their morality. As they grow up, they will learn more. But it is all part of the same system of faith and thought. Its words and values resonate throughout it all: love, compassion, sin, forgiveness, dignity, God, heaven. 

Love? Compassion? That’s what the Inquisition was? That’s what the Crusades were? That’s what the Irish industrial schools and Magdalen laundries were? That’s what the cesspit full of skeletons at Tuam was? That’s what the residential schools in Canada were?

Please.

Similarly with CRT, impenetrable academic discourse at the elite level is translated to child-friendly truisms, with the same aim — to change behavior. And so the notion that the most important thing about a child is that she is white, and this makes her part of an oppressive system purposely designed to hurt her new friend, who is black, is how this comes out in an actual real-life scenario. And she has to account for her indelible “whiteness”, just as Catholic kids have to account for their sins. CRT has its own words and values, and they are instilled from the beginning: racism, systems, intersectionality, hegemony, oppression, whiteness, privilege, cisgender, and “doing the work,” as CRT convert Dr. Jill Biden would say.

He’s talking about whiteness studies. Sir, sir, the target is over there.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Overdose of individualism.

I have just sent the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan after his latest piece on the subject of race on his blog ‘The Dish’. He rightly takes issue with some horrid examples of what has happened in some schools, but…

Dear Mr Sullivan,

Well, this on Critical Race Theory was rather better than your ready inclusion of ‘systemic racism’ as one of the horrible, ambiguous un-Orwellian terms in your last piece, although I think that as usual you exaggerate things. I agree with much of what you say, particularly with respect to those examples from schools, but was — I am sorry — amused by your comparing these examples unfavourably to the things taught in Catholic Sunday schools. It does seem to me that if you don’t like the one kind of inculcation, you should at the very least find the other very dubious. They do not seem to me to be fundamentally different, though you seem to find the one better than the other since you believe that Christianity is about ‘love, compassion, sin, forgiveness, dignity, God, Heaven’ (I rather admire your positioning of ‘sin’, followed by that quick ‘forgiveness’) — or, rather, that children should be taught this so that they may be primed to accept the more unsavoury aspects of Christianity later on. My irreligiousness was prompted at a very young age as a result of being subjected to such platitudes in (Anglican) Sunday school, as well as by the sense one had that behind these nice, comforting, sentimental things were lurking absolute power, fear, and punishment, not to mention Hell, for children hear of Hell about the same time they hear of Heaven. I do not really see that Christianity, whether of the Catholic variety or not, particularly as presented to impressionable children, is superior, in terms of morality or truth, to the platitudes about race trotted out in the examples you provide.

But, regarding ‘systemic racism’, I would say that Macpherson’s original term, ‘institutional racism’, is better than ‘systemic racism’ since it makes it clear these are faults of actual and reasonably clearly defined institutions, whereas ‘systemic racism’ is vague, and so allows abuse. You speak of ‘The legacy of this country’s profound racism, the deep and abiding shame of its genocidal slavocracy, the atrocities, such as Tulsa, which have been white-washed, the appalling record of lynchings and beatings…’ You might add to this gerrymandering and other on-going attempts by the Republican Party, particularly since the election of Biden, to suppress the African-American vote, the long sentences handed out to African-Americans for trivial offences, the constitutional allowance (Article 13) that ‘slavery’ and ‘involuntary servitude’ is permitted in the case of those who ‘have been duly convicted’ of a crime (an Irish friend of mine who travelled in the States in the last century was appalled to see chain-gangs working on the roads in certain areas), the destruction of African-American neighbourhoods by routing freeways through them, etc, etc.

These are all clear examples of present institutional racism. If it were clearly recognised that these things are examples of institutional racism, and reforms were made, the wind would be taken out of the sails of those who propose such an all-encompassing account of racism that any reform seems impossible, and only race-war seems on the cards. It would also make for a juster society. But I do not find in your fulminations any recognition of this possibility — instead you merely lash out at those whom you consider your ideological enemies without coming up with any positive and pragmatic ways of overcoming the present situation.

Best wishes,

Tim Harris

Perhaps I should have added that making institutional reforms would also lead to less racist attitudes. It is not simply that institutions are racist because people are, but that institutional racism encourages overt racist attitudes in individuals.

Laurel Hubbard is on the team.

The New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is set to make history and headlines, plus an enormous amount of controversy, after being confirmed as the first transgender athlete to ever compete at the Olympic Games.

He’s “set to make history and headlines” by stealing a place from a woman. How about thinking of her for one fucking second, Guardian? How about imagining what that feels like?

“I am grateful and humbled by the kindness and support that has been given to me by so many New Zealanders,” Hubbard said in a statement. 

Of course he’s not humbled. If he were humble he wouldn’t be doing it! It’s a shit thing to do to another person, and it takes colossal ego and selfishness to insist on doing it. There’s your making history and headlines.

“The last eighteen months has shown us all that there is strength in kinship, in community, and in working together towards a common purpose,” Hubbard added. 

Just stop. If it were anything to do with kinship and community and working together toward a common purpose he wouldn’t be cheating a woman out of her place. OBVIOUSLY.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive, Kereyn Smith, said Hubbard would be welcomed to the New Zealand team.

“As well as being among the world’s best for her event, Laurel has met the IWF eligibility criteria including those based on IOC guidelines for transgender athletes,” she said. “We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play.

He’s among the world’s best women for his event, but he’s not a woman, so he’s not among the world’s best. He’s also a cheater and a selfish piece of crap.

“As the New Zealand team, we have a strong culture of ‘manaaki’ [respect] and inclusion and respect for all. We are committed to supporting all eligible New Zealand athletes and ensuring their mental and physical wellbeing, along with their high-performance needs, while preparing for and competing at the Olympic Games are met.”

But what Hubbard is doing is the opposite of respect and inclusion. He’s excluding the woman who should be in his place. It’s cheating and it’s cruel and a decent human being wouldn’t do it.

Let’s think about autonomy.

In some cultures and contexts children have always experienced some forms of autonomy – like ones where their labor was necessary for example. Farm children – which was most children in most places for most recent history – were expected to do as much of the work as they physically could. The modern change is more in shielding them from work than in newly seeing value in autonomy for them.

But, that aside…children are children. The amount of autonomy it’s safe to give them is limited. Autonomy to decide to trash their own bodies…that’s one that should wait. The “thesis” that children know their own best interests is absurd, and thus reckless.

Victoria Smith points out how dull, banal, simple, obvious the whole issue of female subordination is. Where’s the fun in that? No room for clever layers of irony or jargon-riddled homilies.

“Men keep threatening to kill — and in fact killing — women and girls” is just not very interesting or complex. On the contrary, it all sounds terribly basic. Aren’t there more fascinating debates to be had about language and symbols and whether in fact — hear me out on this, it’s counter-intuitive hence super-clever — female people are in fact complicit or even to blame for their own deaths, what with them weaponising their pain by performing being murdered within the cisheteronormative capitalist economy? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whereas a plain, boring feminism that says “no, I don’t think you threatening to kill me with a machete offers us all a unique opportunity to explore why I am in fact The Man” doesn’t make you think at all. It sounds so painfully obvious it’s hard not to suspect there’s something you must have missed.

The machete reference, in case you’ve forgotten, is to one of Akwaeke Emezi’s tweets in her tantrum at Chimimanda Adichie.

This unfortunate boring obviousness of women’s subordinate status is an entry point for “You’re both giving me a headache,” which Victoria calls “opportunistic both sides-ism.”

It tells us we are too clever, too humble, too conscious of nuance, to fall for anything so simplistic as a straightforward victim-perpetrator narrative. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of our bystanding. Those women who are begging you to intervene? They lack your heightened sensitivity, your intellectual discernement, your ability to see shades of grey in a fist to the face.

…

The practical, rational desire not to intervene, because it is risky and upsetting, because it aligns one with the messy, disruptive victim, creates a need to see complexity where there is none. If you can position yourself as morally and intellectually superior to those basic types who still “take sides” (how childish!), then you have not only saved yourself the work of serious political engagement, but you can kid yourself that your conscience is clear. And — added bonus — it’s because you’re cleverer and kinder than everyone else!

And you have the best accessories, too.

No, please, do go on; I love being patronized.

Hazarika belittles feminist women and pats herself on the back for being so brave and determined. Two for one: you get both sides of the Both Sides award.

The Fawcett Society is continuing the “who can possibly know what to think in such a complicated disagreement??” approach. If they’re going to go that route in spite of everything, why are they even the Fawcett Society? Why aren’t they the Everybody Society? Being a feminist society is taking a position, it’s not throwing up one’s hands and saying “You’re both wrong and you should both apologize and start over.” Feminism isn’t about splitting the difference.

Ah yes “mediation.” Let’s force “mediation” between the aggressor and the target; let’s split the difference between the bully and the victim; let’s say “you’re both wrong” instead of paying attention to the reality; let’s say “good people on both sides” and see what happens.

The Law Society? Really?

Under HR and people management:

Using pronouns in the workplace

I think you’re supposed to learn that in the very early grades, or even earlier, as you learn to speak the local language. I don’t think it’s something adults need a refresher on.

Judging by name or appearance is not always an accurate method for determining a person’s pronouns.

Yes it is. Being able to tell who is which is another very early skill.

We frequently, and likely subconsciously, interpret or ‘read’ a person’s gender based on their outward appearance and expression, and ‘assign’ a pronoun.

However, our inference as to that person’s gender identity may not be correct.

Getting it wrong is extremely rare. This isn’t something adults don’t know how to do, or need instruction in.

Everyone deserves to have their chosen name and pronouns respected in the workplace.

No, everyone doesn’t. The workplace is the workplace. It’s a place for getting stuff done. It’s not a place for massaging the egos of special flowers who have special pronouns. The childish hobby of “choosing” a new name and a luxury pronoun is not something anyone “deserves to have respected.” On the contrary, such foolery deserves contempt.

Although you may feel it personally unnecessary to do so, and it may even make you feel a little uncomfortable at first, sharing your pronouns helps raise awareness and acceptance of different, including non-binary, gender identities.

But those identities are a fiction. HR departments should not be telling employees that they have to adopt a stupid new language that’s tedious to learn and worthless when you do learn it. The People of Gender need to grow up.

Sarah Phillimore is scathing about the cowardice and malice of Ayesha Hazarika.

[T]here was only strange and timorous silence from the Fawcett Society following [Maya] Forstater’s victory, until it was finally broken by an article in the Evening Standard on Wednesday.

Hazarika calls for “more moderate voices” to overcome the toxicity of the current debate, and an end to “cruelty and polarisation”:

As with so much right now, extremist, unforgiving, rigid voices on both sides dominate the online war in a fight to the death of who can scream and shame the loudest. And all it does is alienate people in the middle who want to find a solution which is humane, modern and common sense. But more moderate voices who could find the common ground here and find useful solutions are too scared to join in and who could blame them?

It is not merely the crude and unfair caricature of the current position which reveals the bad faith of this author. This is emphatically not about “both sides”. It is not trans women who are facing criminal trials or secret police recording their political speech; nor is it trans women who are being no-platformed by universities in breach of their statutory obligations to protect freedom of speech. It is also not trans women who are being sacked from their jobs for talking about issues of sex and gender.

And it is also not trans women who are the subordinated sex. It is not trans women who are assaulted on the street, murdered in their kitchens, sold into sex slavery, kept out of school, stoned to death on suspicion of talking to a man.

I am sorry that Hazarika finds herself so threatened by legitimate criticism that she needs a mental health professional on speed dial. Perhaps she might like to spare a thought for the thousands of women every day who face much worse and who do not have this privilege.

Define your terms. No discussion can take place unless we can agree what we are talking about. I suspect Millicent Fawcett had no difficulty defining a “woman” — they were the ones denied the vote. What does the Society that bears her name and operates under her banner of “courage calls to courage” now think a woman is? And what rights will it fight for her to have?

The right to chat about shoes and scarves with men who claim to be women?

I can’t recall any great campaigns that were won by squeaking mice, but if the Fawcett Society thinks timidity is the way to win women’s equality, fine. Do as you wish. But please don’t expect to go publicly unchallenged when you suggest that this represents the limits of what a woman can aspire to be, or to criticise her for defending her legal rights with vigour and robust language, in the face of continued threats of physical and sexual violence. If you really find argument and discussion so traumatic then that is your weakness to address, not our responsibility to fix with our “kindness”.

There is no “middle ground” here. Either women have rights, or they do not. Either they are allowed to speak about their rights, or they are not. If you seek to persuade us that “being kind” is more important than “having rights”, then you will need to do better than this. And change the name of your society. You have offered sufficient insult to the legacy of Millicent Fawcett.

Also…Maya has offered to have a conversation with Hazarika, and Hazarika has simply ignored her.

Nothing. Lots of lovey thank yous to people who flattered her, but no response to Maya, whose position she did not describe accurately.

She’s annoying.

More It Must Not Be Allowed, this time from LSE staff in solidarity with Open University staff and students.

We, the LSE Department of Gender Studies, write this letter in solidarity with the scholars, researchers, members of staff, and students at the Open University who are facing an unwelcoming and antagonistic environment because of the newly created Gender Critical Research Network. We support and wholly endorse the Open Letter from OU Staff and Postgraduate Research Students, written in response to the launch of the Network. Reiterating the demands of our colleagues at the Open University, we ask that the Open University urgently rescind its support for this network, and that it actively re-commit to supporting trans rights and the field of Gender Studies.  

The Gender Critical Research Network is an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics. Proponents of the “gender critical” perspective, including the Members and Affiliated Members of the Network, are adamantly and openly opposed to recognising trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights. Their efforts to undermine trans rights are particularly concerning now, at a time when trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in the UK and elsewhere are already experiencing such immense restrictions on their social, medical, interpersonal, and political livelihoods.

What is meant by “trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights”? If by “gender” they mean clothes and haircuts, then no gender critical people oppose such claims. If they mean “sex” then of course we do, just as people of color object if white people pretend to be people of color. That’s the usefulness of “gender” in this conflict: it’s never clear exactly what they’re claiming.

As numerous scholars and activists have documented, those espousing gender critical perspectives routinely make transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly, that have profoundly negative effects on social and political life. Their unfounded viewpoints are inimical to intersectional feminisms and scholarly debate, and they contribute to the ongoing “anti-gender” attacks on the field. In refusing the concept of gender, and in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and medical fields, and it relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender.  

Nah, what’s racist is claiming that it’s only white people who know who is which sex.

They end with a list of demands.

Empowerment! Yet another institution for female people has found a new way to erase female people. Progress!

The alma mater of a long list of distinguished women, from Rosalind Franklin and Dame Kate Bingham to Emily Mortimer and Rachel Weisz, is to rename the role of head girl because it is too “binary”.

In other words a girls’ school finds the word “girl” too “binary.” So will it become a persons’ school now? If so it will wait a long long long time for Eton and Harrow to do the same.

The head girl of St Paul’s Girls’ School, one of the country’s leading private schools, will be known as head of school after calls from pupils to make the role more inclusive.

Inclusive of what? They’re at a girls’ school. I suppose they could make it more inclusive by turning it into a factory, but then it wouldn’t be a school any more.

A better way to make such schools more inclusive is to offer more and more full-ride scholarships.

The school confirmed that the change would take effect from the next academic year, prompting outrage from some staff who claimed that it sent a “damaging message that girls now have to be ashamed to be seen as girls”.

Oops! Those members of staff are even now on the train to re-education camp.

“Why do the girls have to change their name?” a source said. “They should be teaching young women to be proud of their sex, not ashamed of it. It’s very contradictory. How can you be a single-sex school that exists to empower girls to do well and at the same time support girls to identify out of being a girl?”

Easy question. You can’t.

About seven out of 778 pupils at the school identify as non-binary, requesting that the school refer to them as they or them. “It’s a damaging message for the majority in order to protect the minority” Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the campaign group Transgender Trend, said. She claimed that the push for inclusivity had gone so far that “only male people can be girls or women without fear of offending anyone, apparently.”

Also the school had a gender training session in April.

The webinar — Beyond the Binary: Understanding How to Be Inclusive for All Gender Identities — was hosted in April by Helen Semple, the deputy head, in her capacity as founder of the Schools Inclusion Alliance, a group that aims to “put inclusion at the heart of every school”. It featured as guest speaker Emma Cusdin, founder of Global Butterflies, who spoke about her own transition from male to female. “The LGBTQI world is an amazing rainbow of positivity and labels. We love labels. We love terminology, we love flags, we love parties,” Cusdin told staff.

“Young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify. At the last count, we stopped counting at 150 gender identities that people are self-identifying. We did a little quiz in terms of what are the 150. I know about 30, in terms of what the definitions are. Don’t be afraid to ask, ‘That’s a new term to me. What does it mean to you?’ ”

Of course “young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify” – they’re self-obsessed. Adolescence does that to a person. But obsessing over one’s personality and idenniny and special specialness is not a reason for the world at large to change its understanding of sex every ten minutes.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 3,115 students in Britain identified as neither male nor female in 2019-2020, compared with 185 in 2013-2014.

But it’s not a fad. Not at all. No no.

They always frame it deceptively.

The fight over the rights of transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s athletics has spilled over to more than a dozen states as lawmakers in Idaho, Montana, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and most recently Florida have passed legislation since the beginning of 2020 to ban them from the field.

There are no such “rights.” Imagine saying “the fight over the rights of adult athletes to compete in children’s athletics has spilled over” blah blah – nobody would say that because the absurdity would be too obvious, but for some reason it’s not obvious when it comes to men trampling women.

Chase Strangio, a transgender man who serves as the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, pushed back against the notion critics of transgender athletes have pushed, that they have an unfair physical advantage over girls and women. “The idea of trans dominance is completely overblown. It’s a myth,” he said.

It’s not a “notion” that men have an unfair advantage over women, it’s reality. We’re not “critics of transgender athletes,” we’re outraged at the obvious unfairness of letting males compete invade women’s sports. The issue isn’t “trans dominance,” it’s male dominance. They just will not report this honestly.

“At the Olympic level…the most elite level of sporting competition, trans women and girls have been eligible to compete,” said Strangio. “Laurel [Hubbard] will be the first trans woman to ever qualify. Her current statistics do not even put her in medal contention.”

Hubbard stole a medal from a Samoan woman at the Pacific Games. He should not be competing in the women’s events.

“Perceived” by whom, you damn fools?