I see it is acceptable again for men to tell women what to do. And to snap ‘Get over it!’ if any of the little dears dares to quibble or speak back. How else do we explain William Hague taking to the airwaves to wag a patriarchal finger at the Women’s Institute and instruct it to welcome transgender women into its ranks?
Lord Hague was asked about infighting at the WI, between a leadership that wants trans women on board and ‘rebel members’ who think it’s odd and wrong to let biological males join a famously female-only organisation.
Hague was unequivocal. The pesky WI insurgents who outrageously believe that people with penises are men, not women, need to get with the programme, he said on Times Radio. Transgenderism is now ‘part of our society’ and ‘large national organisations like the WI have to get over that and get used to that’, he decreed. Shorter version: give it a rest, ladies.
Hague’s cry of ‘get over that, get used to that’ sums up everything that’s wrong in the trans debate
It was the cavalier manner of Hague’s intervention that felt most unsettling. Does he really not appreciate what he is demanding of the WI rebels? He is essentially insisting that they convert to his religion; that they genuflect before his hyper-metropolitan belief that a man can become a woman. But here’s the thing, William: some people don’t share that belief. They think it’s irrational.
What, exactly, must these women ‘get over’? Biology? The millennia-long understanding of human society that there are men and there are women and that they are different? Their desire for freedom of association, perhaps? Women wanting to associate with other women is bad now, apparently. It’s transphobic. Your right to organise as you see fit has been voided in the name of trans rights, ladies. Get over it.
Hague’s cry of ‘get over that, get used to that’ sums up everything that’s wrong in the trans debate. He was echoing Stonewall’s famous slogan: ‘Some people are trans. Get over it!’ What a patronising instruction that is. It’s a cynical debate-ender. Grow up, move on, stop squawking your petty disagreements – that’s what it means. It’s the 21st century’s ‘Calm down, dear’.
Playground cries of ‘Get over it’ are designed to damn anyone who questions the trans agenda as a batty old dinosaur in urgent need of awareness-raising. But the WI rebels, like other outspoken women on ‘Terf island’, are right not to ‘get over’ reality, to ‘get over’ freedom, which is essentially what is being demanded of them.
Hague might not understand what is at stake in the clash over the future of the WI, but the rebels do. Their concern is that the leadership’s embrace of the fashionable post-truth idea that anyone can be a woman, even a fella, threatens the entire mission of the WI. How can you have a Women’s Institute if you can’t say what a woman is? The leadership is ‘de facto forc[ing] individual Women’s Institutes to accept men’, say the rebels.
This would be the end of the WI. It would have to rename itself. The Women’s, Men’s and Non-Binary People’s Institute, perhaps. The Institute For Absolutely Anyone Who Feels Like A Woman, maybe.
Are we really saying it is no longer permissible for women – actual women – to freely associate with each other? That there is no space whatsoever – no changing room, no domestic-violence shelter, not even a local WI chapter – where women may gather without men? If we are, then let’s be honest about that. Let us openly say that women are no longer allowed to organise themselves as they choose. If that is your belief, Lord Hague, say it.
If the trans ideology is making it forbidden for women to associate exclusively with women, then the problem isn’t the WI rebels and other so-called ‘Terfs’ – it’s the trans ideology. In a free society everyone should enjoy freedom of conscience and freedom of association. In this case, that means the right of women to believe that a man can never become a woman, and the right of women to meet with other women for whatever reason they desire.
The WI rebels are following the diktats of their conscience rather than allowing themselves to be blown this way and that by the winds of ideology. Good on them. And if men don’t like it? Well, get over it, lads.
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