Does the TUC understand what the word ‘mum’ means?

Imagine if, in 1868, when the TUC was founded, someone had told those warriors for workers’ rights that one day they would be referring to biological males as ‘mothers’. And what’s more that they would be publicly scolding anyone who dared to dissent; anyone who said: ‘Hold on – surely only women can be mums?’

They would have thought you mad. We’re a reasoned, rational organisation concerned only with improving the pay and conditions of working people, they’d have insisted. Well, fast forward to 2023, and what do you know: the TUC, the big beast of union politics, has openly declared that men can be mothers too.

A curious thing happened this week. ITV News ran an item on the problem of soaring water bills. It included an interview with a ‘Thames Water customer’ called Mika Minio-Paluello. The spike in the price of water, and so much more besides, is ‘tough if you’re a mum like me’, said Minio-Paluello, who was then shown filling the washing machine and cleaning dishes and generally looking stressed about the cost of living.

Here’s the thing: Minio-Paluello is trans; a biological male who identifies as a woman. So while this person may very well be an excellent parent, can we really use the word ‘mum’ here? Many women say ‘Nope’. There was a massive digital backlash against ITV. Britain is full of real mums struggling to make ends meet and yet you speak to a born male who only identifies as a mum, women tweeted, perfectly reasonably if you ask me.

The valiant Labour MP Rosie Duffield led the charge for truth. ‘Dear ITV News’, she wrote, ‘I am sure this is a lovely, intelligent and decent human being. This was an important piece. This is not however a struggling “mother”.’

The vast majority of Brits, who understand biology, who know that a mum is an adult human female who has given birth to a child or adopted one, will see nothing controversial in what Ms Duffield said. The right-on virtual mob is a different matter entirely. They went for Duffield, viciously, as they so often do. They denounced her as a bigot and a transphobe. Kick her out of the party, Corbynistas cried. Shorter version: ‘Silence, witch.’

This is how completely the bourgeois left has taken leave of the realm of reason: it now hounds women simply for saying that only women can be mums. It demands the expulsion from public life of any ‘TERF’ – the modern term for witch – who dares to utter something that every generation before ours knew to be true: that a mother is a woman who has a child.

The irrationalism of it all is chilling. And it’s an irrationalism the TUC now endorses. As well as being a concerned Thames Water customer, Mika Minio-Paluello is a TUC member of staff. And the TUC wagged its huge union-boss finger at the uppity women who had the temerity to question whether Minio-Paluello is a ‘mum’.

It denounced them for the sin of ‘transphobia’. It is unacceptable, it barked, that a member of our team has been subjected to criticism just ‘because she is a mother’.

And there you have it: the TUC has succumbed to the post-truth delirium of identity politics. The TUC now genuflects before the religion of gendered souls, which holds that we all have a mysterious inner gender and sometimes it runs counter to our cursed biological frame. An organisation founded to make the rational case for workers’ rights now appears to promote the irrational creed of a hundred genders. How the mighty have fallen.

This is a serious matter. It is none of my business what pronouns Mika Minio-Paluello uses at home or with friends. But it absolutely is my business, and yours, when a word as important as mother is unilaterally redefined by broadcasters, political activists and union bosses; when our supposed betters radically alter the meaning of the words we use every day without our permission.

It is intolerable. Language is not the plaything of the elites, something they can rewrite on a whim. It is the means through which we all make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the universal tool for understanding who we are. Language belongs to us all. The TUC has no more right to redefine the word mother than it does to redefine the word ‘the’ or ‘sky’ or ‘home’. It is conceited in the extreme, and anti-democratic too, for people in positions of power to assume the right to change a word’s meaning.

And make no mistake: the idea that a biological male can be a mother radically changes what the word mother means. It empties the word of its biological, relational and social truths, of its historical essence, and rules that from now on anyone can be a mother. Male, female, neither, whatever: if you feel like you’re a mum, you’re a mum. ‘Mother’ no longer describes a real person, a real relationship; ‘mother’ is now a mere feeling, as likely to be felt by a man as by a woman.

It is hard to think of another word as important to human society as mother. If we let them redefine even this word that binds families and communities together, then we are granting them dominion over reality itself. The power to overhaul a word like mother is a power no one should enjoy. It is cultural autocracy.

So no, you cannot have this word. It means too much to the rest of us. No man is a mother, or ever will be. I’m sorry if that hurts some people’s feelings, but truth trumps your feelings, every time.