Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Munroe Bergdorf and the left’s monopoly on morality

Munroe Bergdorf has resigned as Labour’s LGBT adviser after just one week in the job. Her appointment looked quite promising until it emerged she had deployed ‘butch lezza’ as an insult, joked that she’d like to ‘gay bash’ a TV character, and described gay Tory men as ‘a special kind of dickhead’. ‘Ever find that sometimes you’re just NOT in the mood for a gay and their flapping arms,’ she once mused on Twitter. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest gay rights advocacy isn’t the career for her. 

She has quit, citing ‘attacks on my character by the conservative right wing press’. Of course, there is no need to attack Bergdorf when you can simply quote her. Last year, she was dropped as L’Oreal’s first trans model for telling white people they are ‘the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth’ and their ‘entire existence is drenched in racism’. Yeah but she doesn’t mean ALL white people, right? ‘Yes ALL white people.’ Ah. Well, she’s a trans woman and it’s 100 years since the franchise began to be equalised. She must at least rate the Suffra.. ‘The Suffragettes were white supremacists,’ she tweeted. What, even those nice singing ones from Mary Poppins

Here my inner liberal gets all squishy. Identity politics is a counsel of despair but left and right alike are now firmly in the grip of sectarianism and probably will be for some time. To anyone under 40 unfortunate enough to hold an arts or social sciences degree, Bergdorf’s worldview is a bit oversimplified but uncontroversial. If you add phrases like ‘discourse analysis’ and ‘androcentric paradigms’ at random most of her statements read like the abstract of a peer reviewed journal article. But – and I can’t emphasise this enough – please can we stop getting people fired for saying things we don’t like?

Incidentally, you’ll notice those feisty foes of bigotry on the Labour benches who clamoured for (and got) Toby Young’s scalp were very quiet on this one.

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