Of all the grotesque modern types who cast a silly-yet-sinister shadow over the dog-days of Western civilisation – the Queers for Palestine, the Jew-baiting anti-racists, the humanity-hating eco-nuts – the Transmaid has a special step of shame very near the top. The Transmaid is a handmaid, like in Margaret Atwood’s novel, with two vital differences.
Transmaids get everywhere, but they are often to be found in showbusiness and politics
Transmaids often curry favour, not with regular men – indeed, they may often think of themselves as feminists who hate the patriarchy – but with men who say they are women. This means they do not really practise feminism at all, but something I call ‘Frankenfeminism’ which, whatever the intention, ends up gratifying men and degrading women. A Transmaid may get cross about the high level of violence against women and the pathetic police prosecution of rape (now practically ‘decriminalised’ according to the victims’ commissioner, Dame Vera Baird), but in the next breath suggest it’s fine for a rapist to be housed in a female prison, if he decides he wants to be called Karen, not Kieron.
Transmaids aren’t necessarily forced into such positions, unlike the poor women in Atwood’s book. All too often, these women choose to be Transmaids, perhaps because they believe that doing so may bring more power, institutions being captured by the ideology the way they are. She is the worst sort of sell-out.
Transmaids get everywhere, but they are often to be found in showbusiness and politics. Some of the showbiz ones have a ‘trans child’. But Clare Balding doesn’t even have that excuse. Talking in the Times, the radio presenter (who takes blandness so far that it sometimes feels like a kind of outrageous performance art) spoke of her desire to see mixed sports teams of men and women: ‘I don’t ever want to fall into the trap of making it men versus women, because I genuinely believe that people doing stuff together in mixed environments is better for everyone.’ What, like a boxing match between a strapping six-foot bloke and a slip of a girl?
Though Balding didn’t mention ‘trans women’, I very much doubt that she would have come out with this ocean-going tosh if there wasn’t an attempt underway by men to colonise women’s sports. Mixed teams are a one-size-fits-all way of making sure that the men in frocks don’t have their feelings hurt. They’re also a sure way of guaranteeing that women who have trained hard to win won’t win anything anymore unless, as in the case of team sports, they have big strong men to help them out. But the joy of solitary excellence will be a thing of the past for the ghost girl champions of tomorrow.
Time and again we see the aggression of males attempting to rob women of their hard-won necessities and pleasures, from toilets to trophies. Brave women stand up against these wolves in ewes clothing, often to have their livelihoods and even lives ruined; cowardly women give in to them and become Transmaids.
It’s telling that the growth of #BeKind has taken place alongside the rise of increasingly noisy self-expression from other groups who feel hard done by, but only for females. As the social commentator, Laura Bishop, put it: ‘While shopping for my kids I noticed that there are so many items of clothing which say Be Kind – but they were all in the girls’ and womens’ section. Every. Single. One. It’s like indoctrination.’ Every other group: riot. Women: Be Kind.
Which brings us to the woman who makes Nicola Sturgeon look like Valerie Solanas when it comes to sucking up to her trans-sisters. I’ve always been so allergic to the terminally smug Sandi Toksvig that, when I paid my subs to the Women’s Equality party (WEP) – which she co-founded – back in 2015, I took great pains to join only to the level below the one where you got a free copy of her book. This was even though I was keen to contribute as much money as possible to this apparently noble cause. Between then and now, this awful hybrid of Lady Muck and a lumberjack has made seven sorts of fool of herself, including by suggesting Brexit might be ‘sexist’. Writing in the Independent in 2019, this ludicrous being opined:
Some of the enormous political issues we face today – the climate emergency, cyber crime, violence against women and girls – are truly global; we cannot fight them alone, and we cannot fight them outside of Europe…
Johnson’s insidious sexism is a dangerous threat to women’s rights. Ironically, he’s the very character that the European Union was designed to counteract, with its long-standing commitment to women’s working rights and gender equality…
For me the choice is starker than ever: a sexist Boris Johnson Brexit, or a bright future in Europe combined with a serious effort to heal the country.
Since the brave dawn of its inception, the WEP has gone from netting 0.01 per cent of the national vote in the 2017 general election – the first it put up candidates for – to 0.0 per cent this year. But it could probably have struggled on as a pressure group if, in 2022, it had not voted to support gender self-ID, thus revealing itself as a captured group run by, and for, Transmaids.
Now, in the ultimate act of male-pandering female erasure, the WEP looks set to vote to abolish itself. It has done so, as Suzanne Moore – who helped set the party up – wrote, after years of ‘taking the donations and membership subscriptions of women who could often ill afford them but remained hopeful somehow…a quick look at X will reveal just how betrayed so many women felt who put their heart and soul into trying to make it work’.
The fact is that, whatever excuses they may make, the WEP has chosen to take this cowardly decision because it knows that it cannot call itself a feminist party while putting men first. The party’s inability to place the hard facts of women’s lives over the fantasies and demands of men decreed ultimately that it should dissolve itself as it could not control its members. This brings to mind the Bertolt Brecht poem The Solution:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Even otherwise sensible women come over all soppy when trying to make the final break from their long-time abusive boyfriend, the Labour party, in some instances taking it out on the gloriously autonomous Kellie-Jay Keen, whose angry, playful and unashamedly populist Party Of Women is everything the WEP wasn’t.
The death of the WEP should be a lesson to all of us that ideas of Right and Left have no place in feminism any longer – if ever they did; let’s not forget that Emmeline Pankhurst herself was barred from joining her local Manchester Labour party because she was a woman. (Her friend, Labour’s founder Keir Hardie, made a special dispensation so that she could join the London branch instead.)
It’s time for women to break up with their bully boyfriend once and for all; if they do not have the guts to make themselves politically homeless – but free – they will find that they become as confused and ultimately self-immolating as the WEP has turned out to be. Because he doesn’t love you despite it all, you don’t look fat in that blue dress – and there is someone else who likes you just the way you are, be they Kemi Badenoch or Kellie-Jay. But don’t waste your time on a party – be it Labour or the WEP – which would gladly chuck 51 per cent of the population under a bus, or even the king’s racehorse, in order to bag the tiny transgender vote. Because if their judgement is off on that obvious choice, it’s going to be off on everything – as the state of the current government so woefully shows.
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