Gender

Thursday

Toby Young

Pride continues to crumble

In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride pudding’. This turned out to be a rainbow-coloured crumble created in honour of Pride month. ‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, and then noticed a large ‘Progress Pride’ flag behind the counter. Oh dear, I thought. That’ll set the cat among the pigeons. Sure enough, a couple of hours later the GC Cons Peers’ WhatsApp group erupted. This is made up of those dinosaurs who style themselves ‘gender critical’ – i.e. they believe sex is biological, binary and immutable. For the uninitiated, the Progress Pride flag features a large, multicoloured chevron

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The war on normality

Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures that ‘defy the binary, change sex and mirror the spectrum of identities found in the human world’. Adults-only tickets are a mere £18.50, so rush to reserve your place now. We’re presumably to conclude from this racy reveal that because some fish can change sex and hermaphroditic undersea organisms are commonplace, for humans sex is

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough

Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was

Lara Brown

The next front in the gender wars

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation. Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity. The semantic contortions

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Can a conclave be secretive? 

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a permanent or habitual quality. I suppose the people who wrote the news bulletins wanted to make it clear that the existence of the conclave was not a secret. But that is not how secret would be used. After all, we benefit from the secret ballot in Britain, but it is not the holding of the

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why don’t men ask questions?

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn. That sounds too passive. ‘Waiting in vain’ doesn’t begin to summon the way mild pique turns first to incredulity, then actual rage and despair at the man’s apparent lack of interest. ‘Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,’ my husband used to observe quite regularly on date nights in our courting days. ‘Is it because

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The gender frenzy has wrecked language

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The hidden violence behind the trans ruling

It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Let men do the housework!

Why are women still allowed to do housework? The question used to bother me during the years of my marriage when housework became a running sore between us. Perhaps the friction was inevitable. I was born in revolutionary times, the 1960s, and my mother taught me and my siblings to cook, clean and wash up for ourselves. We turned out as independent, self-sufficient adults. I would never ask a woman to make me a cup of coffee any more than I’d ask a bumblebee to build me a lighthouse. And doing jobs around the house suits my life as a writer. During the day I take frequent mini-breaks and do

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How to get your husband to do the vacuuming

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time. Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Migration mystery, Ipso’s trans muddle & are you a ‘trad dad’?

46 min listen

This week: why don’t we know how many people are in Britain? How many people live in the UK? It’s a straightforward question, yet the answer eludes some of the nation’s brightest statistical minds, writes Sam Bidwell for the cover this week. Whenever official figures are tested against real-world data, the population is almost always undercounted. For example, in England alone, nearly 64 million patients are registered with GP practices – higher than the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s estimated population of 58 million. Sam argues there are serious consequences for our society at large, including for tax, housing and our utilities. Who is to blame for this data deficiency?

Thursday

Theo Hobson

My wife earns more than me – and it doesn’t feel great

This is the article I have thought about writing for years, but I have always ended up asking what would be the point. And how annoying that some people would call it ‘brave’, meaning shameful. I’ve always earned a lot less money than my wife. There, I’ve said it. Is that still a big deal these days, a difficult thing to admit? Yes and no – and the ambiguity is rather interesting. Our culture claims to be liberated from old stereotypes about gender roles. But is it hell. Even its progressive urban elite is ruled by stubborn visceral traditionalism when it comes to gender and money. I’m prompted to share

Sunday

Michael Biggs

The ONS finally admits to flawed trans population statistics

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has finally admitted that the 2021 census figures on the transgender population of England and Wales are irredeemably flawed. They no longer count as ‘accredited official statistics’. This is the first time that data from the decennial census – the backbone of British statistics since 1801 – has been downgraded. This humiliating climb-down came just a week before the Office for Statistics Regulation published its final review on these statistics. This review had been provoked by my critique of the census transgender figures, publicized in the Spectator last year. Until now, the ONS has brushed aside criticism from sociologists such as myself and Alice

Monday

David Abulafia

Labour’s outrageous attack on academic free speech

In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the Conservatives, as a ‘hate-speech charter’. This is an outrageous distortion of the new laws that aim to guarantee free speech within universities. The best that can be said about that phrase is that, so long as we retain free speech, people are free to describe it that way. But doing so raises worrying doubts about what the new government thinks free speech means.   Universities have a special role in the promotion of free speech. They are, or should be, places where those teaching and those taught can try out ideas,

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Unmissable – for professors of gender studies: Alma Mater, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

Alma Mater is a topical melodrama set on a university campus. The new principal, Jo, (amusingly played by Justine Mitchell) is a radical feminist who recalls the bitter struggles of the 1980s when she strove to put women on an equal footing with men. Her task now is to address the college’s reputation for ‘binge-drinking, partying and casual sex’. To ingratiate herself with the students she makes a speech full of swear words which greatly impresses the first years, apparently. Then a nightmare unfolds. A naive Welsh fresher, Paige, attends a fancy dress party where she’s sexually assaulted by a handsome older student. Drink was involved. Paige admits that she

Saturday

Katy Balls

Labour’s women problem

14 min listen

The gender debate has become increasingly difficult for the Labour Party as the election campaign has rumbled on. JK Rowling has now agreed to meet with Labour to discuss gender transition policy, after writing in The Times that she’d struggle to vote for the party after feeling dismissed by them. After the election, will gender become an increasingly difficult issue for Keir Starmer? Megan McElroy speaks to Katy Balls and Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer and columnist at the Observer 

Thursday

The Spectator

When was the first televised election debate?

TV clashes The concept of a televised election debate is often believed to have begun with the one held between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon before the 1960 US presidential election – an innovation not repeated until 1976. (The first televised election debate in the UK didn’t take place until the 2010 general election.) Yet its history can really be traced back to 4 November 1956 when, days before Americans were invited to choose between President Eisenhower and Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson II, the CBS News show Face the Nation held a half-hour debate between Eleanor Roosevelt, representing the Democrats, and Margaret Chase Smith, representing the Republicans. Remarkably, it

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The inequality of sex

As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations, a few thoughts occur. The first and most obvious is (once again) the presumption of guilt on the part of the entertainment industry, a business entirely devoid of morals and managed largely by coked-up hypocrites. Obviously, for most human beings our repulsion at the immediacy with which Brand has been cancelled by these dreadful people is challenged by our collective detestation of the man himself – yet another of those ‘comedians’ who never ever said anything funny and whose shtick was simply to reflect the zeitgeist of the age by

Wednesday

John Sturgis

Stop misgendering my dog

It happens a couple of times a week: in parks, usually; sometimes outside shops, on Tube trains or in pubs. ‘What kind of dog is he?’ they’ll ask. I answer: ‘Bearded collie crossed with a greyhound which comes out looking like a deerhound but is actually a lurcher.’ But this is pointedly preceded by: ‘She’s a…’ I don’t like to be rude when strangers are being interested and congenial, but I feel compelled to quietly make the point that the dog they’re expressing interest in is not a he but a she.  News emerged this month that God might be becoming gender neutral. Or at least, certain factions of the

Tuesday

Cindy Yu

Will the Scottish trans row go to court?

15 min listen

Westminster and Holyrood are going head to head on Scotland’s newly passed Gender Recognition Bill. Last night, the UK government blocked the legislation from Edinburgh, citing that the powers it gives – requiring those identifying as a different gender to only live in that gender for three months, and reducing the age of self-identification to 16 – would contravene the UK’s Equality Act. In the end, it may be the courts that decide. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Cindy Yu.