Gender

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Gender fluid

Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid to negative electricity. ‘New flannel, if dry and warm, will draw the electric fluid from non-electrics.’ By an electric he meant substances such as glass, and indeed the air. I’m not sure how much we think of electricity as a fluid today. James Thurber’s mother worried that it would run out of the sockets unless one left a plug in them, but she was perhaps unusual. Flann O’Brien put forward the similar theory that darkness was due to the accretion of ‘black air’. Fluid mediums persisted in our world view because it was hard

Friday

Tom Goodenough

Spectator most read: Our five top pieces from this week

Our most-read piece this week was Fraser Nelson’s article about the Swedish government’s refusal to be honest about the crime and immigration. He said: ‘News of an attack brings grief and outrage, but the sense that the authorities are not telling the whole truth brings a new level of anger and suspicion. All of this further undermines public support for immigration.’ Read the article by clicking here The second most-read article was Melanie Phillips’ cover piece on gender. She said that it was dangerous and wrong to tell children they’re gender fluid. In her piece, Melanie added: ‘In short, the political class is obsessed by gender issues. I trust you

Thursday

Melanie Phillips

In defence of gender

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3″ title=”Melanie Phillips and Jacqui Gavin, a trans activist and civil servant, discuss gender”] Listen [/audioplayer]Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast

Wednesday

Melanie Phillips

It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’

This is the cover piece of this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow: Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Notebook | 10 December 2015

This time last year I was running around excitedly telling all my friends that I had an African president in the family, something none of them could boast. My younger daughter Theo is married to Sasha Scott, son of Dr Guy Scott, who was president of Zambia from October 2014 to January 2015, and the only white African president since apartheid. When I first met him five years ago he was an opposition MP, but then in 2011 his party won the elections and the new president, Michael Sata, appointed him vice-president. Dr Scott’s job as veep seemed to involve constant travelling. President Sata was reluctant to leave the country,

Thursday

James Delingpole

There’s a right way to lose at the Oxford Union. I did the wrong way

The way not to win a debate at the Oxford Union, I’ve just discovered, is to start your speech with a casual quip about Aids. It wasn’t a scripted joke. Just one of those things you blurt out in those terrifying initial moments when you’re trying to win the audience over with your japeish, irreverent, mildly self-parodying human side before launching into your argument proper. It only happened because when my turn came to speak there wasn’t any still water for me to drink and I was parched. So various Union officers proffered me the dregs of the other speakers’ half-drunk bottles. ‘Oh my God, I might get Aids,’ I

Friday

Ross Clark

Eight years’ jail for a girl with a strap-on. What’s Britain coming to?

In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it here, else she might be facing the best part of a decade behind bars. There have been many times since the accusations against Jimmy Savile came to light three years ago that I have wondered whether Britain’s traditional prudishness over sex is developing into a national psychosis. Is there any other nation where a dozen

Ross Clark Ross Clark

There’s a transgender storm coming…

The weather chart does not usually echo social trends, but Monday might be an exception. We could be about to be blown about by the world’s first transgender storm. This week, the Met Office began the practice of naming storms to strike the UK, in the manner that tropical hurricanes have been named by the World Meteorological Organisation since the 1950s. If a storm looks as if it is developing winds powerful enough to uproot trees and cause structural damage to buildings it will be given a name from a list. The list of chosen names goes through the alphabet in progression, alternating between male and female names. The first

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport

Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had acquired was every bit as authentic as the one they had jubilantly renounced. So a separate toilet is surely otiose. And not just that, but the suggestion that they might need a separate toilet for micturition through their surgically emended private parts is surely offensive. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, may be in trouble, then, for announcing his intention to install these mysterious receptacles throughout the Palace of Westminster to service the hordes of transgendered workers wandering around with extravagant beehive hairdos and outsize stiletto heels.

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Who isn’t genderfluid?

Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female.’ Which makes this not just the oldest but the most socially progressive tree in Britain, the Caitlyn Jenner of topiary. Or perhaps it was just one transgressive branch making a bid for attention, having been trapped in the wrong trunk all this time.

Thursday

Robert Gorelangton

All white on the night

Shakespeare’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ will have no ethnic minority actors in the cast when the shows (two Henry VI plays and Richard III) open at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, later this month. A sprinkling of so-called BME (black and minority ethnic) actors in Shakespeare has been the norm for ages now. So the decision by the director to go with an all-white cast has caused much hurt and concern from the actor’s union Equity, the Guardian, and from various groups promoting racial diversity in the arts. From all the fuss, you’d think the plays are being directed by a hooded white supremacist. In fact they are being

Kate Chisholm

Loose women

Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled conversation’. The 11 p.m.–midnight slot is an ideal opportunity for cardigans to be unbuttoned and tongues unloosed, a chance to show that Radio 4’s venerable magazine programme for women can still shake up the station. Lauren Laverne was brought in from 6 Music to host the first few editions, signalling that there would be nothing mumsy about these hour-long chats around the table with a selection of well-chosen guests. Her style is refreshingly different, frank and a little bit cheeky, not at all Radio 4. How could it be when

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Lifting the veil

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty equal footing with their future male oppressors. Indeed, in arguably the first civilisation — a hive-like collection of houses in central Anatolia called Çatalhöyük dating back to 7,500 bc, when mankind was just beginning to emerge from the Stone Age and living with semi-domesticated animals — not a single man was expected to put out

Friday

Brendan O’Neill

There’s a simple reason why the Stonewall trailer doesn’t feature more ‘trans women of colour’

Aping Isis, trans activists have defaced a historical monument to make a political point. They blacked-up — seriously, with spray paint and afro wigs — the Christopher Street Gay Liberation statue in New York, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Their beef? That the monument and a new movie about Stonewall don’t give enough credit to the black and Latino trans women who apparently were among the first to hurl bottles at homophobic cops on that fateful night. Let’s leave to one side the ugliness of sticking a comedy afro on a statue to make it appear black — a PC version

Thursday

James Delingpole

The lying game | 14 May 2015

My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole thing had been scripted and faked by the film-makers (as I’m sure it wasn’t: no need), it couldn’t have worked out better. With just 15 minutes to go before Maxwell’s court hearing seven miles away, his brother turns up to give him a lift on his motorbike. But there’s one small problem. Maxwell’s brother is

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Rock bottom

The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made a packet out of saying the unsayable about race. Richard Pryor kicked down the door, but it was Rock who stamped a registered trademark on the N-word. He also had a rapper’s sensibility in the area of gender politics: his breakthrough set had much to say about — and I merely quote — dick and pussy. And what about the movies? For children, Rock voiced a jive-talking zebra in the Madagascar mega-franchise, perhaps a quadrupedal hommage to Eddie Murphy’s donkey in Shrek. Alas Rock’s own pet projects have a tendency

Friday

Zoe Strimpel

Force Majeure reviewed: meaty and hilarious – but it may wreck your relationship

If you’re unsure about the man (or woman) you’re dating, go and see this film. It’ll cause rifts in a weak relationship, and yield powerful debate – or perhaps agreement on the central themes – in a strong one. It asks men to defend or disown the role of hero, and begs us to consider whether motherhood naturally graces its host with more altruistic instincts than fatherhood. Who’s braver: men or women? Or, let’s cut to the chase, you or me? At the core of this slick and sometimes hilarious Swedish film by Ruben Östlund is the non-rhetorical question: when push comes to shove, what would you do? I’ve always

Francesca Steele

The Falling reviewed: a film of beauty and magic

Long live the glockenspiel, that typically dull percussion stalwart usually relegated to primary school memories, along with humdrum gym classes and endless repetitions of Kumbaya. Here the glock is like a new instrument altogether. Its eery, metallic tones haunt the early scenes of Carol Morley’s The Falling, filling them with an unexpectedly ethereal quality that is both childlike and yet somehow sophisticated at the same time – just like the longed for worldliness of the impatient teenage girls at the heart of this warped coming of age story. The music (recorded by Everything but the Girls’s Tracey Thorn) is the backbone of this flawed yet deeply atmospheric film, which gets

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Trans activists are effectively experimenting on children. Could there be anything more cruel?

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’? Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks.  Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five