Women

Education has become embroiled in a culture war and rather than extricating itself politely, it just keeps digging. What gets taught has long been subject to debate: move beyond the basics and you rapidly head into dangerous terrain (although, look hard enough, and you will find those prepared to argue that even maths and spelling are racist). Now it’s not just taught content but the name of modules that is under the woke microscope. One of the UK’s leading exam boards, OCR, has proposed renaming the ‘Women in Literature’ section of its A level English courses. It is taking votes on new titles: ‘gender in literature’ or ‘representing gender’. But

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made

As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on a man who posted a photo of a bus bearing the beauty spot’s name as a destination with the caption ‘Heading up to the Dyke’. It’s nutty, but it sparked a serious thought: where have all the lesbians gone? Just the other week the lesbian Joanna Cherry was sacked as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for

I’ve always been perplexed why anyone lucky enough to be born male would want to swap sexes. But it seems completely rational to me that girls might rather be boys. The UK’s recent High Court judgment that under-16s aren’t mature enough to give informed consent to puberty blockers highlighted the extraordinary switcheroo that has recently taken place in transgender clinics. Not only have diagnoses of gender dysphoria gone through the roof, but who wants to be what has reversed. A few years ago, nearly three-quarters of patients unhappy with their sex were male; now it’s almost exactly the other way around. So in this season of goodwill, I’d like to

Considering the subject of compatibility, experienced British expats in France maintain that a French man and an English woman might work, but rarely the other way around. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. The English chap, for example, who came to look at the septic tank has a long-term French partner who once broke his arm during a domestic dispute. This mildest, most liberal-minded of men lives alone in a mountain refuge whenever feasible. He also has a part-time job as a tour guide in the Far East. I am currently transitioning to a woman for urgent medical reasons. Force of habit, however, leads me to consider the French women I

New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great Yogi Berra got credit for it, but what he really said was: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ Well, I think it is all over, although it’s going to be dragged out by The Donald, who never knows when to stop. But as Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness, the fix was in; that’s why the man who lives in a basement remained in the basement while Trump flew manically all over the country rallying the troops. Apparently the cheating was on an industrial scale. We’ll know the final outcome

Taken to the Garrick Club one evening, I was surprised when a mouse ran across the carpet. I squeaked and pulled my legs up. Not a murmur from the other armchairs. My host leaned over. ‘No one minds the mice,’ he explained. ‘It’s the women they don’t want.’ It made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. I thought fondly of this story when I read in the paper that Emily Bendell, founder of the lingerie brand Bluebella, had instructed lawyers to seek an injunction preventing the Garrick from ‘continuing to operate its discriminatory policy’ of excluding women would-be members. As it happens, I don’t mind being there

It happens a lot lately. Not just in a Twitter DM or an email but in real life. Someone tells me they can’t really say what they think in their workplace any more. What awful things do they think? Mostly that the rights of vulnerable women should be protected and that children should be allowed to express their gender however they like without being whisked to a clinic. In the café the other day, a woman I vaguely knew from the playground asked me if I had received a letter she had sent to the Guardian. I hadn’t. She needed me to know that she and her friends who work

Just when you thought there was nothing more for women of the left to nonsensically oppose, I bring you news of a baffling development. Female horse-riders of a liberal persuasion are burning their bridles. Yes, there’s a new craze among the lunatic fringe of the horse world whose members are casting their reins on to the muck heap. This trend is mainly confined to people who can’t ride very well and who are terrified of horses, making it extremely risky for all concerned. You would have thought nervous riders would put extra tackle on for more control but the happy-clappy hippy-dippies of the horse community — who also happen to

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception. But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress

According to a poll of 538 experts on women’s issues, the United States is one of the ten most dangerous countries in the world for women. Admittedly, America is ranked tenth, but it’s still considered more dangerous than 183 other countries, including Iran, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Bangladesh and Myanmar. That’s quite a claim when you bear in mind that Iranian women caught not wearing a full hijab are routinely sentenced to 74 lashes, that an estimated 94 per cent of women in Sierra Leone have had their genitals mutilated, and that thousands of Rohingya women and girls have been raped by Myanmar’s soldiers and militiamen

We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about that roof.’ I looked at the roof, baffled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the roof.’ Genuinely, it’s the last bit of the lorry I have ever worried about. I tend to worry more about the floor, given that that is the bit the horse is standing on. I had the floor fully

To mark International Women’s Day, Liz Truss took over the Treasury for one night only. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury kicked off the celebrations at No 11 with a speech praising Destiny’s Child, the American girl group: ‘I can’t put it better than Destiny’s Child when they sang “all the honeys making money”‘ While Truss’s speech was primarily focussed on encouraging the women of the world to open their minds to finance (and liberty) – it also appeared to have a message for Philip Hammond. Truss told a room of female businesswomen and hacks that there was still much work to do for women’s progress. She noted that while