As soon as she heard the news thatBridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, was providingguidance on single-sex spacesin line with the Supreme Court ruling, a friend texted me jubilantly to say that perhaps a portal into sanity was finally opening. “Being allowed to say no to men in women’s toilets is the first step to being allowed to say no more broadly to insane, bad things,” she said.
One wants to believe that if people see the light about A, they’ll see the light about B, the whole woke edifice will simply crumble; some semblance of cultural rationality and decency will return and the West will survive.
But on receiving his text, I shook my head ruefully. For unfortunately I think that glimmers of sense pushing against the incursions of the trans activist agenda are rather more contained than one would hope.
We’ve already had endless would-be Eureka moments – theHilary Cass reportinto the scandal of puberty blockers liberally dispensed by NHS trusts to children, the slow progress on banning men from women’s sport, the Supreme Court ruling itself that sex should be defined as biological and so, praise be, women’s loos really do mean women’s loos.
These were all important strikes against madness, but never really seemed to go beyond themselves. The reason the Government is now belatedly issuing guidance is that the activists running our public institutions largely ignored the Supreme Court. For instance there is a new sign up at theLadies Pond on Hampstead Heath, where I frequently swim, saying that trans women are welcome.
Conspiracies spread like wildfire, but good ideas, sadly, don’t.The killing of George Floydwas a starting gun for an era in which progressive Western societies lost their heads. Longer-running wokisms, like extreme affirmative action, were amplified, and new fires of madness, like teaching pre-schoolers about “white supremacy”, were ignited.
In the years since George Floyd and the atom bomb explosion of identitarianism, we have – as creatures of hope – heard many times about how the madness might finally have been defeated. But it most certainly hasn’t, and those celebrating are, I fear, clutching at straws.
That’s not to say some things haven’t shifted. Greenism has had a battering, though in the typicallyirresponsible style favoured by Trump(rather than the way it ought to be battered: by encouraging enterprise to solve the real problem of global warming). At any rate, Trump has opened the door to a culture in which pursuing the bottom line, environmental virtue-signalling be damned, has become more acceptable.
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In the UK, there is a bit more honest conversation about what a luxuriously silly campaign net zero is. But… meh. It’s barely a dent in the sprawling edifice of loonyism in which we all must live.
False hope is everywhere. Ever heard of “grandpersoning” an idea into reality, or a person to success, rather than “grandfathering”? The Aussies have, thanks to Greens senator Nick McKim deploying it to describe some aspect of the opposing Labor Party’s housing policy. It was met with jeers and consternation. Well, you might say, at least we get to laugh at such things now. Sanity has surely returned!
Let us not forget the poor eco-zealous restaurateurs who were awarded newfangled green stars from Michelin, in recognition of their commitment to the environment, only to have them wrenched away because everyone confused them with the gastronomic red ones.
Do spare a thought for Hylton Espey, owner ofCulture restaurant in Falmouth, who serves mushrooms from a nearby “no-dig” garden, and Cecily Fearnley, ofHomestead Kitchen Garden in North Yorkshire, who have now lost their green stars and are very unhappy about it. To be fair, their food sounds great so maybe they will soon get some real red ones.
And they can take comfort that Michelin Guide’s zeal for saving the planet, one plate offoie grasat a time, is not dwindling in the slightest, thanks to its Mindful Voices initiative, a “global editorial platform” about sustainable restaurants.
It’s not impossible that a small thing could unravel the whole. And so I am always on the lookout for signs that chinks in the armour of the woke beast are connecting to, and diminishing, the horror and falsehood that defines treatment of Israel. And the answer to that question is repeatedly and disappointingly no.
Take the existence of prominent persons in the Western feminist movement who have staked their morality ondenying that Hamas raped and sexually tortured Israeli womenon and after October 7. Some of these women are “gender-critical” feminists, i.e. they are opposed to the trans movement. Sadly, this does not offer the assurance you’d think it would.
I have repeatedly encountered fellow travellers who are crestfallen and confused when they find out that this or that “gender-critical”, i.e. sane-seeming, feminist, still seems keener to bolster a jihadi Islamist group 2,000 miles away than the Jewish women they butchered (and the Muslim women they continue to butcher).
EM Forster introduced the evocative injunction “only connect” inHoward’s Endin 1910. But in a world of fracture, boredom, anxiety, intellectual thinning and incoherence, it is becoming increasingly hard to do so. If one bit of madness is punctured, a million more remain intact.
