The Left has saved the Right from its own cowardice

JK Rowling, take a bow. The defeat of gender ideology in the UK is now almost complete, and it was the Left, not the Right, that delivered it

Link

Daily Telegraph 19/4/25

Paradoxically, the greatest victory for conservatism since Brexit was engineered by a heroic gang of Left-wing feminists, most notably Rowling, only belatedly supported by a Conservative Party that for long was too timid to stand up to the woke juggernaut. It’s a tale that has a lot to teach about the realignment of modern politics, the Labour Party’s retreat into a weird metropolitan bubble, the fading of the Tories and the rise of Reform.

Now that the vibes have fully shifted, culminating in the Supreme Court ruling that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equalities Act refer to biological sex and not the gender with which a person identifies, few in Westminster want to be reminded of their erstwhile unsoundness.

Yet it shouldn’t be forgotten that when a small group of feminists launched For Women Scotland in 2018, Theresa May, now Baroness May, was the UK’s prime minister, and the Tories had bought into gender ideology hook, line and sinker. Many Conservative MPs thought that trans ideology was merely the latest big social shift, and that it would be mad for them to oppose it. They wrongly saw opponents as bizarre dinosaurs.

They failed to stand up for Rowling when she famously slammed the (then) growing use of the idiotic term “people who menstruate”? She tweeted: “I’m sure there used to be a word for these people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Baroness May herself advocated allowing people to change gender without medical checks, famously arguing in 2017 that “being trans is not an illness and it should not be treated as such”.

Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader at the time, was an ardent supporter of allowing gender self-identification. How wrong they were: the Left-wing feminists had simply realised that trans ideology was the greatest threat yet to women’s rights, to reason, to biology and to gay rights. Among the heroes of this tale were Rosie Duffield (Labour), Baroness Falkner (ex-Lib Dem) and a group of Leftist writers and activists such as Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, Maya Forstater, Helen Joyce and Suzanne Moore, whose piece on the victory you can find below.

This episode is one that the Tories and Labour alike would love us to forget, but it raises many questions. Why did the mainstream so fully take leave of its senses, buying into a fadish mania? Why was Sir Keir Starmer unable to say what a woman was? Why were so many intelligent and powerful people so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for the truth and for reality, so willing to collaborate with a destructive, hysterical mob? Why were women so easily sacrificed on the altar of a totalitarian American-inspired belief system? Why were so many cancelled and pushed out of their jobs for daring to question an absurd orthodoxy?

In the end, the Tories saw sense. Rishi Sunak did a great job, as did Suella Braverman and many others. Kemi Badenoch covered herself in glory, fighting the gender ideologues and pushing back on woke madness when it was politically dangerous to do so. But it’s time for all of our main political parties to take a long, hard look at themselves for being such willing accomplices in such an unjust cause.

This episode is one that the Tories and Labour alike would love us to forget, but it raises many questions. Why did the mainstream so fully take leave of its senses, buying into a fadish mania? Why was Sir Keir Starmer unable to say what a woman was? Why were so many intelligent and powerful people so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for the truth and for reality, so willing to collaborate with a destructive, hysterical mob? Why were women so easily sacrificed on the altar of a totalitarian American-inspired belief system? Why were so many cancelled and pushed out of their jobs for daring to question an absurd orthodoxy?

In the end, the Tories saw sense. Rishi Sunak did a great job, as did Suella Braverman and many others. Kemi Badenoch covered herself in glory, fighting the gender ideologues and pushing back on woke madness when it was politically dangerous to do so. But it’s time for all of our main political parties to take a long, hard look at themselves for being such willing accomplices in such an unjust cause.