Newsletter #33: Homeland Party rift after femboy scandal

PLUS: Graham Linehan DESTROYS transsexualism after BOMBSHELL judgement

Good morning.

I hope you’ve all had a happy Easter. This newsletter has come out later than I expected as I have been unwell over the last couple of days — but better late than never!

Fortunately, not much has happened in Britain, yet again. Or, at least not much that interests me has happened in Britain. As such, we will be only very briefly discussing the main British news story of the week, before going on a Homeland Party-themed diversion.

This newsletter’s agenda: Graham Linehan DESTROYS transsexualism after BOMBSHELL judgement (free); Renaud Camus banned from entering the United Kingdom (paid); Homeland Party rift after femboy scandal (paid); More market turbulence, and somehow Britain always loses (paid)

Graham Linehan DESTROYS transsexualism after BOMBSHELL judgment

Most readers will find it unsurprising that I have little interest in this issue. Whilst I do support the side that asserts that sex is a biological fact, the amount of energy devoted to this issue is so grossly disproportionate to its importance that I can only consider it to have been a net-negative for the British Right over the last five years, despite it objectively being a vote-winner. The best thing about the judgement is that we can finally move on from the issue. The second best thing is that hopefully, now that the TERFs have ‘won’, at least in their own minds, we can stop pretending that they are somehow our allies. No more reading Julie Bindel.

I don’t want to completely deride those interested in the issue. Transgender ideology has clearly hurt a lot of vulnerable people. While the danger that transsexuals pose to women is generally exaggerated, there are enough perverts and people willing to exploit the rules (especially in the case of prisons) that reform was obviously necessary. It is also humiliating, and not to say illiberal also, to be forced to publicly acknowledge something that is blatantly a logical absurdity, perhaps under the threat of legal sanction. But still, none of this justifies the attention paid to the matter.

The judgment is primarily interesting for what it says about the relationship between British society and that nebulous thing that calls itself ‘the law’. Keir Starmer, after years of taking flak for his tepid but still extant support for transgender ideology — with past statements including ‘the vast majority of women do not have a penis’ — seems to have used the judgement as an opportunity to ditch these unpopular commitments entirely. It is not clear why. Did he change his mind? Or did he never take them seriously in the first place? I would speculate that for Starmer’s lawyerly brain, whatever a court says must be correct by default, and that it would actually be vaguely against ‘the rule of law’, and thus basically against ‘democracy’ also, to take a different stance. The courts, somehow, are not human; not fallible. Even the Woke Warrior and Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson has abruptly switched sides in this matter, all but announcing that transgender individuals should use the toilet of their biological sex.

I think there are very few other countries where the mere word of a court would be treated as so sacrosanct. No-one behaves this way after the openly politicised American Supreme Court makes a decision. And, as the court itself noted, they were not pretending to end the ‘trans’ debate once and for all; rather, they were merely interpreting the meaning of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010, and how this interacts with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (which allows for someone to legally change gender, ‘for all purposes’). Whilst of course a big win for the TERFs — to the extent that the Gender Recognition Act is effectively dead — such triumphalism still seems unwarranted; and, insofar as they have any reason for triumphalism, it is in their broader cultural victory, not the opinions of the courts. After all, only a small proportion of transgender individuals even bothered with legally changing their sex anyway; in reality, most matters were dealt with somewhat ad hoc, on a personal basis.

It seems as if people are still desperate to cling on to some kind of authority rather than figuring out things for themselves. And, in Britain, increasingly the only public authority that still has actual authority is… the courts. A major right-wing project for the next four years will be to try to erode this entirely unwarranted authority, given their deep hostility to much of our politics, especially on the matters of environment and immigration. Some of the recent work of Robert Jenrick is particularly important in this regard; hopefully, this will put us in the political position to override the courts if necessary, or even to reform them outright.