Author: sarah

It seems that it was easier than perhaps thought to put us all into a lockdown situation… but rather harder to know how to let us out. The urgency of preventing the NHS from being overcome was laudable and the public went along with it. Plus the new communication from the government was to promote fear. Anyone could die. Now fewer than one third of ICU beds are Covid cases and the Nightingale which was hardly needed has been mothballed. Doctors’ surgeries and 111 calls have been much quieter over the past week or and some hospitals in London are receiving cases in single figures. So the original reason given to us for our lockdown is no longer there. But it has been replaced with another major one – the prevention of the resurgence of the virus, itself perhaps a consequence of the government strategy to lockdown and suppress the virus. There are five tests that need to be passed before it can be lifted. No one seems to have questioned these or asked why they chose these five.

1. NHS ability to cope
2. Sustained fall in daily death rate
3. Rate of infection
4. Supply of tests and PPE
5. No risk of a second peak… (track and trace policy required to be in place)

The first as said above has clearly been met as there is now excess capacity in all hospitals. The data on which the predictions were made used the former NHS critical care bed capacity. We know that the NHS acted quickly and almost tripled this by using operating theatres, private hospitals etc. as well as building the Nightingale hospitals.

 The second test has also been passed as the peak of deaths is generally agreed to be on April 8^th

The third test, the rate of infection is now estimated to be as low as 0.6 despite Professor Ferguson saying it would take five months to get it below 1. Germany began a relaxation of measures when their R = 0.7. The measure itself has been criticised by some with Professor Michael Levitt saying that without also knowing how long a person is infectious for, is not that much use. Should the use of a general R be the main determinant of strategy? We know that in a small infectious area like a care home it will be much higher than say in the countryside where it may be nearly O. We are not told on what data the measure R is calculated.

The last two tests are not tied into the demise of the illness but on the government’s ability to deliver testing and equipment and the introduction of a nationwide track and testing system. The economy and all our lives are further put on hold so that the government can do what arguably should/could have been done some weeks back. The mess up over PPE does not seem to have been resolved and there may be jobs to go at the end of all this, probably in procurement.  But neither  has the government explained its thinking behind the need or indeed the feasibility of tracking and tracing as a strategy for the ongoing suppression of the virus.

These two tests have given the government a reason to keep the lockdown longer and one wonders whether that is why they were included in the five tests to begin with. They know that by suppressing the virus rather than mitigating it, the risk of a second epidemic is higher (this warning was given in the Imperial paper, widely believed to have provided the ‘evidence’ for the sudden switch to suppression and lockdown) and they have concluded that tracking and tracing is perhaps the only effective way of stopping this from happening. Again I am just surmising here.

Surely we can demand some transparency as to the reasons why the last requirement of tracking is now so needed, that no relaxation of the lockdown can occur without it. Tracking and tracing was deemed an appropriate measure at the outset of an epidemic. The government started this well and then decided to stop.

“There comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention,” Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer. On March 14, officials signalled the contact-and-trace strategy for fighting the spread of the virus was ending, except for those in high-risk places like prisons or care homes. For everyone else, testing would be prioritised for those most ill in hospital.

Of course at that point the government was still following a fairly relaxed mitigation strategy of social distancing, to be followed by the closure of pubs and bars and large gatherings, to be followed by the demand that the over 70’s and vulnerable to self-isolate to a total lockdown for the entire population coming three days later.

The Imperial Paper was published on March 16^th and recommended suppression not mitigation and without delay. And the government changed course. Frightening numbers were presented that no government could ignore. Even then arguably it was a bit late in the day for suppression as the virus had run rampage for a good month before this date. Other countries were doing the same, with Sweden being an outlier. The Swedish government decided to adopt measures which protected the elderly and vulnerable (and they concede that they were too late on this as well) and the impact of the illness on the healthcare system…just like our initial response of mitigation. The reason they gave for this was that it believed it to be sustainable whereas suppression by total lockdown of a population isn’t. Which our government knew at the time. And which is now proving correct. Nearly two months on and people are getting frazzled.

In the Imperial paper the downside of suppression is given “the major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more)”. This was not told to the public at the time or really has been since, for obvious reasons but it is being leaked out bit by bit in what I suppose they believe to be palatable bite sizes. However, asking us to stay in when nearly 1000 a day are dying and for a matter of three weeks  is a little different from now when the numbers in hospital have fallen and the consequences of an economy on hold are being felt.

But it is easy to see the bind the government is in. As the Swedish epidemiologist Prof Johan Giesecke said in his interview with Lockdown Unherd, once a government had made a decision of total lockdown, it is hard to come out of.

They knew that lockdown had to be lifted at some stage but Ferguson et al had also warned of a high risk of a second wave after suppression. Hence the government have gone now returned to the earlier tactic of track and test, despite the virus having been in circulation for at least two and a half months, and despite the fact that the authorities have absolutely no idea of how many have actually had the illness. The paper, like Dr Harries also says that suppression strategies are best introduced at the very beginning of an epidemic, so the government needs to get the country back to a situation that resembles the beginning of the epidemic. Hence perhaps its choice of the Isle of Wight as the first trial for track and test, where the numbers of those with the virus has remained very small. The Imperial paper refers to concerns about civil liberties with this method but that so far has not been raised by many in the public eye which is surprising.  MPs – where are you?  Not everyone wants such an intrusive measure on their phone.  How can this be a viable strategy when we have a population of nearly 70 million people and testing has barely reached the 100,000 a day level? Surely doing regular randomised surveys on parts of the population would have been a sensible way of at least getting an overall picture of the illness and how deep into the population it has spread. If this has happened I have not heard about it.

The more suppression the greater the risk of a second wave because there has been no chance for sufficient community immunity to build. So it is reasonable to ask why this was chosen as a long term strategy? The sacrifice is many people’s health, well – being, financial security, future, careers etc. This is not a temporary period of hardship for people. It has enormous repercussions for our society and economy and will do for many, many years. We will basically be a broke nation. The talk of bouncing back after a short period of difficulty has stopped.

There are clearly some questions that could be answered now such as has the Imperial Paper so far proved accurate – if not why not and what has been learned? Would 250,000 people really have died if we had followed a less stringent mitigation strategy? Are other approaches being taken into account? And fundamentally what exactly is the current goal, the logic behind it and the strategy? Is there an acceptance that the virus will remain with us at some level until a vaccine is found or herd immunity established? Is there an acceptance that some people will be ill and some people will die? By following suppression at what point can we resume normal lives without a vaccine having been found?

I cannot be the only one to bristle when I hear the “we are following the science” mantra. Mainstream media is finally beginning to give space to those questioning this ‘science’ eg. Newsnight. It is vacillating and dithering. Let us see what happens tonight. But the population deserve more transparency (and data on risk which I have written about in the another post) as to the reasons why they have been forced to sacrifice so much.

What has happened to the earlier government message of – don’t worry unnecessarily, the vast majority of cases are not serious and do not require hospitalisation? This was given to us only six weeks ago and we already have a lot of data proving that this message was in fact correct. The ONS stats show that only 332 people under the age of 45 died from Corona virus (ONS figs up to April 24^th).  Instead we are given a daily diet of catastrophe stories of young people dying by the media and the government has done nothing to assure people that this is highly unusual. No wonder fear has gripped the nation.

We now have a lot of data which the government choose not to relay to us. Instead we are given the daily numbers (not actually the daily, but taken over a number of days) of deaths and new infections. The latter data may change according to how many tests are being administered, making comparison difficult. Hospital figures are much more helpful in seeing the decline in numbers. The media is focusing on how we fare against other countries in terms of number of deaths despite knowing that we are probably all using different ways of measuring. This is not where the focus should be. We should be having a debate about the pros and cons of shutting down the economy and the whole population, and coming out of it in the best possible way. But to do that the public need proper information. About the risks and perhaps more about the illness itself.

This data should be communicated by the government rather than through occasional press stories. Are some people more at risk than others? The answer is an emphatic yes but to give these important details might have taken away from the overall message that we are all in this together, the disease is indiscriminate (it’s not) so that we obey and all stay at home. The facts may undermine this message.  But even if belatedly, journalists are beginning to report on some of the data that can readily be found on various government and NHS  sites eg. NHS England, ONS and ICNARC.

A virus cannot be fought and beaten by hiding from it. We are avoiding it and suppressing its spread. It can only be really beaten by a vaccine or herd immunity, that is sufficient numbers have had it or are immune enough to depower it.  For all the talk of vaccines, they are a long way off, maybe two years and maybe not at all. A vaccine for the HIV virus was never found. Hence we have some hesitation from the government on what to do next. But we are entitled to ask questions at this stage.

Who is most at risk from this virus?  

The figures in the Intensive Care National Audit Research Centre provide a lot of information about those who are receiving critical care for the virus.

Headline figures – all  Covid intensive care patients:

Average age is 60

72% are men

34% are from BAME backgrounds

And 33% are overweight according to BMI index

And a further 40% are clinically obese

The ONS figures on deaths tell us  twice as many men die as women in the age groups 50-70, one third more in the 70-79 age bracket before there is an evening out in much older age.

So possibly a fit seventy something old female would be less vulnerable than a 55 year old overweight male. Is this fact is influencing the very middle aged and male decision makers? Surely the public should know whether or not they are more or less at risk. Perhaps there is not enough understanding as to why these groups are overrepresented which is why there is no official comment on these figures. It is thought that a higher propensity to diabetes that BAME groups have may be one of the factors responsible for increased vulnerability as well as a lack of Vitamin D.  Research I hope is surely going on to discover why but these are still facts that should be publicised.

Maggie Pagano has written an excellent article in Reaction showing why the UK has such a high number of deaths… and inequalities loom large.

The most deprived areas of England and Wales have 55.1 deaths per 100,000 people compared to 25.3 in affluent areas. That is, people in the poorest areas died at twice the rate of those in more affluent ones. (ONS)

One consequence of poverty and indeed one measure of social deprivation is poor health outcome and we know that those with underlying conditions get hit the hardest. Ninety-five percent of people who have died with COVID-19 in hospitals in England had underlying health issues.

It is time for a discussion with as many facts given to the public as possible. If you know you are a high risk person, you presumably may be more careful than those who are not. There is a question of personal agency, which we have had removed from us perhaps for good reason but we should be questioning the rationale for it.

What is the risk for different groups of people and how far should people be allowed to take their own risk, without putting others at risk… This is a debate that we  should be having , that Parliament should be discussing. It is not just about the science. There are many scientific views. There are many routes being taken and these are political decisions.   We live in a democracy but nowhere is there a democratic debate. Where are the MPs on either side of the House challenging the current strategy and demanding more information? The consequences of this lockdown continue to multiply like the virus every day, the devastation to the economy, of young people’s futures and the toll on health and mental health needs to be brought upfront into the decision making process. This is about lives v lives. And to have that debate we need the facts. And we need honesty. If the government doesn’t know something, it should say so. We deserve to be treated like grownups now.

Feminists have always quite rightly paid a lot of attention to language. Sheila Rowbottom said over forty years ago “language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination”. I am old enough to remember how hard it was to get Ms acknowledged as a title so that women did not have to be categorised as married or single on every form. It was considered an extreme demand by feminists at the beginning and many women themselves would say, well I don’t mind, it isn’t that important etc. But it was important because for centuries, all of history to be exact, women have had no power to name themselves. As Mary Daly said ‘Women have had the power of naming taken from them’. Insisting on the inclusion of Ms in titles was a reflection of women finding their voice and making it heard. Lots of people didn’t like it.

Women are relative newcomers to the public sphere, and public discourse has been developed over the years by men and for men. Disrupting it and adding the ‘feminine’ or even changing words has proved extremely hard and meets with resistance. Minority groups have had similar struggles naming themselves instead of being named… so until thirty years ago people with cerebral palsy were known as spastics, people with disability were known as handicapped etc. etc.

Women in the business world still have to speak in a business language full of sports, wars and sex metaphors. They may jar but if you do not used them you will not communicate what you need to say. Many nouns that derive from verbs have ‘man’ at the end and even today many dislike adding woman instead e.g. salesman/saleswoman saying it sounds odd and artificial… more like an add-on than a different word. There has been a huge resistance to changing familiar words, rather like Anglicans wanting the King James version of the Bible to remain in church services and not the NIV. But listen to the radio or watch television and you will hear many more additions of woman to nouns as women’s role in public life is acknowledged more. Women’s ability to name themselves and their activities is still in its infancy.

Minorities and by minority I mean either numerically or those with fewer resources than the dominant group (like women) do not determine the dominant discourse. Feminists and male supporters of feminism may influence it, and this is what has been happening. So it is fairly extraordinary that a numerically tiny minority have been able to secure the erasure of female words with the majority of powerful dominant group standing by and allowing this without comment. Two things are going on here. One, the group is tiny numerically but powerful with regard to resources. On their side they also wear the badge of ‘most discriminated group’ which gives ‘liberals’ or those wanting to appear liberal permission to champion and accommodate their demands despite these being in tension with women’s rights including women’s rights to define themselves. Secondly and perhaps more disappointedly one wonders whether the male dominated establishment including liberal males are permitting this erasure as part of a backlash against women’s rights without it appearing to be so.

This is the context in which we need to regard the concern women are having about the removal of the word woman from public discourse. In order to appease a tiny but vocal and active group, organisations, including the government, are replacing the word woman without any consideration over the impact this may have on half the population. The word men and man seems to have been retained.

It is worth watching this video of the conversation that Julia Hartley-Brewer has with activist Laura Coryton on YouTube as these exchanges do not happen very often. You realise quickly why they don’t because the activist’s insistence that biological men are women and biological women are men and therefore men can have periods sounds so ridiculous. Better to fend off any debate with cries of ‘transphobia’ which is why there has been no debate. The activists and increasingly our organisations are no longer using the word woman and man to mean biological sex but indeed some ill-defined identity. Women’s ability to define themselves has been hijacked.

The word women has been replaced in certain medical notices and replaced with obscure descriptive nouns like menstruaters, and cervix holders so that ‘trans men’ can be included. This is biologically confusing and incorrect. The British Medical Association sent out guidance suggesting that practitioners do not use the word expectant mothers as it might offend trans people. A group of lesbians with teeshirts with ‘lesbians are women’ were refused service at the National Theatre last year as they were deemed offensive. Organisations are now making up new words like Womxn( the most recent being Oxfam) in a bid to be inclusive, whilst excluding women.

The feminist project is based on a common understanding of the word ‘woman’. Woman is a biological sex category and their rights are given to them on that understanding. Trans people are just that, trans, and may well live their life socially as women or men. Some activists’ insistence on re defining woman as a social identity is offensive to women as is the insistence that women are themselves a sub category of women, cis women. Surely it is not too much to ask that women retain the right to define themselves. Language is not fixed and can change by use therefore it is imperative that we continue to use the word woman as we, women, want to use it.

References
Jean Bethke Elshtain ‘Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and Meaning’ in
Signs Vol. 7, No. 3, Feminist Theory (Spring, 1982), pp. 603-621
Dale Spender 1981 Man Made Language. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Made-Language-Dale-Spender/dp/0863584012

The government has now published its proposal on immigration. It is based on the premise that the country only wants foreign workers who are skilled. Their outlined point system has highlighted one of the problems that plagues pay equality – the definition of skill. On the face of it this is not a gendered issue but a closer look will reveal that combined with the gendered segregation of work the ‘definition of skill’ is responsible for perpetuating women’s relative low pay compared to men. Pay level is not the only proposed entry requirement for people wishing to work in the UK but the focus on it reflects the government’s belief (and many others’) that pay is still the main indicator of skill.

 Despite the intention to lower the minimum salary threshold for ‘skilled jobs’ from £30,000 to £25,600 for those coming to the UK with a job offer, this would still leave swathes of jobs in many sectors deemed out of bounds for foreign workers, particularly out of London.  Social care is in the news as one of those sectors most hit and also the catering industry – both female dominated and reliant on imported labour.

The government’s proposals have also been met with dismay by the UK’s growing fashion manufacturing industry. Skilled jobs such as sewing machinists and cutters will not reach the skilled training requirements for entrants under the new system. Jenny Holloway, owner of London manufacturer Fashion Enter, says “I really object to the fact that our industry is regarded as cheap or low skilled labour and strongly suggest that the government should make the effort to visit manufacturers and see how skilled it is, labelling the new minimum general salary threshold of £25,600 as “unrealistic”.

Academics have long regarded the ‘so called’ objective category of skill as a myth.( Phillips and Taylor 1980, Cockburn 1985).  Far from being an objective fact, skill is often an ideological category imposed on certain types of work by virtue of the sex and power of the workers who perform them.

Historically, one of professional organisations’ and trade unions’ roles has been to protect the status and pay of their workers, creating barriers to entry where necessary. They have always tried to protect the skills cluster in their memberships often in the form protectionist strategies like training and exams as well as other more informal types of closure. This is to maintain the status of those skills, limit entry and ensure higher pay. If too many, and historically it was women, were able to demonstrate those skills and entered the profession or trade it would result in a lowering of status and in market forces lower pay. The status of work (and its accompanying level of pay) is not static. It can be challenged and change. There is an argument that just the very fact that large numbers of women work in an industry will mean it has a lower status. Work has been ‘feminised’ and women carry their lower social status into the workplace (Witz 1990). If you look at areas of work which are highly prized, they are likely to be very male dominated. At the beginnning of the computer age, computer programming was deemed eminently suitable for girls, nimble fingers for the keyboard, patience and attention to detail – women’s work.  In the West as computers’ importance rose computer programme became associated with science, rationality, binarism and masculinity. It was adopted by male hobbyists, gamers and later the dot.com entrepreneurs. Bill Gates and Stephen Jobs arrived and the image of a “geek” became synonymous with a technology worker and the shift from a feminine to a masculine skill was fully made. The accompanying shift was from low status to high status skilled work. And pay went up.

Both the gendering and valuing of jobs (not always the same but there is a huge overlap as women dominate low paid industries) can be revealed in some of the equal pay for work of equal value pay discrimination claims. One example I wrote about in my book was the 2010 Birmingham council workers equal pay case, which was won by female employees based on work for equal value. Under a bonus scheme male refuse collection staff sometimes received up to 160% of their basic pay. In one year a refuse collector took home £51,000 while women on the same grade (cleaners) received less than £12,000.

Currently the average pay for an underground train driver’s ( predominantly male)  average base pay of a Tube driver is £55,011.  The majority of London Underground train drivers, approximately 3,000 of them, made £70,000-£80,000 last year when overtime and benefits are included. Compare this to the average salary of a nurse in London which is £29,000.

These figures tell their own story about skill, status and value. The segregation of low paid work makes bringing any equal pay claims impossible.

Surely it is time that unconscious bias in the evaluation of skills  is more widely recognised as a contributing factor to women’s inequality in the workplace. Some companies have individually been doing this for some time, checking their assessment or partnership criteria etc. for signs of bias. But perhaps a more comprehensive approach to what does or doesn’t constitute skill needs to be debated at a social level.

Today I wrote to Ms Kate Varah, the executive director of the Old Vic following its announcement yesterday that its new refurbishment now provided 42 toilets, but none of  which were for women only.  In the letter I set out the specific background to this announcement before asking some questions.

In 2018 the Old Vic announced loudly and proudly that it would be doubling the number of women’s toilets  and stars including Joanna Lumley, Glenda Jackson and Bertie Carvel  backed the campaign, and appeared in a video in which they plea for more women’s toilets.

The Old Vic launched a £100,000 public fundraising campaign to help it carry out major works, including doubling the number of women’s toilets.

Yesterday, October 2nd 2019, the theatre announced that the numbers had indeed increased. There was now one facility with eighteen toilets which also have urinals, making it unlikely that women will go in there, and then another set of 24 cubicles which are mixed sex.  So in fact it announced a removal of all women only loos – the opposite of the campaign in fact.  Men have access to all 42 whereas the 24 that women can use are also open for men to use.

“Our loos now offer ‘self-selection’ rather than being labelled male or female. This takes a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approach following advice from surveys conducted with focus groups,” it said.

Who does this actually work for? The problem was a lack of women’s loos in the first place, that was all.

The announcement said that there had been consultation with focus groups but failed to say which ones. Indeed it failed also to provide any concrete reason at all for removing women’s sex segregated facilities. All previous surveys show that women prefer  women only toilets. On the positive side the theatre has asked for feedback – if only this had been asked for before the decision to do this.  I had a few questions for Ms Varah:

What happened…?  It is clear that you changed your mind on provision of women’s only  loos over the course of a year.

Why was this?

There is a mention of focus groups – what kind of focus groups?

Were you advised by any external consultancy?

What percentage of your theatre audiences is male?

What percentage of your theatre audience is female?

Did you consult your theatre goers?

Which of these wanted mixed sex toilets?

Who did want mixed sex toilets?

Why do you think sex segregated toilets existed in the first place? Are those reasons not applicable in 2019? What has changed?

There is an insufficient number of toilets for women generally throughout the UK because many were built at a time when women were more confined to the private sphere.  I suggest that the Old Vic was presumably very familiar with the reasons women require more toilets than men otherwise it would not have pledged to provide more.   Yet the reasons for the sex segregation of toilets are exactly the same today as they were fifty/hundred  years ago. A Parliamentary Committee Paper over ten years ago (on which Emily Thornberry sat) sets out the rationale and the recommendations – that women require twice the number of toilets than men do – which the Old Vic ( even though not a local authority, the advice should still apply)  has seen fit to disregard (particularly page 18 and 19)

And the reasons that mixed sex toilets do not work for women were more recently given in an excellent blog .

Someone who may have provided some advice to the Old Vic is Professor Clara Greed, Professor of Inclusive Urban Planning at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and a specialist in toilet provision with particular emphasis upon women’s needs. You can watch her here.

Any organisation that has been advised by Stonewall will know that they can earn extra brownie points by changing their toilet facilities to mixed sex. This is not done because of demand but because it looks progressive. This was not something even considered five years ago. But for whose benefit are these changes?  Fewer than 1% of the population are trans and that is on the widest definition given (this includes cross dressers, non binary etc.). Most organisations will have fewer than 1% of trans people for whom using a male or female toilet is problematic. Personally I have no problem sharing female toilets with a MtF trans but I, like many women don’t want to share them with men generally. And some women for reasons of past trauma, or for religious reasons do not want to share a facility with biological males, whether they are transgender or not. There is no point pretending biology is irrelevant – hence men use urinals.   So is there another way to include the potential trans person who may be embarrassed? Why not have one separate cubicle that is mixed sex? This is not always possible in old buildings but it certainly is in new developments such as the Old Vic. A year ago the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith made the downstairs toilets mixed sex but kept sex segregated ones upstairs.  So I am eager to hear the rationale for the decision to remove all  women only toilets whilst retaining men’s.

Sometimes and increasingly in this case, one very small minority group’s demand for rights disproportionately impact another’s in a negative way.  But women are half the population and their needs and concerns for sex segregated spaces are currently being dismissed and ignored in a shocking and distressing way.

 Bristol 2005

Group dynamic work is a great way to explore gender relations… and here was an opportunity for a whole weekend of it.  What a pity for all of us that there were so few men there. But just like in all work on gender, and arguably very often in our relationships it is women who do the work. As the gender that is least privileged it is obvious that we want change more than men. How many events have I spoken at or attended when I think – I wish more men were interested in this.

I do understand how difficult it is for men to participate and be ‘themselves’ in this pro feminist environment. It is as if they too are quite unsure as to what constitutes a man or manliness apart from the body. How is a man different from a woman in a positive way – and here let’s move away from the physical. Many of the ‘masculine’ traits are deemed negative or ‘othered’ to the feminine, which is often valorized in these ‘feminist’ or woman- centred gatherings. What masculinities are useful, good, do we women like /love?  What aspects of masculinity or being a man do men like? What tends to happen is that there is an expectation that the ‘good’ men will display all the feminine traits but what happens to the masculine ones?

What was interesting in this weekend was that whilst on the surface men were empathising with women, some stereotypical masculine traits still emerged through this dialogue with women. There were some difficulties and differences in how ideas were communicated… the men still fought shy of the personal whereas the old feminist adage of the personal is the political still resounded for most of the women. In this context men will often be quiet rather than risk displaying too controlling a role in the debate and being called out for it.

It must be hard to be a pro feminist man when it is men who are mostly responsible for so much violation and violence in the world. But men must speak out about it. Just as women are having to work out what parts of the traditional feminine they own or not so men need to do the same. No man or woman is the same as anyone else but the weekend showed me that there is still a long way to go before we understand each other. Women’s anger has been quite subdued in the past fifteen or so years as social theories have focused on the individual and emphasis has been on self improvement and indeed other disenfranchised groups in society. But it is still there and somehow has to be faced by men.

I see this repressed anger _ there is a feeling that we should not feel it, life is so much better for us than it was for our mothers – in organizations. But I am also seeing resignation, an acceptance that perhaps this is as good as it gets and that at least we have entry into the public world of work and can sniff the scent of power. Many women are even harbouring the possibility that perhaps there is a natural order of things and men will always dominate. This would be a dangerous conclusion leading to a social impasse plus a betrayal of the thousands of women who fought hard at great personal cost to give us this ‘freedom’ to still come second.

Although awkward at times the group succeeded in maintaining a consensus until the second day when one woman talked about an incident involving a man following her on her way home the previous night.  She was telling us about it and became really angry about the ‘normality’ of this fear of being followed at night and this resonated with most of the other women in the group. This then was the opportunity for the men present to discuss what if felt like to be linked to the ‘predatory’ male either in reality or symbolically. However what happened instead was that all the men in the room felt attacked and got extremely defensive and aggressive – indeed one stormed out of the room, saying he felt victimized. This left everyone left behind rather shaken and I do not think I am alone in feeling that familiar mixture of anger and guilt (shame) that we (women)  had done something wrong and we should have contained the situation. Oh how often do we women do that, taking responsibility for and managing men’s feelings. These feelings run deep. We owe it to one another to explore them.

Sarah Rutherford

In the past I have too easily associated football with pubs packed with noisy men drinking pints, men dominating streets on football nights, and when I was younger warnings not to go out after the end of a  match. Alcohol, men’s voices and violence…not an altogether positive picture!  Although it was central to the lives of boys and men around me, and indeed the nation, I looked at it and felt it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Looking back again now I think I felt  excluded.

I have been watching some of the Women’s World Cup and find myself smiling, shouting them on and just enjoying watching women play football at this level.  I can see a sport requiring skill and team work that excites spectators.  I have also been thinking about some of my own more affirming football memories.  And there are some.

As a child playing football was just out of the question. It was a boy’s game. Even though I was quite a tomboy I never played. At school I played hockey, on the left wing and enjoyed it. My introduction to football was, like for many women, through my son and his father who both loved it. So it was frequently on the TV in our house and I learned the rules and enjoyed watching when I knew the players! On our annual holidays in the UK a big group of us always had a game of football on the beach, kids and parents and when I played I loved it! I thought then what a shame I hadn’t had an opportunity to play when I was growing up. I think I may have been quite good.

My kids went to a very progressive primary school which at the time believed that boys and girls should play sport together if they could, until secondary age. Not all parents agreed. But under eleven, there is little physical difference between the sexes and if anything girls are stronger.  Similarly, there were a few girls who played on Saturday mornings in the park with the boys. My daughter played there. She had two brothers and was sporty and didn’t think anything of it. This must be the same story perhaps of the many talented players we are now watching on our television screens.

As a nine year old my daughter had a painting accepted into a big children’s art exhibition and a cartoonist, Andy, was there on the opening night drawing many of the children. The cartoonist asked my daughter what she wanted to be drawn as.  ‘As a footballer’ she said. I truly had hope at that time that within a few years I would see as many girls as boys playing football in the public parks.  But it just didn’t happen. The push behind it didn’t seem strong enough.  Gender stereotyping increased and parents seemed happy to reinforce these … boys do football and girls do ballet.

One of the delights of having women’s football on the TV is of course that the footballers are offering fantastic role models to young girls today. I was dismayed when I learned only relatively recently that women actually women played more football a hundred years ago than they do today. It was extremely popular during the First World War, when women in munitions factories were encouraged to play for their health and fitness. This developed in factory teams and their games started to draw big crowds.  A Boxing Day match at Goodison Park in 1920 attracted a crowd of 53,000. Then in a similar vein to pushing women out of the workplace and back into the home after the war, the FA banned women’s football in 1921, not to lift the ban until 1971. If I had known this legacy perhaps I might have had the courage to say as a child, I want to play. Many of us may have. Perhaps my daughter and the other girls in our local area would have felt it was just as much their right to play rather than being treated as mascots or token boys.

However I am so pleased that the hard work of men and women promoting girls’ and women’s  football  did keep going and has resulted in where we are now. But I would still like to see girls playing football in the parks and schools offering football as a sport to girls.

 Blog on www.womenworldfootball.com a project collecting voices on women’s football over a sixty day period in, over and around the World Cup.

Interview 2. Hard Talk  Sarah Montague 

A few days later a second more challenging interview followed, the interviewer being, World at One presenter Sarah Montague.  Her researcher had provided her with some good questions but I didn’t feel she took the opportunities she had to really grill Hunt on her position. Perhaps she personally didn’t feel confident on the topic and when faced with an ‘expert on a controversial subject’ only too readily accepted whatever response she got. How unlike her questioning of politicians on the Today programme or now World at One! They don’t get let off the hook so easily. So an opportunity rather wasted but still some interesting responses from Hunt on which to comment.  I wanted to ask my own questions which I will occasionally insert in this piece, probably out of frustration!  For those that haven’t the time to listen to it here is my take on it.

The context of the interview was different from the above one which was pitched as a interview of an outgoing chief executive.  This next one was about the contention that Stonewall was in a problematic situation and the headline title shows this with ‘Is Stonewall in danger of tearing itself apart?’

Montague began with asking Hunt – why self ID?  Her first response was quite surprising as she said well other countries are doing it. Really – was that the reason? She cites a few including Iran!  Have we as a country always been so keen to follow Iran in their social legislation?  Some of these countries have enabled trans to be legalised because it is more acceptable than homosexuality which is outlawed as Hunt will only be too aware. Proceeding with the discussion on self ID here in the UK Montague asks about the proposed GRA 2004 reforms and the demands to make it easier to get a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) and legally change sex.  In an effort to play down the importance of this, Hunt then says that actually getting a GRC doesn’t really make any difference as people are self id- ing anyway!! No one she says gets asked for their GRC.  So one may well ask why the fuss to repeal the 2004 Act?  But Montague doesn’t ask this.  Or ask the obvious next question which is ‘So what legal rights are trans activists actually wanting then that they haven’t got that will make a difference?’

Montague failed to drill down here but did raise the issue of women’s safety and women’s fears re special provision for sex segregated spaces. She cites the case of Karen White who sexually assaulted women in a women’s prison, having gained access as a trans woman. This is batted off with Hunt saying safeguarding is already done on a case by case situation and will continue to be. That case was just one failure in the process.  However I have read several policy documents of organisations, which were advised by Stonewall and there the policy is to accept trans people’s word without question. In this culture staff do not feel empowered to question or refuse entry to a trans woman as they fear retribution. Hunt knows full well that this is the advice she and her team have been giving organisatons for some years now even though the law (Equality Act 2010) does provide for the possibility of  barring a trans woman from women only spaces.  So to my mind SM could have then made the point in this first part of the interview  that ‘it seems that you have already achieved what you want by changing policy and practice without any further change in the law.. what exactly are you arguing for now?’ But she didn’t.

The next  question was hard hitting (all the good ones were where SM could rely on someone else’s quote or an actual report)  SM quotes Kristina Harrison saying that what Stonewall is  doing is changing what it means to be a woman (my paraphrase) and what did Hunt have to say in response to this accusation. Her response shocked me and should have prompted a counter question from SM but didn’t… “Oh “ she said in a rather superior, didn’t you know way, “the debate about what constitutes a man or a woman happened in 2004 when it was discussed at length.” SM obviously didn’t know what that meant so failed to ask for further elaboration. Mistake. Hunt must have been referring to the lead up to the 2004 Act. As far as I am aware no women’s groups were involved nor was there any public debate. This was because as the consultation papers show the Committee all believed they were discussing and passing legislation to help fewer than 5000 people, who were unable to marry because this was when same sex marriages were  illegal.  It was this bill that sowed the confusion between sex and gender and there was some concern expressed by certain committee members this at the time.  However again because of the small numbers they decided to create a legal fiction whereby someone could get their birth certificates changed after certain conditions were satisfied and this became the GRA 2004. Outside of this committee I found no public debate about what it meant to be a man or a woman but these conversations were perhaps taking place among the trans lobby. Perhaps this is what Hunt was referring to. In a paper written by Professor Stephen Whittle and Lewis White the authors considered the insertion of the word gender in the bill to be a success. One now can see why. Gender was on its way to being prioritised over biological sex. .

This has been the number one goal of the trans movement. To replace sex with gender as a category. If they could never actually be physically a woman or man then they would change the meaning of being a woman or a man so that they could be. Of course none of this is admitted by Hunt nor does SM challenge her. It is interesting that in the earlier interview Hunt said that Stonewall took on the trans rights brief because it had the resources available that Press For Change (Whittle is the founder) which had been going for years did not have. The influence of Whittle is obvious.

When SM repeats that some feminists and lesbians are upset/angry Hunt’s stock reply is to ignore that question and say well I am also a feminist and a lesbian. End of.

Next SM tries, as the other interviewer did, to tackle the toxicity of the debate. But this is familiar ground for Hunt. She can express surprise and blame all sides as she did in the earlier podcast interview, placing Stonewall firmly in the ‘we are doing the right thing and have received hostility for it’. Or the furthest she goes to conceding that trans activists hostility has played a huge part is that there is incivility on all sides.

SM does push her on Stonewall’s refusal to debate with those critics.  Hunt then goes on to say that a debate is going on all the time, conversations are going on all the time and difficult ones at that. Much of the frustration for gender critical feminists has been the trans lobby’s refusal to debate so it isn’t clear with whom Hunt is debating.  A possible embarrassment brought up by SM was the public criticism of Stonewell’s refusal to debate by Simon Fanshawe, one of the original founders of Stonewall. Hunt dismisses this in one sentence… his time was a long time ago sic he doesn’t understand the issues.  As to not debating with critics, she uses the safety of her trans staff as an excuse not to. But only 6% of Stonewall’s staff are trans and this doesn’t explain why she herself who is not trans cannot sit and debate the issues.

SM then asked her the direct question “Is it transphobic to disagree with the concept of self ID?” ‘No’ she replies categorically, ‘Nor have we ever said that’.  This is the biggest concession she has made yet  but she still does not condemn those activists who accuse feminists who do question self ID of transphobia and worse. Almost as if she is expecting  SM to  have come back with,  then what is there to fear in a debate about self ID?, Hunt gets there first by pronouncing that “It is not Stonewall’s role to host that debate” thereby closing off that part of the questioning.

And to justify Stonewall’s position which this interview entrenched further she said that it (position) was arrived at through a survey of 700 plus trans people.  She also rather disingenuously says that Stonewall’s position has been influenced and informed by all its diversity champions. This is an area I know and the reality is that these corporate champions have taken their stance and developed policy through Stonewall’s advice and training not the other way round. But Hunt insists that these employers ‘have been asking us to do trans work for decades’. Again I find that hard to believe.

Hunt maintains that Stonewall’s approach is ‘thoughtful, considered and measured’ which does provoke SM to ask ‘Why then are so many feminists and lesbians angry with Stonewall?’ Hunt dodges the question like before and replies ‘What we are seeing is lots and lots of support. Many, many of our supporters are very supportive.’  Montague’s response should/could have been  ‘of course they are but that wasn’t the question’. But it isn’t. Hunt sensing she has the floor continues to declare  that the organisation is a much bigger one today than it was, much richer ‘since we thought about things differently’.  So here she acknowledges that the trans work has made Stonewall more successful. The work is lucrative.  It has a new strand of income and the subject matter is so niche only Stonewall can provide the advice and training organisations have been led to believe they need.  It is their ideology wrapped up in rights and discrimination and organisations want to do the right thing. They have created the demand for a service only they can provide. Hunt still has not answered the question as this has nothing to do with anger from feminists.

So Ruth Hunt has acknowledged that pretty much all the recent growth at Stonewall has come from trans issues. An obvious question at this point would be ‘How have you grown so much on the back of promoting rights for a tiny, tiny fragment of the population? Why do so many people and organisations want to fund this?’ I have my own thoughts here but that is for another piece.

Or why not ask the question ‘What percentage of your income is directly attributable to work you do on trans rights and policy advice compared to that for lesbian rights or gay rights? Of the £7.5m income from training, advice, donations etc… how much can you attribute to trans work, or funding for trans issues.’

Hunt continues saying that some people didn’t want or believe that trans people should be part of that movement (what movement?) but lots and lots did. Again instead of addressing the specific concerns of lesbians, a group Stonewall was set up to protect, she dismisses them, citing that there was bigger support for trans as her rationale.

Sarah Montague has another gem of  a challenge to put to Hunt(and her researcher has been good, pulling out reported criticisms). This time it is the report  that Maureen Chadwick, a  well- known  Stonewall supporter and her partner pulled their funding citing Stonewall’s militant trans rights crusade as the reason. Montague quoted some of their concerns, like the teaching  ‘that a bearded man with a penis can be a lesbian’ and  the couple’s criticism of  the fact that Stonewall was using the gender norms of the 1950’s as signs of being girls or boys.’

Hunt dismissed the criticism by merely responding with ‘I don’t agree that that is what is happening. I am a lesbian myself’ before repeating that an increase in donors is proof that Stonewall is doing the right thing.  She merely says again that some people don’t want them to work on trans issue, an easy rebuttal without acknowledging the specifics of the criticisms.  Montague had a real opportunity here to press in on the ideology that Maureen Chadwick objected to and ask more about it. But she didn’t.

Alluding to the fact that Stonewall was coming in for public criticism SM asked Hunt if she was leaving to protect the organisation. Interestingly she didn’t exactly deny this. But she says there is a board which is 100% behind their policy, defensively adding that Stonewall is supported by all political parties and other organisations like the Army and Barclays. Again this is because these organisations have relied on Stonewall , the self-appointed expert, to tell them the rights and wrongs of how to treat trans people and have swallowed the ideology hook line and sinker.

SM’s best challenge comes near the end. Having gained so much for the LGB community in the UK, she said, some people feel that Stonewall should campaign in countries which still carry the death penalty for same sex relationships ‘rather than focusing on identity and semantics’, she conjectured. Hunt responds quickly with ‘it is not semantics for trans people who experience hate crime daily’ and the viewer feels by this stage that Montague is just looking forward to finishing what has seemed to  be an uncomfortable interview. A few minutes of quite banal conversation follow before time is up.

As a reasonably well informed observer I think Ruth Hunt was also uncomfortable with this interview and just used a few tactics to avoid any challenges or indeed engage with any of the difficult issues. She either ignored criticism of others, and referred to being backed up by supporters, then repeated her own experience as a lesbian and feminist to trump any feminist/lesbian criticism and lastly used donors and clients as justification for policy. She actually failed to take ownership and responsibility for the policy or put forward a really persuasive argument for the work Stonewall is currently doing that is making them quite rich.

Interview One

Anushka Asthana of the Guardian interviews the outgoing Chief Executive of Stonewall, Ruth Hunt.

In this podcast Ruth Hunt, outgoing Chief Executive of Stonewall is asked about the challenges Stonewall have faced by – and Asthana used the phrase  ‘some people who call themselves feminists’ seemingly declaring her own view and Hunt’s responses are telling. She claimed wrongly or mistakenly that these critics had framed the debate so as to make it impossible for Stonewall to take part. She accused her detractors of making  blanket statements like ‘trans women should not do sport’ and that ‘all trans women are men masquerading as women so that they can enter women’s prisons and abuse them’ which she then used to justify why Stonewall would not engage in any debate with its critics,  because, she said  they were not starting out on the premise that trans people have human rights. This is totally wrong and it is extraordinary that someone with Hunt’s intelligence would say these things.

I have never heard anyone make statements like the two examples that Hunt used. In fact as Hunt well knows it is feminists who have been the most supportive of trans people in the past. It is not women who trans people fear entering the wrong toilet or being picked on in the street. It is men. Pointing out the dangers to women’s safety by allowing biological males into their protected spaces is not the same as saying all trans women have ulterior motives.   Concern about the male bodied people taking part in women’s sports is not the same as saying ‘trans women shouldn’t do sport’. This is of course what happens when you refuse to discuss, you don’t hear what your critics are saying and you are free to imply what you want as there is no comeback.

Is it that this trans ideology is so flawed that it cannot merit scrutiny for fear of it being exposed. So the solution for those that promote it is to repeat it endlessly ‘trans women are women,’ and not engage with critics apart from calling them unpleasant names and getting them sacked. Historian Timothy Snyder calls this technique of misstatements and reiteration which Trump, among others, uses  ‘shamanistic incantion’, as they depend upon endless repetition designed to make the fictional plausible.

It is actually Stonewall and others who have framed the debate to be about trans rights and anyone with any objection is cast as opposing trans rights, which as we know in this rights obsessed time we live in, that makes you the baddy. The question is not should trans people have human rights but should those  declared human ‘rights’ remove some of the human rights from half the population? Is it indeed a human right to self -declare your identity as a woman when you have the body of a man.  Who said it was? There is as yet  no agreed consensus and it has not until now been widely discussed.

Hunt also said that the current situation regarding trans rights reminded her of how people treated gay and lesbians thirty years ago but the two groups are not the same. Gay and lesbian rights never impinged on any other groups’ rights. Some people may have objected morally but that is a different matter. Merging the two is disingenuous but highly emotive, and again casts any opposing view as anti progress.

Hunt began the discussion saying that society was going through an obsession with gender. Well I wonder why? It is not actually trans people who have caused this ‘obsession’, but the political ideology and demands being made in their name through organisations like Stonewall that have. They have pushed for several years to impose and instill an ideology in which sex is no longer a priori our category for distinguishing men and women. Most of us did not have any idea of the breadth and depth of the influence of this global movement. Nor are we yet fully comprehending of exactly what it is they are trying to achieve.

In response to the question on why  Stonewall took on trans rights, Hunt said that it made sense for Stonewall to use its huge resources to push for trans rights in 2015. Until then, she said it was only a small underfunded trans pressure group Press for Change that worked solely for trans rights. This was founded by Professor Stephen Whittle who was instrumental in influencing the passing of the GRA in 2004.  A reading of some of his work will enlighten you as to how the trans ideology has developed over the past twenty years, taking root in the academic discipline ( a word I am using lightly) of queer studies. The powerful network of government organisations and big corporates that saw Stonewall as the specialist in LGB were quite open and responsive to new policy suggestions and training on trans people about which they probably knew very little. Below in a second interview Hunt actually says it was these clients that have pushed her into taking on trans. I discuss that later.

When Asthana asked about the focus of Stonewall’s current debates being on trans Hunt replied that ‘we are just responding to what’s in the media”.  This is not so. The media like the rest of society was ignorant of the huge swathe of changes that were taking place behind the scenes that would impact the lives particularly of women and girls. The media is still for the most part too frightened to talk about what is happening.  Commentators who detract from the trans ideology are subject to vile abuse. On this Hunt merely says there is a lack of civility ‘on all sides’ which is a very Donald Trump type of comment. By refusing to acknowledge that there are very real conflicts of interests Hunt stands accused of betraying women and in particular the lesbian community that Stonewall represents.  She has not responded to the concern expressed in the huge rise in young girls being referred gender clinics, another social impact of the trans ideology. She did not acknowledge that this was a topic that was complex, impacted women and girls or that the definitions that society  were used to of transsexuals had been changed without any public debate and that the goal has been to redefine what being a woman means. Hunt was never really challenged at all in this interview by Asthana, reflecting perhaps the Guardian’s own reluctance to enter the debate in any meaningful way.

In February this year Education Secretary Damian Hinds announced that there will be compulsory lessons in Relationships Education for primary-aged children and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) for secondary students from 2020. LGBT issues will be part of this, as will honour marriages, dangers of online abuse, FGM and domestic violence.   In the light of this surely it is surely both relevant and appropriate to introduce feminism and the history of women’s equality into the curriculum?  For without understanding that until relatively recently women here had few rights and did not enjoy the same status as men (and still do not in many parts of the world), it is impossible to explain the ongoing discrimination and abuse that continues today. And why we still have inequality.

Women’s lives in the West have changed enormously over the past hundred years, and despite the marking of women’s suffrage last year, there are many men and women who do not appreciate that their current freedoms have been hard won by earlier feminists. Domestic violence, rape, child abuse, sex trafficking, pornography all show that women are still too often not treated with respect as human beings.

I believe that all schools should teach the history of women’s liberation so far – perhaps going back as far as Mary Wollenstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women in 1792. This would help provide some context and understanding for both boys and girls and their relations today. What is the point in teaching them about sex and relationships without an understanding that it was not until the feminist movement of the mid-sixties plus the advent of the contraceptive pill that enabled women to have sexual relations outside marriage without risking pregnancy or being rejected by society.  We should set down when women first got the vote in different countries round the world (e.g.Switzerland 1973);  and here in the UK when women were able to own property for the first time (Married Women’s Property Act 1882); when they were allowed to be educated and go to university for the first time and when each of the professions finally allowed them entry. Then when and why the Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination were passed in 1975, before which it was legal to pay women half of what men earned for the same work. That rape within marriage was legal until 1991.

Women’s freedoms today have been hard fought for. In a comment during the Treasury Select Committee on Women in the City in 2009, one of the two women members, Sally Keeble commented that not one aspect of women’s equality had ever come about without a law being passed. That means that there has been ongoing resistance from men and this must also be addressed.

The course could detail how women worked in men’s jobs in the First World War and what happened afterwards and then again in the Second World War. This would include the stories of women whose lives and achievements have been neglected, forgotten, or worse, written out of history.  There is so much talk of role models in our work in diversity and inclusion. But we have many, many women role models, we just don’t know about them.

Issues like sexual harassment and the #Metoo phenomenum make sense when seen in the light of women’s history. None of this is new and there have been many women campaigning for an end to sexual harassment over the years. Learning that there are many cultures in the world  in which women still do not have basic human rights is important for our young people to know. The challenge is to teach and discuss this without alienating or blaming boys. It is about social progress and I want girls and young women to be proud of their history and past, how far we have come and yes to know that there is so much more to be done. Feminism is the reason that women and girls in the West have the lives they have today and we should acknowledge that, teach it and celebrate it.