Joyce activated, issue 32
I’ve used the first issue of the new year to do a bit of stocktaking on 2022, and some forward thinking for 2023. As I’ve been writing my mood has turned darker, probably because of the disastrous and farcical vote before Christmas in Scotland for gen
I started a sabbatical from The Economist at the end of March, at which point I started to work part-time for Sex Matters, and to write this newsletter. It’s been quite a hectic time since, so I thought I’d use the first issue of the new year to do a bit of stocktaking on 2022, and some forward thinking for 2023. As I’ve been writing my mood has turned darker—the product, I think, of watching the disgusting farce that played out in Holyrood in the week running up to Christmas, as gender-critical campaigners tried and failed to stop the SNP-led government ramming through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
This dangerous and unworkable amendment to the Gender Recognition Act (2004) will force Westminster either to roll over and accept a “Gretna Green” version of self-ID, or to pick a fight with the Scottish government that risks inflaming separatist sentiment. (The picture above is of women protesting outside Holyrood as the bill was debated. And the other pictures scattered throughout this edition are also from that hideous week in Scotland.)
First, the more upbeat stuff. In the past nine months, I’ve learned more than in the previous two decades working as a journalist about the political “sausage factory”—the process by which events, problems and ideas get turned into laws. Though I’ve written about politics a lot during my journalistic career, I’ve never been a lobby journalist, and I’ve never written a political column. As The Economist’s education correspondent (2005-09) I wrote about politics insofar as it impacted on education policy, and in Brazil, like any foreign correspondent in a one-person office, I had to cover absolutely everything, including politics. But I was never part of the Westminster bubble—or the Brasília bubble, for that matter.
So it’s been fascinating to see behind the scenes of Westminster, and indeed Holyrood. But I mostly can’t write much about this insider stuff, because I’m now a player, and people talk to me on that basis. Some of them know I want to influence them; others understand me as an ally. From the point of view of journalistic ethics, that would stop me from news reporting, though not opinion-writing. Moreover, it tends to mean that what gets discussed is confidential.
It still feeds through into my journalism, however. I have a far better understanding than I used to of just how law gets made, and it’s riveting having the opportunity to watch the canniest and best-connected political operators work out what to say to whom, and when. I don’t think I used to appreciate anywhere near enough the skill of the Westminster operators: people who know hundreds of politicians’, civil servants’ and special advisers’ positions on a huge range of issues; who influences them, what their spouses think, whom they owe a favour to, and what sort of argument lands best with whom.
This isn’t a narrow point about the campaign for sex-realism, either. The people I talk to usually also have some other abiding interest, and I get to see bits and pieces of what they’re doing on other issues. And this “personal knowledge as political currency” is the way that Westminster and Whitehall operate. Which ministers have been captured by their civil servants. Which special advisers are all talk; which ones are helpless against departmental inertia. Who’s good on detail; who’s got big ambitions; who’s a coward. How you craft a message that lands with each individual, and how you talk to one group without alienating another.
So that stuff has been interesting to learn about. But the wider lesson has been far more depressing. I’ve had a ringside seat not just on how the political sausage-factory functions, but also on how the complexity and sheer size of the modern nation state can make it horrifying easy for highly motivated single-issue campaigners to capture policymaking.
It’s standard for politicians to weigh up the political cost of opposing what a lobby group wants, against the benefit of supporting it. The perfect policy for them to seize on is one that seems to have zero costs (shovel-ready; cheap or ideally free; no harmful impact on likely voters) and a high pay-off, if not directly in votes, at least as a virtue signal.
In all these regards, the transactivist agenda of erasing the meaning of sex in law and practice couldn’t be more perfect. It’s quite easy to present it as a cost-free giveaway to a very tiny group that affects no one else. For a policy that supposedly affects so few people, it is outsize in virtue-signalling. Busy people with a lot on their plates start with the assumption that it’s a trivial side-issue, and refuse to engage with the detail. That leaves civil servants who have been influenced by lobby groups or have a personal reason to care about this agenda, such as a trans-identified child, free rein to write whatever policy they like, and try to palm it off on ministers: “this is inclusive, causes no harm and will make you look good. There’s no downside, minister. Please sign here.”
Some big laws, such as the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill, result from this sort of policy capture (SNP leaders, notably Nicola Sturgeon, are firmly behind it, but I remain convinced that civil-service capture was essential to its adoption despite its egregious flaws). But by and large the problems arise in guidance, in particular non-statutory, and the rules and guidelines that shape people’s behaviour at work.
Things like the Equal Treatment Bench Book—guidance written “by judges for judges”—that tells them how to handle courtroom issues; some real and important, like making sure a disabled or non-English-speaking witness can give evidence; others absolute nonsense, like ensuring the use of “preferred pronouns” by all witnesses—even a woman who has been raped by a man who demands that everyone call him “she”. Or training for NHS midwives and managers in maternity services on how to use “inclusive language”—that is, to avoid calling people “women”, “female” or “she” even when they are in labour. Or telling schools that they should treat all children as the gender they identify as despite an array of sex-based laws and regulations, not to mention the obligation to teach children facts and to keep them safe.
These examples vary from in force (ETBB) to poised to go (midwife training) to stalled (the Department for Education is months late releasing new guidance on trans issues for schools, which suggests internal fights between officials with an activist agenda, and those who want to uphold the law as it stands). But in each case these non-statutory measures have their origins and contents shaped below the ministerial level, and are heavily influenced by unaccountable lobby groups. They are developed completely untransparently, and often quite independently of political leadership. When he was running to be prime minster, Rishi Sunak said that he would “protect” the words man, woman and mother, rather than allowing officialdom to continue to erase them in favour of cervix-havers, people assigned male at birth and so on. But sex-denialist NHS officials are serenely continuing to plan training on “gender-neutral” language for everyone working in maternity services.
Trying to stop this sort of policy capture before it becomes entrenched is a big, and largely invisible, part of the work that Sex Matters and the other sex-realist campaign groups do. Seeing it from the inside is, as I say, a privilege for a journalist. But for an activist, it’s tough. If you paint a rainbow crossing on a road people notice—and some of them think you’re wonderful (I must say, I do wonder how many). But take the time to explain how a proposed policy is unlawful to someone who has a chance to stop it, and you may do a lot of good but hardly anyone will ever know.
Like a lot of people, I had imagined that my time doing this work would be a briefish interregnum. It was obvious that the moment was critical: when I stepped away from my job at The Economist in April, it felt like the last chance to help halt the legal erasure of sex, rather than see it lost and then have to slowly and painfully fight for its reinstatement over the coming years and decades. I really didn’t think it would be that hard to wake more people up to the idiocy of the idea that you can mess with the meaning of “male” and “female” while leaving the uses of those words in laws and policies and everyday life unchanged.
I no longer think like that. In part that’s because the concept of sex is such a core thing to destabilise, and comprehensively destabilised is what it’s been. The erasure of sex has been under way for at least two decades now, while hardly anybody noticed. All sorts of policies and practices have been disrupted; large numbers of equality, diversity and inclusion staff and trainers continue to hack away at it every day; and university students continue to be taught that sex is a social construct.
And then there’s the multiplicity of independent regulators, arms-length funding bodies and the like. There are so many—far more than you would have any idea of, in any given industry, unless you work in that field. They oversee statutory functions, like monitoring and inspecting schools, hospitals and care homes. They funnel government money to private actors, both commercial and charity, to carry out research and training, and to provide services. (To give an indicative example, that contract to train midwives to use gender-neutral language is being offered by the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise Health and Wellbeing Alliance, an arms-length body that funnels funding from the Department of Health and the NHS, to the enormous number of charities and companies in the health and social-care system.)
You can add to this all the organisations that aren’t nominally part of government, but are so heavily regulated that they might as well be. In this category I’d put universities and private schools, and many of the regulated professions (especially in education and health care). Together, form a constellation of influence around the public sector, where almost all the funding is public but political will has little impact. A politician can impose their will, but it takes a huge amount of time and determination—and even afterwards, the results may be underwhelming.
Here’s an illustration. When I was writing about education, the Conservatives were in opposition and keen on giving state schools greater freedoms via academies and “free schools” modelled on American charters and Swedish friskolor. This agenda was pushed hard by party heavyweights: both David Cameron and Michael Gove did the shadow education secretary job.
After the Conservatives gained power in 2010 they largely got what they wanted: most English schools are now “independent” in this sort of sense. But the fragmentation of the system has created a weak education department where ideological civil servants hold sway, and a large, equally ideological and unaccountable army of external providers of education materials and training. It doesn’t look like competition has raised standards as it was supposed to. Parents certainly don’t have any more control, or even voice.
And that’s despite the fact that changing the way the system works took enormous political will, and deep engagement from people at the heart of power. The “Blob” just regrouped and found a different way to do the same thing. (This is the term Gove used to use, as did Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools, for left-wing teachers, education lecturers, local-authority officials and journalists, especially at the Guardian and the BBC. These people believe almost universally in child-led learning, skills over knowledge, the uselessness of competition in raising standards, the endless need for more public money and above all, the futility of trying to decouple children’s academic results from their life circumstances.)
It’s also because I understand more every day how many people whose jobs nominally involve thinking hard and speaking up are entirely unwilling to do either of these. I’m not talking about the people who work in captured fields like publishing or academia, or those whose jobs are precarious, perhaps because they are freelance or work on short-term contracts. I’m talking about people who are paid to uphold the law, protect people’s rights and stand up against vested interests. All too many of them do nothing of the sort.
I know why, of course: they see high-profile cases of people losing everything, or indeed low-profile cases in their industry of people being disciplined or side-lined for the most minor transgressions. I have heard from people who were reported to their employers or clients for simply following someone like me on Twitter, or liking a tweet. I suppose it’s naïve of me to think that the people whose actual job involves standing up to this sort of thing—people who work in safeguarding or regulation, for instance—will be any braver. I genuinely feel I’ve gained some insight into how authoritarians manage to take power.
And sometimes I fear that the emergence of the various groups promoting sex-based rights can make it easier for people to justify cowardice to themselves. Increasingly, I fear we’re used as a type of confessional: people let us know about something bad that is happening—something that it’s absolutely their job to fix—and then they feel happy that they’ve handed the problem on. Rather than stepping up, they grant themselves absolution.
And so here we are, with a tiny number of people, mostly busy women who are working to protect everyone’s sex-based rights, mostly for no pay, in their non-existent free time. In the meantime tens, or maybe hundreds, of thousands of politicians, civil servants, regulators, HR managers and the rest get paid to try to destroy those rights—or at best, to sit on their hands while others destroy them.
I don’t want to end on such a glum note—there genuinely has been a lot of progress over the past year, and I don’t by any means feel the fight is lost. But actually winning will require many more people to face down their fear, speak up—and in many cases, do the job they are paid to do.