This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Tory trans activists

In her devastating appraisal of transgender activists who seek to rewrite history and their role in promoting the falsehoods and harms identified in the Cass review (SORRY IS THE HARDEST WORD, JUNE), Helen Joyce rightly draws attention to Ruth Hunt. As chief executive of Stonewall from 2014 to 2019, Hunt was central to turning the gay rights charity into an aggressive promoter of transgender propaganda.

As Joyce notes, Hunt was duly rewarded by Theresa May with a peerage. This is unsurprising, for it is worthwhile recalling the central role that the (self-identifying) “moderate” wing of the Conservative Party has played in cheerleading some of the most extraordinary claims of the transgender lobby.

Many of its MPs support the very transgender views that got Scotland’s SNP-Green coalition into hot water

In 2017, Theresa May committed her government to changing the Gender Recognition Act so that applicants could officially change their gender without any medical checks. Addressing the Pink News awards ceremony in October that year, May declared “Being trans is not an illness and it should not be treated as such,” demonstrating her customary use of a trite pronouncement to conceal a lack of serious thought.

The Conservative government’s commitment to legalising gender self-ID and removing the safeguards that protect many vulnerable young people from being medically sterilised for life ended only with May’s torturous removal from office. Now May heads to the House of Lords entirely unreflective, let alone repentant, and boasting to Ruth Davidson about her pride in being “woke”. 

But May leaves behind other prominent Tories seeking re-election whose insouciance to trans ideology’s risks cannot be lightly wished away. The architect of the May government’s commitment to gender self-ID was Maria Miller, chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee between 2014 and 2020. Her like-minded successor in chairing that committee, is another Tory MP, Caroline Nokes.

When asked on the Today programme about the relevance of keeping sex at birth data, Noakes expressed incredulity, replying “Why on earth would we want to?” Let’s hope she never runs a medical screening programme or women’s refuge. 

But Nokes’s response was not the thoughtless incantation of fashionable slogans that the likes of the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, mindlessly trotted out, even although (post-Cass) Keegan has effectively conceded that she didn’t really understand the issues at stake. 

Rather, as Nokes said in 2020 when lamenting that the then women and equalities minister, Liz Truss, had scrapped the gender self-ID reform, “I don’t think any of us want to do anything that would in any way upset the trans community.”

For MPs like Caroline Nokes the normalisation of transgenderism is an article of faith, even when it involves kids. She has called for changing school policy to empower trans children “where they will not be incorrectly gendered, where they will not be forced to use the incorrect toilets”. It is “absolutely right that there should be inclusive, gender-neutral loos in our schools and that’s something that I personally will stand up for enormously”. 

Before we run away with the narrative that the Conservative Party’s humbling is a consequence of it having lurched to the far right, let us acknowledge the reality that many of its MPs — old and new intake alike — support the very transgender views that got Scotland’s SNP-Green coalition into hot water.

Days before Liz Truss revoked the commitment to gender self-ID, a group of nine Tory MPs led by Alicia Kearns and Nicola Richards signed a statement that was published by the ConservativeHome website, in which they were not only pleased for self-ID to be enacted but that “we must also go further”. The signatories included Richard Holden, Rishi Sunak’s chairman of the Conservative Party.

Anne Kelly

Leeds

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Franchise folly

Reading Robert Hutton’s cinema column (REBOOT CAMP, JUNE), I felt sympathy for contemporary film critics. Audiences attracted to film by the glories of classic movies have to wade through the ever-thinner gruel from Hollywood studios that are determined to churn out remakes and franchises till judgement day. 

Not every film can, or should, be in the mould of Andrei Tarkovksky, but I can’t be the only one-time regular cinemagoer who mourns the loss of intelligent, novel mainstream films. I remember when even the most crowd-pleasing fare had fun, energy, and solid, conventional strengths of cinematography and story. 

Whether historic epics such as Master and Commander and Gladiator, or science fiction action like Terminator and The Matrix, plots were genuinely original, and adaptations were based on books, not video games and children’s toys.

Do people actually want this regurgitative mush? Based on the DVD collections and watchlists of friends and family, it’s leaving lots of people not only behind but at home. Cynically, it seems the purpose of these sequels, spin-offs and merchandise is to trade off the back of a single creative venture, rather than investing in new stories and ideas. 

James Fraser

Cambridge