This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

“The Future is Female.” Cohorts of corporate t-shirts and signs have displayed that progressive motto for a while. It didn’t age very well. 

Today, what counts as a “female” leader is subject to ideological scrutiny. A variety of qualifying labels — such as “queer” and “gender fluid”— are attached. Intersectional theorists and activists promote “uterus-havers” on an equal footing with gender “diverse” people. 

“Female” role models include, for example, Philip Bunce, a male Credit Suisse director and occasional cross-dressing fashionista who was included in Britain’s top 100 female executives for the 2018 Champions of Women in Business awards. 

It also embraces the former Olympic Games men’s decathlon champion (and now transgender media celebrity), Caitlyn Jenner, who was awarded Glamour’s Woman of the Year Award in 2015. In sports, it leaves the field open to male athletes competing against women, as seen with swimmer Will “Lia” Thomas, cyclist Zach “Emily” Bridges, or MMA fighter Boyd “Fallon Fox” Burton.

That shift is not simply a matter of terminology. It bears political consequences. It is clear in the way the designation is prescribed to (biological) women specifically. Chanting “Girl Power” comes with a prescriptive clause, that of gender ideology. 

Despite being materially sidelined by the erosion of their sex, women have an important role to play in this epistemological revolution. It is only through their marketed consent, their self-policing contentment, and their permissive nods that the cultural revolution continues. However, not all women can become these Captive Minds. It takes a very special type of “leader” to do so.

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There is still a gap between popular feeling and activist objectives. For much of the public, women’s fair access to leadership roles and the gender-gap are still priority issues. In executive, political and thought leadership discourse, the debate has already moved on, however. 

There, the priorities focus on securing the right type of female leader: leaders who agree to trans-inclusive feminism, and don’t see any issue with misogynistic banners such as the now infamous “Kill terfs” or the poetically worded “Transphobes Can Suck My Pink Strap”.

The lag between popular and leadership priorities are especially evident in academia. In the latter, the Future has already arrived. For the 2019 intake across Britain’s Russell Group universities, women made up 55.6 per cent of admissions. Since 2018, female students have been in the majority at Oxford University, where they now exceed 55 per cent of all UK-domiciled undergraduates. 

Outside the Russell Group, the same trend can be observed. In a 2020-21 report for the University of the Arts London, about two thirds of all students were female, with a handful of individuals not “identifying” with their biological sex. Yet events promoting the need to increase women in leadership have not stopped. Merely, their focus has changed.

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In Spring 2022, I was reaching two terms: that of my pregnancy and of my DPhil at Oxford. I wanted a change of intellectual scene, so I decided to attend one of the feminist workshops that I had, until then, warily avoided. 

Knowing that young mothers in academia were not a priority for the usual advocates of diversity and inclusivity, I felt it was time for me to take part in a meeting discussing the representation of women in my profession. The event opened with a tour of people’s personal pronouns, something I swore to myself that I’d never partake in. Unwilling to play the game but conscious that useless tension would make the situation rather difficult, I claimed that people could refer to me as “eight months pregnant”. 

Everyone laughed. I didn’t think anything more of it. A few days later, however, as I lay on the bed where I gave birth, an email arrived. According to its author, my joke had been nothing but transphobic bigotry, which I needed to acknowledge and atone for. Never mind the fact that being pregnant was a matter of “sex”, not “gender”, and nothing else; the organisers had immediately read through the lines. 

They understood very well that the mere refusal to play the game was proof of my non-submission. It was thus explained in great detail how men too could bear children and give birth.

In the English-speaking world, the art of toeing the line on these illiberal issues has become a matter of political survival for most women. Those who bind their career progress to gender ideology not only believe that anyone who isn’t stale, pale, and male is the future; they think that it is their sacred duty to proselytise and enforce that message. 

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Of course, male politicians are never far behind. Yet for them, supporting gender ideology is one tool amongst many to advance their agenda. As such, their vague gestures are not as threatening as those deployed by female politicians. 

That phenomenon is particularly acute amongst Labour MPs. Women who jump on the ideological bandwagon double down whenever they can. Zarah Sultana, Dawn Butler, and Lisa Nandy all seem to have given up on biological reality and its consequences for women’s safety. 

However, when some of their female colleagues, like Rosie Duffield and the SNP’s Joanna Cherry, have attempted to raise the issue, it has been at the cost of marginalisation in their own party. Yet Keir Starmer can state in March 2022 that “a woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women” whilst agreeing in November last year that the transitioning of children without parents’ consent shouldn’t be allowed. 

Is it courage or opportunism that pushed the Leader of the Opposition to discount one of Labour’s frequently repeated policies? Whatever the reason, pushback did not topple him.

Abroad, it is telling that women are generally the first to lead the path on these political issues. In France, for example, Sandrine Rousseau is the new ambassador of “ecofeminism” which plants the seed of queer and gender theory in the political soil. In countries where social liberalism is greatly advanced, such as Scandinavia, female politicians never cease to betray their electorate. 

Norway’s Minister of Justice, Monica Mæland, led a national ban on hate speech against transgender people, stating that protection was an “imperative”. Paradoxically, postmodern female leaders perceive their role as that of a carer (a rather traditional function for the Fair Sex) for all varieties of micro-identities that allegedly suffer systemic discrimination.

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Becoming a Captive Mind is a Faustian bargain. Whether you personally suffer from it or see your other political causes squandered, endorsing gender ideology as a female politician always comes with a cost. 

Nicola Sturgeon is the latest test for that hypothesis. The outgoing SNP leader has so tied her political success to such ideological campaigns that the raison d’être of her own party suffers. Until popular outcry forced some nifty footwork, her attempted legislation could not have been clearer: she believes rapists should be treated according to their self-identified gender. Who would want to follow such a separatist leader?

The backpedalling over the case of male-bodied but female-identifying rapist Isla Bryson, who was initially assigned to a female prison, was excruciating to witness. For Sturgeon, sending him to a prison for men cannot be put in terms of biological reality. Her struggle over that simple point with the ITV interviewer, Peter Smith, reached unbelievably high levels of Kafkaesque logic.

There must be a wider reckoning for these ideology-driven political strategies. No one has the right to dismantle reality in order to secure political or personal gain. There is no progress in this, only a perverted management of decline that twists and breaks civic society to a point of no return.