Caroline ffiske was a Conservative Councillor for Eight Years. Published on 21 September 2021.

There has been a lot of press coverage recently about the attacks and abuse that Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, has endured as a result of her stance on science, free speech, and women’s rights. She has been attacked for supporting all three and for remaining sceptical about some of the extreme demands of gender ideology (such as the idea that anyone is a woman who says they are a woman). Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has now joined in the call for more tolerant debate.

To date, the Conservative Party has remained the only major political party even attempting to hold the line against the full impact of gender ideology. See Suzanne Moore’s excellent analysis here: How did the Tories become the only party to protect women?

Therefore it was disappointing to see, earlier this month, a prominent Tory politician, not just endorsing gender ideology, but actually engaging in a public, provocative, attack on Rosie Duffield. Local newspaper, KentOnline, published the attack from Canterbury’s Conservative City Council leader, Ben Fitter-Harding. Fitter-Harding insulted Duffield. He accused her of ‘liking transphobic tweets’. He wrote ‘that this woman in particular... could now inflict such pain ... is something many of us find hard to bear’. Her crime is to support ‘sweeping claims about who can and who cannot be a woman’. According to Fitter-Harding, ‘progress continues, even as people like Ms Duffield attempt to stand in the way’. 

These are pretty intolerant comments suggesting there can only be one version of progress - Fitter-Harding’s version. They are melodramatic - that ‘hard to bear’ pain. They are cruel and provocative - accusing Duffield of actually ‘inflicting pain’. They are hypocritical: Duffield isn’t allowed to ‘like tweets’ while Fitter-Harding can be as rude, accusatory, hyperbolic, and dismissive as he likes.

However, the most alarming part of Fitter-Harding’s attack on Duffield is what it says about his adherence to gender ideology. He doesn’t approve of Duffield making ‘sweeping claims about who can and who cannot be a woman’. Is he implying that anyone can be a woman? Or that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman? Or that the word ‘woman’ does not mean what we all thought it meant, only yesterday?

It is concerning to us when people in senior positions in the Conservative Party sign up to gender ideology. This is because of the extraordinary harm it does. Biological sex is binary and immutable - we know that. Pretending that it isn’t, matters. Here is how the biologist Colin Wright phrased it: ‘I’m frequently asked why I focus so much on the nature of biological sex. It’s because in my view this may be reality’s last stand. If this undeniable fact can be denied en masse, then we become hostages to chaos. We simply cannot afford to lose our collective tether to reality.” 

At ConservativesforWomen we have repeatedly met with, lobbied, written to, senior figures in the Conservative Party setting out our concerns with gender ideology. I have summarised our concerns, again, below. Each of these concerns is serious in its own right. But brought together, they reveal a dangerous ideology. Ultimately the Conservative Party needs to decide where it stands. Do Tories stand for science, reason, free speech, open debate; and for protecting women rights to single sex spaces and the bodily integrity of vulnerable young people? Or like our other political parties, will it succumb to the aggressive and irrational demands of ideology? Somewhere along the line, the Tories need to decide.

1. Gender ideology eliminates the boundaries between the sexes. If, as, for example, Stonewall says 'trans women are women' then we might as well drop the 'trans'. Anyone is a woman who says they are a woman. At a stroke, this eliminates the boundary around spaces that have been created to keep women safe and maintain dignity and privacy between the sexes. Men can self-identify into women's prisons, refuges, toilets, and changing rooms. 

2. If trans women are women, there is no mechanism whereby women, including elderly and vulnerable women, can request sex-segregated intimate health and social care. There is no way to maintain single sex hospital wards. 

3. Gender ideology is promoted heavily on the internet, in online social forums. Vulnerable teenagers are persuaded that they will find their 'true self', and a resolution to the difficulties in being human, via an 'inner gender identity' unrelated to their biological sex. Then, as they seek to enforce new names and invented pronouns, they can find themselves at loggerheads with those who love them the most, and provide their only security in the world - their family. Some of these teenagers go on to buy cross-sex hormones online. Some go on to seek surgery that renders them medicated for life, potentially sterile, and without sexual function. 

4. Gender ideology undermines the legitimacy of same-sex attraction. Young women and men face being called 'transphobic' if their sexual preference is exclusively for women or men. They're supposed to be open to 'any gender identity'. Men are self-identifying into spaces created by and for lesbian women. Gender ideology leaves these women powerless to object. 

5. If trans women are women, that is the end of sex-segregated sport. Globally, we already see an emerging pattern of men self-identifying into women's sports and taking prizes. 

6. Gender ideology attacks free speech. Because of its flimsy unscientific foundations (biological sex is binary and immutable, and there is no science behind the idea of an 'inner gender identity') it relies on an ongoing attack on free speech to maintain its ascendancy. The flimsy foundations must not be challenged because they will be exposed in all their emptiness. People can reported to their local police for 'hate' if they point out the truth.

7. We are drifting towards 'compelled speech'. Women have been instructed in Court to refer to violent males as 'she'. Prison officers are informed that they should use female pronouns for a male criminal who requests it and male prisoners have demanded to be searched by female officers.

8. Gender ideology undermines the integrity of the press. Newspapers print stories that are literally not true. (They print lies? - How would you frame it?) We now read newspaper stories about violent and sexual crimes committed by women. It turns out these crimes have been committed by men. This changes our perception, our understanding, of our world. This is dangerous for women and for younger people, learning to navigate the world. How do they feel, when they discover our newspapers literally publish, well, false stories?

9. We are eroding the integrity of statistics and data gathering. Until it was challenged in Court, the Office of National Statistics planned for the 2021 Census to allow people to record their sex according to gender markers on documents such as passports. How many people in this country even know that you can change your gender marker on your passport with ease? (Where was the democratic consensus for this?)

10. Gender ideology erodes the integrity of science. Biological sex is binary and immutable. This basic foundational scientific knowledge is being undermined.

11. Gender ideology undermines shared language - eg the meaning of the word ‘woman’. It literally undermines one of our most foundational human attributes: our ability to share language and communicate.

12. Gender ideology undermines reality. We can accurately sex each other within seconds. This really matters for women’s safety - and just our broader elementary understanding of where are and who we are with at any given time. But we’re supposed to ignore our senses.

13. Gender ideology is undermining our democracy. There is no democratic remit for the aggressive roll-out of gender ideology that continues across our public institutions, under the Conservative Government. No democratic remit said yes to men self-identifying into women's prisons, or yes to the 2021 Census attempting to undermine the concept of biological sex, or yes to police forces recording our online discussion about sex and gender as hate, or yes to schools introducing mixed sex toilets, or to any of the above.

In a nutshell - we stand with Rosie Duffield. We think gender ideology is immensely harmful. The Conservative Government needs to come clean on where it really stands.