Struggling with my political allegiance now and it's really bothering me

Don't get me wrong, I liked him and I agree with a lot of what you say. He was also very pleasant to deal with, which definitely couldn't be said for the other Tory ministers I worked with.

But I suppose his stance on gender is a reminder that we shouldn't put people on pedestals. No one is right about everything.

What a silly comment. It's perfectly possible to be both left/liberal leaning and a grown up, thanks. I grew up around mainly Tories, many of whom, particularly those who never left the area I grew up in, remain as myopic and parochial as they've always been. After all, just as unrealistic idealism and authoritarian zeal can be a feature of left-wing circles, small-minded backward-looking and traditionalist authoritarian thinking can be a feature of those on the right.

I'd say whether or not you're prepared to embrace uncomfortable facts or realities that may go against the usual narratives of your given 'tribe' is more a feature of maturity. In my experience, that does work both ways.

I agree with PP re: his family background being totally important to understand him. Especially about the "listening to the people vs guiding the people" thing. To the extent that I find Rory Stewart charming it's that I think he genuinely feels this as a responsibility - a duty - it's not that he cynically wants to order us all around but that he feels he is the leader of a flock.

Maybe more like a kindly priest who is a servant-leader in the sense of getting in amongst his congregation - visiting the poor with a food package - believing that he succeeds if they succeed - but there is no question that they are going to democratically vote on whether to worship God or Krishna!

Where I disagree is that I definitely do not think gender ideology is inherently a "small c conservative" thing to prioritise unless by "small c conservative" you are explicitly referring to the Cameronite consensus of like 2005-era values that were popular on the right at that time, many of which I would actually simply call "small l liberal" i.e. "the primary social values we want to conserve are freedom of speech, freedom from the state interfering in your family life" etc.

Liberalism has been an immense influence on the Tory party in the last few decades. I think Rory's adherence to gender ideology is much more related to he trusts elite opinion (for aforementioned hierarchy/birth reasons) and the elite opinion on this honestly-extremely-weird-and-with-no-answers-in-any-existing-religious-or-otherwise-guidance question at the time it suddenly popped up was "this is the new gay rights and we support it".

I know a lot of men who are "small c conservative" in the generic sense, in fact often calling themselves that as they are now Reform members ;) and none who believe in gender ideology. Not many are activists on the topic because they consider it an utterly stupid question that doesn't really affect them, but they are not confused on their answer. There are many variants of "small c conservative" ofc but I can think of few which unquestioningly put every man above every woman (see: migrant men in grooming gangs vs their local victims)

So I wonder if instead of "small c conservative", a better way of putting it would be "small-a aristocratic" - Rory elevates this small group of men because they are elites not because they are men. The class war is the only war, etc ;)

@YourNoisyQuoter
Join the Communist Party of Britain

Will any land or property ownership be allowed or will all farmers have to rent off the state?
What will happen to Royal residences?

Thank you, this is very interesting. Despite being a socialist myself I loved Rory Stewart’s biography and found his approach to politics fascinating. I too am a long-distance walker and I loved his approach to campaigning for his Penrith seat, which was to walk all over his constituency and speak to as many local people as possible. He genuinely seems to care about making people’s lives better, and as a junior minister he genuinely tried to make things better. It was clear he always put principles before party loyalty (hence his short career as an MP). I genuinely think it’s a real shame he’s no longer in politics, as I think we are all better off having genuinely principled, independent-minded MPs on both sides of the isle.

I have been terribly disappointed by his support for gender ideology. Your post gives a really good insight as to where he is coming from on that. Thank you.

Trade unionist & socialist here. I spent a lot of time with Communist Party of Britain folk, as a fellow traveller. I socialised with many of their senior leadership and initially I found them a refreshing change when I was being hounded & bullied by Trotskyist factions within my trade union.

But I soon discovered there is a deep vein of misogyny running through the CPB. Lots of co-ordinated bullying & hounding of women trade union activists. I applaud the CPB’s gender-critical position, and there are some fabulous women among their long-term members. But the leadership is dominated by elderly misogynists and until that changes I cannot vote for them.

Welcome to my TED talk. I will now attempt to demonstrate how your argument follows the ‘purity spiral’ by comparing it to the arguments of TRA’s.

Essentially, the main argument is following the ‘but people will die if they can’t get immediate access to treatment’ argument so beloved of TRA’s.

It also draws strict limits on what ‘the good people’ can think. Someone does not think as the arguer does. Therefore someone isn’t a ‘good person’ (feminist).

Another TRA technique used is to suggest one solution fits all the problems of a particular case. A look at the Savita Happalanavar case will suggest that her death was caused by faulty medical diagnosis and a failure to apply already existing judicial decisions permitting abortions if the mother’s life was in danger. This was aggravated, judging by some of the comments of the medical staff, by racism and bigotry towards someone of a different religion.

But like TRA’s presenting with multiple mental health problems, all this would be solved by one treatment. Instead of ‘transition’ we’ve got 'abortion’. Would the sepsis the medical staff failed to screen for have been prevented by the abortion Savita should have (quite legally) been given? Given their failure to screen for it, quite possibly not. Is transition going to ‘solve’ depression and suicidal thoughts? Quite possibly not.

Then there’s the redefining of words. ‘Pro-life’ has suddenly been defined as the extreme end of a more diverse set of beliefs. Very similar to TRA’s and their usage of ‘transphobia’. Any mild disagreement and suddenly people are ‘criminalising abortion’. Or are ‘transphobic’.

Finally, we’ve got the ‘no middle ground’. A mother is legally responsible for her child from birth. And adoption is a last resort. Uh, well, laws can be changed and we can have different opinions on what should be a ‘last resort’. Can people discuss compromise on that somehow? Apparently not.

Just as there is no discussion of compromise by TRA’s on single sex spaces, trans women are women, etc.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk on purity spirals.

There are pragmatic reasons for keeping abortion legal and easy to obtain. The most compelling reason is exemplified by Savita Happalanavar. When a doctor is legally compelled to withhold medical treatment and endanger his patient because she is pregnant, women die needlessly. Anyone who is willing to accept women's preventable deaths for the sake of forcing women to carry to term is not feminist.

What kind of feminism is it that says a woman’s choice is between abortion and being totally responsible for another human being for 18 years plus?

Adoption is generally deemed the option of last resort for children whose parents cannot care for them, not as an empowering lifestyle choice for mothers, and there are good reasons for this.

Should mothers get more support? Of course they should. Closing Sure Start centres was a stupid idea. But "prolife" doesn't mean "a political belief that mothers should be supported with State-funded services", it means "a political belief that abortion should be criminalised".

More support for mothers also doesn't make the mother become not responsible for her child for 18 years. She is still the person who, in law, has automatic parental responsibility from birth.

Anyone who thinks that IQ is related to race hasn't read Guns Germs and Steel.

Yes, this is all part of the same purity spiral tendency we’ve got right now. Abortion is a ‘purity’ point, for example because there’s a massive range of options from ‘never’ to ‘up to the point of birth’. But instead of recognition of this, you get the US ‘any restriction whatsoever and we’re straight into the handmaid’s tale.’

Riley Gaines can’t be a feminist because she’s balancing rights on abortion to come down on the more conservative side? Why not? Why isn’t there a feminist pro-life perspective? There should be.

Why aren’t we talking about what a feminist pro-life perspective looks like? What kind of feminism is it that says a woman’s choice is between abortion and being totally responsible for another human being for 18 years plus? Isn’t feminism about expanding choices?

Another purity thing; can you be a Christian and a feminist? Again, there’s a massive range of options with Christianity - it’s very diverse. But again, we get into a purity spiral with ‘Christianity means Trump voting Southern Baptists who are secretly funding Mumsnet…’

Yeah, I think we’d be a lot better if we accepted that people like Riley Gaines and KJK and Christians who hate abortion but support the (entirely Christian) right of a woman to have a career outside kids and marriage are feminist. Just not Official Feminists.

This.

I think it generally comes down to 'deeds not words'.

I dgaf whether I'm seen as a feminist or not. We need women's and girls' interests fought for.

It depends on your purity spiral doesn't it?

Personally I think there are different levels of feminism that women want and are happy with according to their cultural upbringing. And I'd rather that was encouraged to a certain degree accepting that a certain amount of political differences should be respected rather than get into discussions over 'not being feminist enough'.

That way lies the madness which we see consuming the left already.

Yes, all of that is true, but Britain is still importing coal from elsewhere, and countries such as Russia, India, China, Turkey, Germany the U.S and Australia are still mining it.

I didn't mean "people like KJK" as in, there's a class of people just like her and she is the epitome of it.

I meant it as in, "people not naturally politically aligned with feminists, such as these two individuals for example".

I agree that I can't think of anyone else quite like KJK. The closest person I can think of is probably Riley Gaines, but even then there are obvious differences between the two.

KJK is pro women but claims not to identify as a feminist. Is that because she doesn't understand what a feminist is (someone who is pro women) or is it because she does understand what a feminist is (someone who subscribes to a whole set of beliefs, many of which she doesn't agree with)?

This is actually the heart of the problem. A huge disagreement between people who call themselves feminists about what feminism actually is.

Is Riley Gaines pro women? Is she a feminist? She's certainly pro women in sport, but has more conservative views about other things such as abortion due to her religious beliefs.

Can you be a feminist who doesn't support the right to an abortion?

Can you be a Christian who is pro choice?

Can you be a Christian and a feminist?

My own view is that the feminist position in relation to any particular issue is the one that seeks to remove or minimise any physical or societal disadvantage suffered by female people and put them on an equal footing with male people as far as possible.

But if you define a feminist as someone who takes the feminist position in relation to every issue, well, nobody is ideologically pure enough to qualify. My kids have their dad's surname, so I guess I wouldn't qualify.

And if you insist on defining feminists as people who agree on every feminist issue, you can't be surprised to find that almost no one fits the definition of a feminist, and the four billion incredibly diverse women on this planet don't have a movement which represents them.

It's so much easier if all you have to agree on is that male people (however they identify) should have the freedom to do what they want.

You are just growing up, that’s all. Embrace the growth mindset, leave being the 6th firm luxury beliefs and join the grown-ups.

You can't really say 'people like KJK'. Shes in her own class. And its pro women.

Otherwise, yes, good points!

We are still struggling with the notion of equity, as a society.

In a way, I think gender ideology is where small C conservative and small L liberal meet and shake hands, which might explain how it has managed to take root across the political spectrum.

Following on from that train of thought, I think it also explains why sex realists, for want of a better word, have struggled to gain ground.

If gender ideology is where small C conservatism and small L liberalism meet, sex realism is where feminism and social conservatism meet and don't really want to shake hands.

Social conservatism tends to view women as childbearers and care givers. So this tends to manifest itself in political policies designed to keep women in these kinds of roles (and away from the corridors of power) by promoting women as stay at home mothers who raise their children and later care for the elderly (reducing the burden on the state) and generally respect the authority of their husbands. It tends to frown on same sex relationships, which don't naturally lead to the next generation of children being produced. And it generally dislikes immigration, which it sees as an undesirable influx of people who don't necessarily share "our" values, but recognises that this means we need our own women to have more children, which directly influences attitudes towards things like contraception, abortion, and women pursuing goals unrelated to childbearing. All of this is the antithesis of feminism.

Feminists, on the other hand, recognise the reality that women are often thrust into the role of childbearers and care givers, and want policies which support women in these roles without limiting them. Saying, "we recognise that women are biologically the childbearing sex, and that society has developed around women in caring roles and this will not be upended in our lifetime, and women are also physically weaker, so they need sex based rights which recognise this" whilst also maintaining that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men and be just as able to become president of the USA or CEO of Microsoft, is a really difficult tightrope to walk. It always has been.

So feminism is incredibly vulnerable to being split down the middle over something like gender ideology, which might sound great in principle (people not being limited to the gender roles they were "assigned at birth") but doesn't work in reality (male rapists in women's prisons). And when you end up with a large chunk of your natural supporters deserting you in favour of the ideology which sounds great in theory but doesn't work in reality, and then find a whole bunch of people you disagree with about almost everything else wanting to buddy up with you over this issue, it's very difficult to know how to deal with that.

Which is why gender critical feminists are frequently split down the middle over whether to join forces with people like Matt Walsh and Kellie-Jay Keen or only talk to people who agree with us about everything, whilst men like Rory Stewart, Alistair Campbell, Ian Dunt and James O'Brien can stay in their cosy little bubble, patting each other on the back for being so civilised that they can have a debate with other privileged white men who have been known to have different political views about completely unrelated issues. A debate to which women, the people actually affected by this issue, are naturally not invited.

The point is that GC people who weren't making any kind of threat at all nevertheless lost their livelihoods, experienced persecution, and faced prosecution for stating simple facts that the left had decided could not be spoken.

I used to work for Rory Stewart. It was in the immediately post Brexit days and I found him refreshingly intelligent and reasonable, but in retrospect this was only by comparison with the rest of the Tory government.

At the time a lot of people were saying they didn't understand why Rory didn't defect to the Lib Dems, and he said himself that that would have been the wrong thing to do because he was a natural small C conservative, even if he disagreed with a lot of the actions of the large C Conservative government. He'd have done much better in the John Major or even Margaret Thatcher years. I respected the fact that he said he wasn't going to just abandon his core political principles and join a party that was not a good fit, just for the sake of political expediency.

I think it's worth considering what we know of Rory's background. He is from an aristocratic family. He went to Eton. His obvious intelligence and aristocratic connections made him a suitable choice by the royal family to tutor Princes William and Harry. (I doubt they'd have chosen just any Etonian for this job.) And he served his country in the army. So he's spent significant periods of his life, including most of his formative years, in an all male or substantially all male environment, where there is a natural hierarchy and you respect it. At Eton there were no girls or women whose needs had to be taken into consideration. And in Afghanistan there would only have been the kind of tough nut women who wouldn't have wanted to show or talk about their own vulnerability or need for male free spaces. And he's spent most, if not all, of his life in environments where there is a natural order of things, a hierarchy that you respect, and where there are people who give orders and people who obey them. Women typically haven't played a major role in any of these environments, and where they have been present, they haven't generally been the ones giving orders.

I think all of this is consistent with being a small C conservative, and believing that you are doing what is best for the little people, who don't know what is best for themselves. It is consistent with believing that democracy is about giving the little people the illusion of choice, where they believe their views are being taken into account and then those in power just do what they were going to do anyway. It's consistent with not listening very much to women, unless they are the kind of women who do their very best to pretend they are not like other women so as not to appear vulnerable. And it is consistent with favouring individual liberty to do what you want over collective responsibility. I've long said that gender identity theory is a small C conservative ideology because it prioritises the individual freedom of a small number of men over the rights of all women. Telling a small number of privileged men that they can't have everything they want because we have to think about vulnerable women as well isn't something that comes naturally to conservatives. In a way, I think gender ideology is where small C conservative and small L liberal meet and shake hands, which might explain how it has managed to take root across the political spectrum. The people most likely to oppose it are those who are socially conservative, which isn't very fashionable these days. Rory Stewart is fiscally conservative but socially liberal, so his support for gender ideology shouldn't be all that surprising.

It takes real independent thinking to be socially liberal but recognise that on this particular issue being socially liberal comes with negative consequences. I thought Rory Stewart was an independent thinker because he was willing to go against the grain so often within the Conservative government. But that's actually quite a low bar. I also think that, far from not caring what people think of him, he wants to be seen as one of the great intellectuals of our age. He's considered a bit of an exotic species because he's a Tory but not a Tory as we know them in the Brexit age. If he now said he opposed gender identity theory, he'd immediately be put back in the "what can you expect, he's right wing?" box, which is not where he wants to position himself. So I think being pro gender ideology is essential to his own personal brand.

Perhaps the general public no longer supports it very much, but don't forget, Rory doesn't care that much about what the general public thinks. The opposition to gender ideology is largely coming from working class and left wing women, who are the literal opposite of Rory Stewart and the intellectual men he likes to surround himself with.

It's disappointing, but shouldn't be all that surprising.

Has she said anything to the contrary?

When you start from the position that you are left wing, you never believe the right are right about everything in the first place.

I feel pretty cynical now. In a weird way prefer the rights approach as more honest. At least they are not trying to pretend they have the moral high ground and are virtuous like the left are.

Will never forgive the left for backing the anti women trans movement, turning on the brave women and some men that spoke up to say the emperor had no clothes,the denial of the cologne attacks and the blind eye turned and victim blaming of the grooming gangs. I can’t unsee all that.

@OneAmberFinch Just continue, as you are.
Good night

I'm going to bed but would like to say goodnight to all you ladies on the FWR board who make me not feel like such an outlier as a compulsive multi-paragraph poster 😁 one day I will learn to be concise...