The Spectator - Gender ideology has been a disaster for working-class women

[DisappearingGirl]

I enjoyed this article:

spectator.com/article/gender-ideology-has-been-a-disaster-for-working-class-women/

Yeah the failure of unions to keep their side of the bargain and represent their women members over trans issues is particularly disgusting. The trad left have always been part of the patriarchy, but they at least used to feel like they had to pretend that wasn't true. It makes me incredibly angry tbh.

Yes, 50 years ago the leftie men I admired used to agree that women’s rights were of utmost importance, and they would be taking action to support women the very moment they’d finished dealing with XYZ blah.

How young and innocent I was.

Today they openly oppose women’s rights, and back the men who have found new ways of oppressing us.

And the unions we proudly joined take our subscriptions but refuse to do the job we pay them for when we need them.

Thanks for the link, it was a good read, and all true, so very, very true, lets hope the day of reckoning for the unions is coming soon. 🤬

What a picture brilliant as well the 4 Terferteers. 😁👍

I feel the union thing goes beyond not representing women. I really noticed it during covid, my dh, who is in a union, kept telling me stories about things going on that mainly seemed to be the union acting to enforce the stuff the government wanted pushed, including suspending people without pay if they didn't get vaccinated.
There's been talk in my workplace about forming a union, and we are grossly underpaid and could use the capacity to bargain collectively, but for so many I know their unions seem to be working against them one way or another.

When has the Spectator ever cared about working class women?

Clue: when they can exploit an issue to have a pop at “the left”.

Brendan O’Neill has cared about this for years.

And “the left” deserves to be popped at because it has been terrible for working class women. That’s the whole point of the article.

Clearly Brendan O’Neill and the Spectator cares more than “the left” does, otherwise there wouldn’t be an article to write, would there?

I honestly believe it is fraudulent for these unions to take fees from women and then refuse to defend them.

Is Sandie Peggie still taking legal action against the RCN? If she’s successful, I wonder if that might force unions more widely to reflect (although I have to say, I still wouldn’t trust them to defend my rights just because they were ‘made’ to). Another article here from Joanna Williams on a similar theme: https://archive.ph/rHG0Q and https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/01/20/how-the-darlington-nurses-were-betrayed-by-their-union/

The working class is generally inconvenient and distasteful to much of labour these days. It’s all about London-centric luvvies.
Hence Reform flourishes.

Apt user name.
What is it in the article that you disagree with?

I know! The left have been widely celebrating this win for working class women, as you'd expect them to. Articles, comments, posts all over Twitter at organisations being held to account for their appalling failure to uphold worker's rights! What a triumph for Unison and RCN! I bet women are lining up to join!

.....

......

....ah. that's a bit unfortunate for 'the left'

To be fair I expect a lot of working class women are shielded from this due to working in jobs that most transwomen would probably regard as beneath them. Being a woman for them means breast implants and wearing a dress, not demeaning oneself by working in the kind of jobs real women have! Nursing is still a relatively prestigious job so things are a bit different there.

Good article, thank you. It is good to see this and Jo Bartoch's article this week pointing out the very class based issues of this activism. It is the new acceptable snobbery, and you dig into it for two minutes to find the ageism, homophobia, racism, and religious intolerance all tucked down inside as the 'acceptable' way to hold such views.

It also, interestingly from multiple court cases, tends to often run alongside quite fantastical limited competence and limited functional intelligence/being extremely poorly informed, but one hell of a lot of small social circle signalling and mindless recycling of current fad language.

But many women have enabled men to do this by going along with the idea that there are essentially no differnces between males and females in any respect - in pursuit of 'equality' -which is the rallying cry of the Left.

Left wing men all know the differences between males and females but their political ideology compels them to deny these differences publicly - whilst still knowing them privately. Left wing women all know the differences too but are compelled by a vision that one day these differences will not exist.

If we're honest, given that most paid for childcare is still done by women, do we really want to see more men working with babies and small children? Primary school teaching and above is a different matter, of course.

And that is because for most working class families the differences between the sexes and sex based roles are still generally accepted; and families working hard to survive and give a better life to their children are by nature quite conservative.

The problem here is exactly what Mary Harrington is talking about in her book 'Feminism Against Progress'.

It's the "priestesses of cyborg theocracy" that are in charge, especially in unions like Unison and UCU.

If we want real change, we need more working class women putting themselves forward for elected positions.