Extracts from an article by Hadley Freeman in today's ST, which will be behind a paywall.
Look out for the mafia with rainbow lanyards - Diversity Officers have terrorised workplaces, but their reign may be ending.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" Martin Luther King Jnr. said that, a man, I'd hope Isla Bumba, NHS Fife's equality and human rights lead officer, had heard of considering her job is improving diversity. Although given Bumba admitted last week that she wasn't entirely sure if she was a woman, it's probably best not to make assumptions.
Bumba was testifying at Sandie Peggie's employment tribunal, and I must first explain Peggie before I get on to Bumba. In December 2023, Peggie an NHS Nurse with more than 30 years of unblemished service, went into the women's changing room of Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy because she had a heavy period and bled through her scrubs. There she was surprised to encounter 6ft tall, 27 year old male undressing in front of her. This male is now known as Dr Beth Upton, and he had started identifying as a woman only the year before. Peggie complained that Upton was in the wrong changing room and Upton complained that Peggie had committed a "hate crime". This being Scotland - once the cradle of the Enlightenment, now a Petri dish of gender woo at its most misogynistic - Peggie was accused of "misgendering" (the gravest of crimes in Scotland) suspended, investigated and threatened with the sack. Peggie filed a tribunal claim against Upton and NHS Fife, which began at the beginning of this year and resumed last week.
On Wednesday, NHS Fife admitted that its investigation had found "insufficient evidence" of any misconduct by Peggie. Yet the trust apparently decided against settling in favour of spaffing away more public money by defending the case, even as its board's investigation had ostensibly just quashed it. On Friday afternoon NHS Fife issued a hilariously huffy statement in which it blamed everyone but itself for being a national laughing stock. It objected to the "polarised debate" and said media coverage should "distinguish fact from opinion" It's a shame the trust apparently doesn't ask that of its own doctors, given Upton insists he is "biologically female" (reminder this man is a doctor) Who, you ask, could have been providing brilliant in house advice? Enter stage right Bumba.
MLK Jnr never met a diversity officer because they only became a fixture of workplaces in the past five years. But I can't better his description of "sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" when summing up Bumba who testified on Wednesday she didn't know her own sex, because "no one knows what their chromosomes are" (reminder again: these people work in a hospital) Despite being asked for advice on trans policies "frequently once a week" Bumba said she didn't actually have an official policy, and so just asked other diversity officers what they did. It's like the mafia, but with rainbow lanyards.
I had two takeaways from this exchange: first nothing has been worse for the gender movement than the cleansing light of the courts. Again and again, gender activists have lost because while the public are all for supporting vulnerable minorities, they tend to do a double take when they hear claims like "It's transphobic to say a lesbian can't have a penis" The law isn't infallible but it does at least offer the detergent of sunlight.
Second no job has more of the whiff of 2020 than the diversity officer. They exist to confirm their employer's moral purity by "improving diversity and inclusion" and they do this by quantifying minorities and gamifying vulnerabilities, keeping track of which disabilities are up and which are down, as if the human condition were a stock market. Does dyslexia need its own awareness day, as the diversity officer at one friend's workplace decided. How about making pronouns on work emails mandatory. Is a man who identifies as a woman more deserving of protection than an actual woman? These are the kind of hard questions the diversity officer must puzzle over daily, meaning those who apply for the job tend to have few talents other than scolding their colleagues.
Introducing activism into the workplace has rarely gone well, and the diversity officer is the human form of this activism, not interested in making things fairer, but in replacing one hierarchy with another. Aside from distracting people from doing their actual job, it makes everyone sound insane.
why on earth are trans women still accessing the women only pond when it's already been stipulated that only biological women are women?