Caroline ffiske was a Conservative Councillor for Eight Years. Published on 17 September 2021.

Ex-BBC Journalist, Ben Hunte, has launched an extraordinary attack on Conservative MP, Kemi Badenoch, in her role as Minister of State for Equalities. According to Hunte, he has accessed an ‘audio recording’ from three years ago, taken from Badenoch’s parliamentary offices. He has used it to make a hyperbolic and utterly unsubstantiated attack on Badenoch that surely borders on libellous. 

Hunte says Badenoch ‘questioned same-sex marriage’. Gosh - what did she say? According to Hunte, Badenoch said ‘OK well we’ve got gay marriage, and civil partnerships...’ Sorry Ben - is that it? Your big reveal? Are you trying to promote truth and tolerance here - or the opposite? 

Hunte says Badenoch ‘mocked LGBTQ rights’. I’ve read Hunte’s supposed expose ten times and I can’t find the mocking. She uses the term ‘transsexual’. According to Hunte this is now outdated. So is her crime a ‘thought crime’? Is Hunte an arm of the ‘speech police’? Who made the rules?

Arthur Miller and The Crucible comes to mind: “Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem —vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

Then according to Hunte, Badenoch ‘called trans women “men”’. Ben - trans women are men. That is the work being done by the word ‘trans’. Humans can’t change sex. Biological sex is binary and immutable. 

That’s it! That’s the extent of it. But read Ben’s hyperbolic tweet and supposed expose here along with the unedifying attempts at smear and vengeance from others, including politicians who should very much know better - including Angela Rayner who called Badenoch’s comments... ‘disgusting’.... 

Is it Badenoch that Hunte and the ‘gender ideology’ lobby are seeking to take down? Or is it all of truth - and actual reality? Why and who benefits?

Guess what? We can be tolerant. We can actually let people live, dress, love, express themselves as they please. Sort of simple? But we can’t change reality. We can’t force our internal realities onto other people. When we try - when we try to force it through, that’s totalitarian. That requires the suppression of science, reality, and truth. That requires the suppression of established language and the actual accuracy of our senses. It also requires trampling over other people’s hard fought for rights. Many women don’t want ‘trans women’ to be able to ‘self identify’ into women’s single sex spaces. Or at least they want to be able to discuss it and be involved in establishing the rules and boundaries. Is that so hard to understand?

Kemi Badenoch is a Minister for Equalities. She has to listen to all parties. She has to seek to balance competing perspectives and competing demands for the recognition of rights and protections. That involves listening not just to LGBTQ lobbyists - who certainly do not represent everyone who is gay or who identifies as trans. It involves listening to women who have fought long and hard for single sex spaces and services. It involves listening to parents whose children have been caught up in ‘gender ideology’ and who now regard themselves as having been born in the ‘wrong body’ and seek solace via a lifetime of medication which might result in their sterilisation and loss of sexual function. It involves listening to gay people who are concerned that young lesbians and gays are most susceptible to being caught up in the narrative that they were born in the wrong body. It involves listening to ‘de-transitioners’ who regret that they got caught up in ‘gender ideology’ and who now face an unknown future in terms of the health implications they’ll have to live with. It involves listening to health practitioners who know that sex matters for lifelong medical care and that there are dangers in the ‘disappearing’ of sex. It involves listening to statisticians and scientists who know that data accuracy disappears if we mix self-expression with statistics. It involves listening to women who have been assaulted by trans-identifying males in women’s prisons. And I could go on. 

Huge numbers of people are incredibly grateful to Kemi Badenoch and to Liz Truss for taking the Equalities brief seriously and for not caving to the loud powerful gender ideology lobby. As the biologist, Colin Wright wrote ‘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.” 

If we collectively give in to gender ideology, we bow to power and succumb to bullies. So a big thank you to Kemi Badenoch for keeping a clear head and for listening to all of us. We simply cannot afford to lose our collective tether to reality.