Trans: the new ideology of the ruling class

Here’s a tip for aspiring radicals. If your political beliefs can be marshalled to the illiberal cause of disciplining workers, then they aren’t radical. If your views can be embraced with glee by the HR bureaucracy, and used to rap the knuckles of the workforce, then they’re probably regressive, not revolutionary. Look at trans activism. These post-sex agitators fancy themselves as gender-bending militants who are turning dusty old society on its head. In truth, they’re the footsoldiers of the boss class, capitalism’s moral heavies, helping to keep ‘Karens’, the white working class and other lowly types in their place.

Yes, class domination has had a makeover. It wears bad wigs and stilettos now. Consider the Telegraph’s exposé of the woke training regimes that now pertain in the UK civil service. A vast dossier of internal documents was leaked to the Telegraph showing that the machinery of state has been conquered by the trans ideology, ‘white privilege’ chatter and other culture-war craziness. Civil servants who surely have better things to do are being given LGBTQ+ education and shown training videos about how sinful it is to stop a ‘transwoman’ – ie, a fella – from using the women’s loo.

At the Ministry of Justice, they’re even being told it’s racist to believe in biological sex. ‘In many societies’, said a ‘diversity’ group at the ministry, belief in two sexes ‘is a product and tool of colonialism and white supremacy’. You think biology is real? That a person with a dick is a man, not a woman, no matter how many pills he pops or TikTok transition videos he makes? Then you’re basically Cecil Rhodes. It’s bad enough that crap like this is being taught in universities, but in the civil service? Among the people whose job it is to keep society ticking?

They’re being told it’s bad to say ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ because it assumes ‘everyone in your audience is either a woman or a man, which may not be the case’. It is the case, though. It’s a cast-iron fact that every work audience you ever speak to will consist of ladies and gentlemen only. The LGBTQ network at the Department for Business and Trade advises against saying ‘mum and dad’ because ‘gendered’ terms can cause offence. This is a department charged with cutting deals with powers across the globe and yet they’re scared to say ‘mum’ lest an anonymous furry on the internet call them a bigot.

We should all be concerned that woke has been let loose in the civil service. This is meant to be a neutral institution ensuring the smooth running of the nation. And yet its staff are being told not to say, ‘I went home to visit my mum and dad’, because what if they’re overheard by someone who has ‘two mums or two dads’? What if, indeed. Let’s be clear: this is religious indoctrination. As if to make this explicit, an MoJ newsletter said ‘people who identify as other genders’ have traditionally been ‘associated with sacred powers’. Society’s servants are being drilled with faith-based claims that are as cranky as any of those of the old world religions. We cannot just watch as the civil service becomes a neo-theocracy full of zealots who think saying ‘dad’ is tantamount to blasphemy.

For me, the most striking thing about the woke soiling of the civil service is its disciplinary undertones. The implicit threat of consequences for those who stray from the neo-religious line. Especially those lower down the social ladder, in the less-educated and thus more problematic section of the workforce. So in one training vid, a receptionist is shown ‘misgendering’ a trans-identifying male. He introduces himself as ‘Miss Caroline Standish’, but she calls him ‘Mr Standish’. Typical ditzy receptionist. Send her to HR. How dare a woman who just answers the phones disrespect this important man in pearls and a dress?

In another training clip, the same woman is shown telling a big lad in a wig that he can’t come into the ladies’ toilet. ‘Wrong door, love’, she says. Nice touch, HR: having the woman say ‘love’ drives home the point that she’s out of touch and, worse, probably from the working class, where words the middle classes hate – ‘love’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘doll’, ‘darling’ – still abound. ‘You’re not coming in here’, says the wicked woman to the man who thinks he’s female. To some of us, this looks like an admirable defence of female privacy and dignity in the workplace. But the foreboding voiceover chides and corrects us: it’s actually ‘inappropriate behaviour’.

That’s right – the ‘inappropriate behaviour’ belongs not to the hulking bloke making his way into a woman’s toilet, but to the woman who says, ‘Back off, love’. This is a rank moral inversion. A key demand of the second wave of feminism – the last good wave, in my view – was that women should have the right to work. And thus workplaces should not be hostile to women. Working women should be treated fairly and should have access to private spaces for the purposes of changing, going to the bathroom, etc. This video in which the man intruding on the women’s WC is the good guy, while the woman standing up for her sex is the bad guy, speaks to how thoroughly the trans religion threatens to undo the great gains of women’s liberation.

We are all familiar with the professional women who’ve been persecuted and discriminated against at work under the religious banner of ‘trans rights’. Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey, Rosie Kay, Denise Fahmy, Gillian Philip. Now one wonders how many working-class women are also pressured, day in, day out, to bow to their bosses’ beliefs, even if they don’t share them. To greet an obvious man as ‘Ms’, for example, or to sit through lectures about why it’s bad to stop bepenised people from disrobing or urinating in the same place that you do.

Depicting working-class women as a threat to professional men, as that training video essentially does, is one of the cleverest and most sinister tricks the capitalist elite has ever played. The workers are oppressing us, cries the woke boss class. The attraction of the politics of identity to the managerial elites, to both the old-style owners of the means of production and the new rulers of the service industry, is not remotely mysterious. Identitarianism allows these people to camouflage the true power imbalance in the workplace – that between bosses and workers – through inventing all sorts of new bullshit power imbalances. Between white workers and black workers, for example. Or between cishet workers and trans workers. Or between that cocky white working-class woman who answers the phones – who enjoys white privilege and cis privilege – and the professional man in a dress whom she oppresses with her archaic speech and ‘inappropriate behaviour’. And just like that, courtesy of identity politics, the boss and the prole swap places. No wonder capitalism loves transgenderism.

The great irony of the woke set’s use of the ageist, sexist slur of ‘Karen’ is that there are no bigger ‘Karens’ than these people. Trans activists in particular are masters – or mistresses, if you insist – of asking for the manager. They weep online about the unenlightened store workers who call them ‘Sir’. Who can forget when LGBTQ performance artist Dev Mistry complained at a hotel in Manchester after hearing a member of staff say ‘men are men [and] women are women’. Discipline that ideologically errant prole! Or when Billy Bragg, the witchfinder-general of the trans ideology’s Twitter division, said of the outrageous sacking of the children’s author Gillian Philip for the crime of expressing support for JK Rowling: ‘I believe that employers have a right to act in such circumstances.’ ‘Who’ll defend the workers who cannot organise / When the bosses send their lackeys out to cheat us?’, Bragg warbled in the Eighties. Now he nods along as the bosses’ lackeys punish female workers for wrongthink.

The rise of woke in the civil service points to more than ‘PC gone mad’. It confirms that identity politics, with trans activism to the front, is the new ideology of the ruling class. When the machine of state embraces post-sex thinking, when both the police and the army cover themselves in the Pride colours, and when the captains of what passes for capitalism these days proudly declare their pronouns and chastise the little people who fail to do likewise, you know that the problem is no longer those blue-haired 20-year-olds on TikTok. No, it’s that power itself is being reordered around the cults of identity and fluidity, to the benefit of the ruling class and the detriment of the working class. Workers of the world, unite – you have nothing to lose but your pronoun badges.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy