Who’s the real misogynist in Makerfield?

What’s worse: cracking a lame joke about women being bad drivers or forcing women to live cheek-by-jowl with violent rapists? We all know the answer to this question. Yet the phoney moralists of the media classes are pretending they don’t. Hence, they’re gunning for Robert Kenyon while giving Andy Burnham the easiest, most obsequious ride a modern politician has ever had.

This is the latest storm to swirl around the Makerfield by-election. The offence archaeologists of the bourgeois press have unearthed the old digital ‘banter’ of Reform UK’s candidate up there, Mr Kenyon. In a rugby league online forum in 2019, he posted a comment saying women can’t ‘ref, drive or give directions’. He also said women have abortions for ‘vanity purposes’ so that they can ‘shag anyone they want’. In 2021, he responded to a twat on social media who said he wanted to ‘smell and lick’ Carol Vorderman’s ‘arsehole’ with the words: ‘He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.’

Bernard Manning called – he wants his routine back. Everyone knows this is crass blather, including a no doubt squirming Mr Kenyon. But there’s something about the digital inquisition of Reform’s man that is getting on my wick. It’s because his rival in Makerfield is Mr Burnham, a leading light in a party – Labour – that drank so deliriously from the Kool-Aid of crackpot gender ideology that it ended up actively endangering the women of Britain. When will the media’s self-styled warriors for womankind grill him?

Burnham was once a devotee of the most misogynistic idea of our time – that women should throw open their spaces to any cock in a frock who wants entry. The Manchester mayor, at a meeting in 2022, said: ‘I am going to make it really plain: I support trans rights.’ He said he’s sick of the ‘terribly hateful debate’ over trans issues. He graciously said we cannot ‘completely ignore’ those women who have ‘experienced male violence’ and hence might not fancy seeing a 6’4” lesbian with bollocks in their bathrooms. But the idea of single-sex spaces is a ‘minority view’, he said. Shorter version: let the fellas in, ladies.

There was no crude language. He made no mention of any celebrity’s anus. And yet to me, his comments were far more chilling than Kenyon’s digital joshing. The consequences for women of the post-truth mania Burnham bought into were dire. Women were flashed at, forced to undress with men, even raped. They were rounded on by mobs of feral sexists calling them ‘bitches’ and ‘cunts’ if they dared to dissent from those so-called ‘trans rights’ Burnham loved. Give me a boozy forum joke over such real-world savagery any day of the week.

Are we meant to forget the atrocities that were committed in the name of the trans mantra Burnham himself was chanting as recently as 2022? Rapists were placed in women’s prisons, where they raped more women. Women’s sports were invaded by selfish pricks hell-bent on nicking their medals. Nurses were made to undress in front of men who fantasise that they are women, and they were called bigots and even suspended from their jobs if they complained. At least Kenyon only said women can’t ‘ref, drive or give directions’ – this bourgeois mob said women can’t enjoy dignity in the workplace and shall be severely punished if they dare even to ask for it.

No doubt Burnham will say he was against these ‘excesses’ of the trans ideology. Yet every one of these horrors, every one of these cruel assaults on the privacy and dignity of women and girls, was birthed by the ideology he supported. He even favoured ‘self-ID’, that truthless, creepy policy that gives any old Tom, Dick or Harry the ‘right’ to be treated as a woman. And woe betide the actual women who might feel tempted to tell these big lads in boob tubes to piss off out of their spaces – under ‘self-ID’ those uppity broads would stand accused of denying us fellas our God-given right to be ladies if we like.

Burnham has recently called for the implementation of the new guidance on single-sex spaces, which says entry should be on the basis of biology rather than the hocus-pocus of ‘gendered souls’. And yet is he ever going to account for his previous cosiness with the cultish belief that so savagely upended women’s dignity? Is he ever going to ask for forgiveness?

Seeing Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 – and the Guardian, the Independent and all the rest of them – rage against Reform for running a ‘sexist’ in Makerfield is too much to take. All these people gave their nod to the pathological misogyny of saying women aren’t even real. That womanhood is such a thin, naff thing that anyone can join, even yer man with a beard and a perverted taste for the sound of women urinating. I’m praying that the next Reform person who gets grilled about Kenyon’s old posts by one of these plummy media hypocrites turns around and says: ‘Wait, didn’t you support the right of men who masquerade as women to expose their estrogen-shrivelled knobs to actual women?’

There is a rank class animus in the shaming of Kenyon. The blue humour of a plumber in a forum for rugby fans horrifies them, whereas the dulcet sophistry of people with PhDs who think women should put up with saggy balls in their changing rooms washes over them. The truth is misogyny has a new guise. Its primary manifestation is no longer braggarts telling mother-in-law jokes but men with fake boobs saying: ‘I’m a woman, bitch.’ The problem for the Kenyon bashers is that the people of Makerfield are not as dumb as they think. They know a political class that would even force a nurse to disrobe among men is a far greater menace to their daughters than a fella who made a dumb joke seven years ago.

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 latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.