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New guidance issued by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is set to ensure transgender personnel in the armed forces will be shielded from the danger of misgendering, both at work and in the field.

The Times reports that MoD officials have been told to announce their preferred gender pronouns in meetings so as to show respect for everyones gender identity. This follows on from the MoDs decision last month to issue inclusivity guidance, which warns staff to be careful when using the word female in case it erases gender non-conforming people and members of the trans community.

These new edicts are rumoured to be the brainchild of Dunni Alao, a policy expert at the MoD who was appointed as a trustee of lobby group Stonewall in June. The MoD denies that Alao, the senior civil servant in charge of human resources, was responsible for these recommendations, though she has described herself as a fierce proponent of the Stonewall agenda. Indeed, the MoD confirmed this week that it has paid Stonewall 80,312 over five years, mainly for membership of its Diversity Champions scheme, whereby employers allow Stonewall to vet their internal policies.

The fact that the British military has issued the new guidance is hardly a surprise. In recent years, transwomen soldiers have become as much a military clich as squaddies brawling at kicking-out time. From former lieutenant colonel Jennifer Pritzker in the US to Captain Hannah Winterbourne MBE in the UK, there seems to be a pipeline between the macho world of the army and gender-identity clinics.

Notably, the first British woman to serve on the front line in close combat joined the Scots Guards as a man in 2012. In response to this momentous event, army general Sir James Everard expressed his delight, and cited awards from Stonewall as evidence of the militarys shift toward inclusion and diversity.

Yet while the army bathes in Stonewalls praise, it is also facing criticism on several fronts at the moment. There are the reports of veterans being turned out on to the streets and of instances of sexual abuse being covered up.

The experiences of women in the army, specifically of the traditional sort with vaginas, make for particularly grim reading. A recent government report, exploring some of the injustices faced by female soldiers, notes that nearly two thirds had experienced bullying, harassment and discrimination these behaviours, it says, include sexual assault and other criminal sexual offences.

The report also revealed a huge disparity between the career opportunities afforded to women and those afforded to men. Around 90 per cent of mid-ranking male officers have children, compared to just 10 per cent of women in similar roles. It seems women are still expected to choose between a military career or a family. Furthermore, even the design of body armour places women at greater risk of harm in combat because it is designed to fit men.

But rather than deal with these real problems in the armed forces, it seems the MoD would prefer to fanny about policing pronoun use and issuing nonsensical guidance for meetings.

Moreover, by taking Stonewalls transwomen are women approach, the MoD is putting women at even greater risk of sexual violence and harassment. The MoDs 2019 Policy for the Recruitment and Management of Transgender Personnel in the Armed Forces explicitly states that as soon as the transition process begins the person should be provided with accommodation that is appropriate to their affirmed gender. In other words, the moment a male member of the armed forces says he feels like a woman, he is entitled to be admitted to womens facilities. Of course, this works the other way round, too but women who identify as men do not as a rule pose a sexual threat to men.

In an environment known for closing ranks on whistleblowers, it would take ovaries of steel to object to the presence of men who identify as women in single-sex army accommodation. It seems that while the MoD is advising personnel to avoid using the word female, women themselves have fewer rights and protections than ever.

Ultimately, the new Stonewall-inspired guidance about pronouns is a meaningless performance that will probably be ignored by most. But it does raise the question if a soldier can be wounded by a word, how can we expect them to protect the country?

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Why is the army fighting the culture wars? - Spiked

When the chair of the National Maritime Museum, Charles Dunstone, wrote to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to extend Dr Aminul Hoques trusteeship into a second four-year term, it was just a formality. The letter, written in the summer of 2020, said Hoque was a valued board member. It did not say that he was the sole non-white trustee. It did not mention his academic position, or his BBC history documentary, or his MBE. There was absolutely no need to say any of that. No one had ever heard of a trusteeship not being extended: it was automatic.

An official at the department, however, telephoned Dunstone to say that Hoques term would not be renewed. There was no requirement for the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, to justify the decision, they said however, they pointed out, Hoque had liked tweets hostile to the government. That autumn, Dunstone urged Dowden by phone to change his mind. He would not be able to defend the ministers decision to the museum and fellow trustees.

In January, though, Dunstone heard again from the DCMS: Hoques trusteeship would definitely not be renewed. Dunstone, honourably, resigned. For a giddy moment the other trustees, so I was told, considered going en masse their Im Spartacus! moment until they realised that doing so would offer the government the chance to stuff the board with its chosen people. Bear in mind that Dunstone, the billionaire founder of TalkTalk, and his colleagues among them a retired first sea lord and the then head of Lloyds Register were as far from woke warriors as can be imagined.

For his part, I was shocked, disappointed and baffled, Hoque told me. People should draw their own conclusions as to whether my previous academic research and writing contributed to the governments actions. (A DCMS spokesperson told me: There is no automatic presumption of reappointment, and ministers may decide to make a reappointment or launch a campaign to attract fresh talent.)

Ive had my own little trawl through Hoques tweets. Theres a lot of enthusiasm for the England football team. Theres also a bit about British history, which, he suggested, needs to be rewritten to include the stories of its ethnic minorities and acknowledge their important contribution to the development of the British national story. #decolonize #inclusive #multiplestories. Pretty mild stuff but the sort of thing thats a red flag to this culture wars-obsessed government.

Appointing political allies to influential public positions is nothing new. Under Thatcher, the Conservative Marmaduke Hussey became BBC chair; under New Labour it was Gavyn Davies, who had once worked for Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. What is different now, said Peter Riddell recently, is the breadth of the campaign and the close engagement of 10 Downing Street. Until September Riddell was commissioner for public appointments, in charge of ensuring the systems fairness.

The government, in short, is going in hard to shape English public bodies in its image. This project is being pushed forward shamelessly as in the case of Ofcom, where the process to appoint a chair is being rerun so that the favoured, but initially rejected, former Mail editor Paul Dacre can have another crack. In the arena of the arts, what is seen as a left-of-centre consensus born of the Blair and Brown years has been targeted for fixing. The arts have become a battleground where ideas of national image, heritage and history are fought over. At the heart of No 10, theres an intense dislike of the politics of identity, and a loathing of the suggestion that the British imperial project was harmful. Thats partly born of the assumption that anything that even hints at a lack of patriotism is a turn-off to the voters of the red wall.

A look at the board of the National Portrait Gallery in London gives a sense of how this might be going: the museum in charge of presenting Englands image back to itself, and currently in the throes of a major redisplay, has on its board Chris Grayling; Jacob Rees-Mogg (the leader of the House of Commons is an automatic appointment); and Inaya Folarin Iman, the culture and social affairs editor of the rightwing GB News. The chair is David Ross, who facilitated Boris and Carrie Johnsons infamous Mustique holiday.

Behind this campaign of realignment is Munira Mirza, Boris Johnsons culture adviser when he was mayor of London, now head of No 10s policy unit, and her husband, Tory fixer Dougie Smith. The trawling of tweets is not just about risk-assessing inflammatory or offensive things buried deep in a persons feed, but fishing for disloyalty. One person who recently sat as an independent member of an interview panel told me that their attention was drawn to one candidates tweet that was unfavourable about Brexit. Ill pretend I didnt hear that, they told me they replied.

The government, it is pretty clear, doesnt have a great deal of time for rules, or established practice, or the unspoken liberal norms that have traditionally funnelled behaviour into commonly accepted channels. Kicking out Hoque wasnt the done thing, but since it was possible, it did it. Youre not supposed to leak the names of favoured candidates before a public appointments process begins, but it did with Dacre for Ofcom. The process itself is designed to be transparent and rigorous: it involves an interview panel containing at least one independent member and chaired by a civil servant. The panel will name who it considers the best candidate, alongside one or two others deemed appointable. Riddell has voiced concerns about ministers ignoring recommendations and selecting candidates deemed unappointable; there has already been an attempt to do this, he said recently. Johnson has form; when he was mayor, he tried to insist that the former Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley became chair of the Arts Council London, despite the interview panel having rejected her. (Blocked at the time by Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw, she later got the job under the then Tory culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.)

How much does all this matter? Boards of trustees are innately conservative: that institutional stolidity might act as some protection from the radicalism of the right as much as it frustrates those on the left who wish for change. The direct influence of No 10 on arts institutions does not extend deep into the arts (and not much beyond Englands borders): aside from national museums, Arts Council England and a handful of others, English arts organisations are in charge of appointing their own board members. However and unarguably once the BBC is brought into the equation those that do fall under direct government influence happen to be especially influential ones.

The most important job of trustees is to select directors of organisations, and as Tory influence deepens on boards this may begin to have its impact on the way institutions are run and what the public sees. In the meantime, dont expect museum high-ups to utter the Tory trigger-word decolonise any time soon; an institutional caution around certain areas the empire, slavery may put them into conflict with their own audiences and even their workforces, many of whose younger members are increasingly impatient with structural inequalities.

More generally, the climate created by a government obsessed by culture wars is profoundly damaging. When staff members from a rather dull institution such as Historic England in charge of listing buildings and monuments receive threats from the far right, theres something amiss with the body politic. The Tories should be very careful what they wish for.

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No 10 is marching through cultural institutions and making a battleground of the arts - The Guardian

by Karina Le | published Nov. 12th, 2021

When I got to college, some of my friends were talking about the books they had to read for English classes. I confessed that I actually liked a lot of my readings. "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison and assorted works stood out in my memory.

My friends were confused. They've never read a Toni Morrison book before, much less for class.For the most part, all they read and knew were works likeShakespeareand "The Great Gatsby"by F. Scott Fitzgerald very white-centric novels written by men typically for men of the time. There was a distinct discrepancy in my education, being able to read a diversity of novels from diverse authors, in comparison to my friends and their white-centric education.

At times, this focus is understandable. Many white authors hold great importance to the foundation of the perspective during their times, but is it really history if we only hear one version of it?

Back in the '80s and '90s, parents and teachers alike fought for the diversification of the literature curriculum. It was during the culture warsof the late 1900s that the literary canon a grouping of what would be considered the most influential pieces of literature or narratives during a specific period that propelled these protests. An example of a part of literary canon would be Shakespeare.

Despite the culture wars of the '90s, there isstill a highly concentrated focus of white voices when discussing 1920s American literature, for instance. Again, works like The Great Gatsby are some of the most wellknown from that time, but cultural figures like Langston Hughes for his anthologies of poetry have less focus within the main curriculum.Hughes's work is fundamental for understanding the impact of the Harlem Renaissance, and hashad lasting impacts to the poetry world arguably as much as Fitzgerald had to the prose world.

Amit Ray, an associate professor specializing in postcolonial literature at RIT, spoke in depth about some of these lost authors.

They may be overlooked, but they still existed, Ray noted.

One of the biggest aspects of history is the recovery of historical artifacts. For literature, its finding the authors of the time that were lost due to reason and circumstance.

Daniel Worden, an associate professor with the College of Art and Design for RITs Art History program, explained some questionable aspects of restoration efforts.

One of the first exhibitions of comics, 'Masters of American Comics,' there [were] no women in the show ...very few of the artists were artists of color back in 2005, Worden explained.

Some reasons behind the loss of some artists was the occurrence of race conflicts in the past.

As African American artists, many of them couldnt buy paper, since suppliers didnt want black press in America, Worden said.

With the rise of diverse voices in modern times, however, it brings to question how schools are compensating for this increase of newer voices to the literary canon.

History is written by those in power, and the people in power are cisgender, heterosexual white male voices. This is reflected by who and what is taught in our general curriculum.The question becomes, when we move to the modern era, howdo we share the more diverse voices of our time? For some classics, however, theyre still readapted in our cultures and act as landmarks for the genre.

For Shakespeare, he serves as a central point and role in the Elizabethan language and history, Ray said. [Hes] still in demand, since his works are continuously adapted.

So long as we readapt tropes Shakespeare has made, he remains relevant tothe current literary canon. For Ray, he believes that there have been big changes to the school curriculum since the culture wars of the late 1900s.

At my daughters high school, they give a broad spectrum of writers both as people of color and as non-heterosexual perspectives, but it really depends, Ray said.

The national school curriculum isnt standardized. What someone learns in an advanced language class in New York may not be an opportunity given to a student in Wyoming. Even down to city schools against suburban schools, especially in Rochester, there is such a discrepancy between what the school can afford to give their students.

Even with the changes being made in secondary school, there is so much more we can do even for higher academia. Especially when colleges allow their students to freely explore subjects they do not have access to in secondary school.

Often times, when talking about the lasting consequences of living in white society, theres a feeling of helplessness that accompanies it. How does a single person, much less a student population, enact change against a system that has been in power for centuries?

However, with colleges, students can and dohave a lot of power.

Students have an immense power, an immense amount of say in their curriculum. RIT wants to be responsive to this change in culture, so theyre more receptive to [student needs], Worden said.

Ray offered a similar attitude in regard to curriculum changes.

When students demand change, asking for diversity in their curriculum, thats how change gets made, Ray said.

When students demand change, asking for diversity in their curriculum, thats how change gets made.

There is a lot of criticism to RITs student platform, PawPrints, about whether or not they truly encourage change with student voices. However, Worden encourages students to take a step further and talk to your professors, your deans and other administrative heads to let them know your needs.

Tell your academic advisors, email your department chair grassroots stuff works. I created courses because students asked me to, Worden said.

Tell your academic advisors, email your department chair, grassroots stuff works."

As someone who has been with the RIT community for four years, the student population is not blind to some of the problems within our own societies. What is stopping anyone from getting a group of like-minded people, and demanding change outright?

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History by White Men, a Retrospection - Reporter Magazine

I cant believe Aaron Rodgers has ruined Aaron Rodgers on me. I might never forgive him. He took my favourite quarterback and dragged him into the Covid culture wars. There are no winners here. There is no upside. This is terrible.

A quick primer for the vaguely interested: Rodgers is the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. More than that, the people who know these things - or at least the ones who yak about it on podcasts - have him down as being in or around one of the 10 best quarterbacks in history. Top dozen anyway.

I obviously dont know enough about American football to credibly judge any of that. But I know what I like. And what I like is sitting up on a Sunday night and watching the Packers down six points with a minute-and-a-half left on the clock and one time-out and Rodgers needing to go the length of the field to win. Give me that three times a season and life is peachy.

A game-winning drive by any quarterback is one of the purest pleasures in sport. So much has to go right. Nothing can go wrong. The mental gymnastics involved, the precise calibrations of each play required, the bluff and double-bluff of the opposition defence - all of it is high-wire sorcery, carried out while 17-stone monsters are trying to put you in hospital.

Its the ultimate example of why sport is such a blessed escape from the petty grind of the outside world. You cant spoof a game-saving drive. There are no alternative facts. No conspiracy theories. No Twitter, no Reddit, none of that stuff. There is a winner and a loser and if you dont spend the next 90 seconds showing you are one of a tiny handful of people on the planet who have the goods, the loser is you.

The wonder of Aaron Rodgers isnt just that he has done it so often, its that he has made it all look so unspeakably cool. Theres a casualness in the way he leads his team down the field, an unpanicked control of the situation. Every NFL play is four seconds of whirling violence - threatened and actual - and yet Rodgers always looks like he is thoroughly unruffled by the whole scene.

The American novelist Paul Gallico began life as a sports columnist for the New York Daily News back in the 1920s. In a piece about Jack Dempsey one time he wrote that all the great legends of the ring are built upon the picture that the average man has of himself as he would like to be.

If we could, we would all be gentle, soft-spoken creatures, tender with women, cool and even-tempered, but once aroused - WHAP! - a lightning-like left or right to the jaw. Down goes the truck-driver or footpad or hoodlum. We mentally dust our hands, readjust our cravat, smile pleasantly, step over the body of the prostrate victim, and carry on. Just like that.

Gallico wrote that passage nearly 90 years ago but you wouldnt have had much trouble applying it to the appeal Rodgers has had for most of his career. Famously, in 2014, he told Packers fans to R-E-L-A-X after a patchy start to the season and went on to win 11 out of the next 13 games. That was the Aaron Rodgers you couldnt but love. Clooney in a chinstrap.

And now? Lets check in with Aaron Rodgers now.

Aaron Rodgers invokes abortion, MLK Jr and thanks Joe Rogan in rant over why hes not vaccinated.

Aaron Rodgers Rips Woke PC Culture

Anti-vaxxer Aaron Rodgers spectacular fall from grace happened in record time.

Health care company ends relationship with Packers star Aaron Rodgers.

Ah, Jaysus. No, no, no. Please no. Dont do it, Aaron Rodgers. Please dont drag Aaron Rodgers down into the weeds of all of this.

Too late.

Rodgers, in a move that we really all should have seen coming, decided he was too intelligent to get vaccinated against Covid. Instead, he had a homeopathic treatment and when asked back in the summer whether he had been vaccinated, he replied, Yes, I have been immunised. He made several attempts to get the NFL to accept that his treatment counted as a vaccination but they wouldnt allow it.

All of which is his business, obviously enough. As with Callum Robinson in this part of the world a few weeks back, it doesnt do any of us any good at all to be pronouncing on anyone elses personal health choices. Whether Rodgers is vaccinated, immunised or does a dance around an ancient druids chalice every night to deal with the Covid issue isnt going to make a tuppence of difference to any of our lives.

But the culture wars stuff is enough to make your brain throb. Regardless of whatever side you fall down on, all this point-scoring and nit-picking is so unbelievably tedious. Youve done your own research, Aaron Rodgers? Cool! Enjoy it! Bathe in it as you would a pond of asses milk. Just dont weaponise Aaron Rodgers in a screed against the dreaded woke mob on the basis of it.

This stuff is all so absolutely pointless. The tyranny of woolly language, the online scattergun of vitriol - none of it gets anyone anywhere. Any suggestion that maybe restrictions are a bit much is enough to get you called an anti-vaxxer. Any expression of discomfort with people colouring outside the lines and youre a woke ivory-tower snowflake.

Its Long Covid of the public square, its symptoms baked into public discussion long after the initial sniffle has cleared up. And now Aaron Rodgers has gone and got Aaron Rodgers caught up in it all.

What a dose.

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Why did Aaron Rodgers have to dive headfirst into the Covid culture war? - The Irish Times

John Henry Ramirez is going to die. The state of Texas is going to kill him. The question that came before the Supreme Court this week is whether Dana Moore, his longtime pastor, will be able to lay hands on him as he dies.

Given the grand, even alarmed pronouncements about religious liberty made by the right-wing justices recently, you might think this would be an easy decision. But at the oral argument, several of the conservative justices suddenly became concerned about whether Ramirez is sincere in his religious beliefs, or whether he is simply, in the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, gaming the system.

Justice Samuel Alito shared his fear that approving Ramirezs request might produce an unending stream of variations from other condemned prisoners seeking religious accommodations. Whats going to happen when the next prisoner says that I have a religious belief that he should touch my knee? He should hold my hand? He should put his hand over my heart? He should be able to put his hand on my head? Were going to have to go through the whole human anatomy with a series ofof cases. Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried that if the Court ruled in favor of Ramirez, then there will be the next case after that and the next case after that where people are moving the goalposts on their claims in order to delay executions.

Garrett Epps: The machinery of death is back on the docket

Ive heard a lot of slippery-slope arguments in my time, and I confess that the possibility that the condemned might experience a brief moment of comfort before death has to be among the least frightening Ive ever encountered.

As Slates Mark Joseph Stern writes, the conservative justices novel concern with the potential that people might use their religious beliefs to get around the law is particularly jarring, given that these same justices have refused to consider that possibility in other cases. When the issue is businesses of public accommodation discriminating against customers on the basis of sexual orientation, or adoption, or contraception, or even vaccination, the conservative justices have refused to consider whether someone might seek a religious exemption in bad faith. In the conservative commentariat, the mere suggestion that someone might do so is taken as evidence that conservative Christians are being persecuted. With any kind of exemption, theres a chance that someone might try to claim one in bad faith. Its not beyond the pale for the justices to consider that chance; its telling that they do so only under certain circumstances.

Many questions of religious liberty involve two parties who have reasonable claims that a decision one way or the other could violate their rights. Such cases are usually complex. But the extent to which certain justices take such questions seriously appears related to how politically sympathetic they are to a given party. In this case, Ramirez is a convicted murderer who stabbed a man to death during a robbery. He is a far less sympathetic figure to the conservative justices than the owners of Hobby Lobby, whose religious views did not prevent them from accumulating thousands of stolen artifacts from the Middle East. Their skepticism of his motives comes despite the fact that the Ramirez case has no particular partisan valence.

The justices who are so skeptical of Ramirez have not always been eager to question motives. In Ramos v. Louisiana, a case involving nonunanimous juries, Alito fumed at Justice Neil Gorsuch for pointing out that the history of such juries was tied up in an effort to undermine African American participation on juries, whining that the majority opinion, which held that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous juries for conviction in criminal trials, reflected a modern discourse that attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the arguments proponents. That Louisianas 1898 constitution was a consciously racist document that successfully disenfranchised the states Black residents and purposely prevented them from serving on juries was apparently not germane, nor was the origin of Oregons similar law in an attempt to forestall the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on Oregon juries. Indeed, as Gorsuch wrote, courts in both Louisiana and Oregon have frankly acknowledged that race was a motivating factor in the adoption of their States respective nonunanimity rules. Alitos reaction to the facts of the case was what you would expect from an obsessive Fox News watcher, rather than the apolitical jurist he claims to be.

Read: Samuel Alito and the slippery slope of liberty

Similarly, in 2019, the Trump administration sought to use the addition of a citizenship question to the census to effect a nationwide racial gerrymander, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by voting-rights groups. The scheme was uncovered when the daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the Republican operative who had developed the idea, handed his hard drives over to liberal advocacy groups. The documents, and communication between Hofeller and the Trump administration, made clear that the questions stated purposeto aid enforcement of the Voting Rights Actwas insincere.

The documents came out too late to be considered in the argument about adding the question held before the Court, but they seem to have affected the outcome anyway. In an opinion that was otherwise highly sympathetic to the Trump administration, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Democratic appointees, ruling against the administration on a technicality that left it without time to implement the scheme. Alito was outraged, however, that anyone would question the Trump administrations motives. In his dissent, Alito thundered that the decision is either an aberration or a license for widespread judicial inquiry into the motivations of Executive Branch officials. Thomas also lamented the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, suggesting that the volume of evidence pointing to the Trump administrations dishonesty had used corkboard andwith a jar of pins and a spool of string to create an eye-catching conspiracy web. Not long after the decision, Donald Trump did what he usually does, and confirmed that those who were suspicious and distrusting of the administrations motives were correct. Questioning the motives of Republican officialsbut only Republican officialsis apparently impolite, especially when they are obviously lying.

From 2018 to 2020, civility in politics was a constant theme in conservative media. Such calls for civility were, as I wrote at the time, less a demand for a political discourse rooted in mutual respect than a demand for submission to those currently in power. That the conservative justices would have the same political preoccupations as Fox News is not at all surprising. By the same token, however, the public is not obligated to humor the justices insistence on being seen as apolitical actors while they wage partisan culture wars from the bench.

These justices now echo the refrain that we should not question other peoples motives, that to do so is uncivil and undignifiedexcept when they feel like doing it. As the record shows, holding motives above question is not a standard these justices adhere to; its just one they demand of others. You might ask whether its one they really believe in.

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Conservative SCOTUS Justices Are Religious-Liberty Hypocrites - The Atlantic