As someone infamous once said (me, need you ask?), ‘The truth is not mediated by the identity of the speaker’. If it were, one could sidestep debate entirely by identifying the ultimate victim status and taking umbrage accordingly. Increasingly devoid of argument, the Critical Social Justice (or ‘woke’) left relies almost exclusively on this tactic. And while such behaviour perfectly explains the HS2-like expansion of the LGBTQwerty community, it does not excuse the vitriol accorded those who humbly suggest we have more pressing concerns than society’s perfect accommodation of genderfluidity and nonconformity. Regrettably, this is a hurdle the right is now failing to negotiate as well.

To say that the sin of identity politics is pervasive would be an understatement. Consider the general election campaign, from which we shall thankfully soon be freed. Rather than political ideas and stratagems, it is the commitment to ‘diversity’ which now poses as a flagship policy. We will be ‘the most working-class cabinet of all time’ coos the Labour Party, while Liz Truss’s Tory administration could be lauded as containing the ‘most diverse Cabinet in history’, as though the benefits of this were somehow self-evident. Even Reform UK is showcasing its ethnic minority candidates, albeit to counter accusations of racism.

Mistaking identity for substance is a dangerous game; not one which should be entertained by any serious individual—and certainly not by any heavyweight politician. When famously asked by Terry Wogan whether male MPs made any concession to the fact that she was a woman, Margaret Thatcher immediately responded: ‘No. Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.’ Similarly, Winston Churchill famously remarked that his speech impediment was ‘no hindrance’.

However, they are the exception to the rule. For modern politicians, the allure of playing the victim is almost irresistible. Even our current prime ministerial candidates can’t help it: the knighted multi-millionaire Keir Starmer makes a mountain out of his father being a ‘toolmaker’ and the billionaire Rishi Sunak boasts of his being the first British Asian PM. (Though arguably Sunak’s best performance of the campaign so far was his response to the racial slurs used against him by a Reform UK activist.)

Victimhood now colours every clash of ideas and egos to such an extent that it often supersedes the argument itself. And it was this tangled web of intersectional Top Trumps that overshadowed the recent row between the actor David Tennant and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch.

Picking up an award for ‘celebrity ally’ at last week’s British LGBT Awards, Tennant made the mistake of going off-script in his acceptance speech. Casting around for a suitably progressive topic, he chose to criticise Badenoch for her vocal opposition to trans women in female spaces and sports:

‘If I’m honest I’m a little depressed by the fact that acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they’re not hurting anyone else should merit any kind of special award or special mention, because it’s common sense, isn’t it? … However, until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more—I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up—whilst we do live in this world, I am honoured to receive this.’

That Tennant chose to spout this left-wing bile was predictable. That he clearly failed to see the irony of his words was, also, par for the course. But it was Badenoch’s response which concerned me more. Faced with such sneering contempt, she ought to have realised the sympathy vote was already in the bag, and preferably she would have opted for humour: ‘Perhaps the right honourable gentleman had had one regeneration/one Tennent’s Super too many, Mr Speaker?’ Alas, she decided to play him at his own game:

‘I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end. Tennant is one of Labour’s celebrity supporters. This is an early example of what life will be like if they win. Keir Starmer stood by while Rosie Duffield was hounded. He and his supporters will do the same with the country. Do not let the bigots and bullies win.’

While it was only right and natural to draw attention to Tennant’s hypocrisy, choosing to challenge him in terms of identity politics was a gross miscalculation. Agreeing to play on the enemy’s turf legitimises their rules—and there is zero legitimacy to this Critical Race Theory (CRT) interpretation of how society ought to conduct itself. What are we to conclude? That Badenoch ought not to be challenged because she is a black woman, or that if Tennant self-identified as one, his argument would suddenly gain credibility? Tennant’s ‘rich, lefty, white male celebrity’ is the least of his problems; his demand that everyone he disagrees with ought to ‘shut up’ is the issue.

Sadly, Badenoch is not alone in misplaying her hand. Even the perennially sensible Douglas Murray let an element of identity politics seep into his piece on the matter: ‘It is hard to think of any other situation in which such intolerant and ugly language would be used, let alone of a black woman.’ Triaging the right to speak or to offend on the basis of identity is not a road we should be dragged down, even kicking and screaming.

Conservatives who consider it wise to play the game of identity are naïve in the extreme. They fail to recognise that the woke left entertains neither consistency nor accountability and that their rules are malleable. Certainly, non-white males are afforded immunity from criticism, right up until they express the wrong opinion; then, all bets are off: Priti Patel is the wrong kind of Asian because of her political views and, similarly, Kwasi Kwarteng is ‘superficially black’.

The danger for conservatives who fall into this trap is that not only are their victim statuses null and void the minute they enter the race, but they also make it harder for the rest of us to simply resist such nonsense. In the case of Badenoch, this is particularly damning—having established herself as a frontrunner for the Tory leadership in 2022 by speaking out against CRT, where does she (and what’s left of the Tories) go from here?

Related reading

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park

Liz Truss, the nobody PM: review of ‘Ten Years to Save the West’, by Ralph Leonard

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview of Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

The return of blasphemy in Ireland, by Noel Yaxley

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Quebec’s French-style secularism: history and enduring value, by Mathew Giagnorio

In the fight against authoritarianism, the culture wars are a distraction, by Kevin Yam

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it. By Helen Pluckrose

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right appeared first on The Freethinker.

We live in an era of steadily proliferating and competing orthodoxies. News feeds are curated on the basis of what users have already liked and shared, niche political communities that could not have existed a couple of decades ago are able to flourish online, and commentators are under immense pressure to give their fans what they want. This phenomenon is known as ‘audience capture’, and it has ensnared plenty of prisoners: former liberals who first moved toward the centre and are now on the far right; left-wing identitarians who care more about skin colour, gender and sexuality than ideas or principles; politicians who have become servants of increasingly polarised constituencies.

Public intellectual life in the twenty-first century is often reduced to a series of increasingly strenuous ideological purity tests. This leads to warped incentives, intellectual rigidity, and extremism: Oh, you have your doubts about the efficacy of vaccines? Well, I have my doubts about the entire system that authorises and produces them. I even think Bill Gates might be putting microchips in our arms. In political communities built around conspiracism and dogmatism, radicalism is a way to gain prestige and trust. This is an inversion of the role which responsible public intellectuals could play: instead of challenging the orthodoxies and assumptions of their readers and listeners, they offer increasingly high-decibel assurances that those orthodoxies and assumptions were right all along.

We have never been in greater need of authors, academics, and journalists who think for themselves rather than mindlessly conforming to the demands of their tribes. This is one of many reasons the absence of the late Christopher Hitchens is felt so acutely by so many. In his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens warns: ‘Don’t allow your thinking to be done for you by any party or faction, however high-minded.’ As a former socialist, Hitchens knew all about the pitfalls of party-mindedness and factionalism. The main story of his political life was his realisation that maintaining a consistent commitment to certain principles required him to abandon a political community he had embraced for decades.

In a 2002 interview, Hitchens said: ‘If you’ve concluded that there is no longer an international socialist movement, that it’s not going to revive, you’re really only being a poseur if you say that you’re a socialist nonetheless. And that’s the position I’m in now.’ Yet Hitchens resisted the standard ‘conversion’ narrative: while his politics undoubtedly shifted after the Cold War, his principles remained constant. He even still claimed to ‘think like a Marxist’.

Hitchens despised the word ‘contrarian’, but it is not difficult to see why his publisher thought it was applicable. Martin Amis once observed that Hitchens had ‘always taken up unpopular positions,’ and has claimed that his friend had a habit of ‘saying something that went against the grain and then having to justify it. So that the Hitch was really debating with Christopher half the time.’ The problem with this view is its implication that Hitchens was taking controversial positions for the sake of controversy. But even the positions that were most unintelligible and infuriating to his left-wing comrades and liberal fans were grounded in his firmest principles.

Take Hitchens’s support for the post-September 11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though he often made indefensible arguments in favour of these wars (about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance), his central argument was always his view that universal human rights should be upheld around the world. He made a similar argument about defending Bosnia when it was under siege by Slobodan Milošević’s forces in the mid-1990s. He did not just view this campaign of ethnic cleansing and conquest as a humanitarian catastrophe: he argued that Milošević’s victory would ‘negate the whole idea of Europe.’ He supported the defence of Bosnia because he believed that was what his commitment to liberal democracy and internationalism required.

‘It matters not what you think,’ Hitchens wrote, ‘but how you think.’ Many assume Hitchens was such a pugnacious debater and polemicist because he was temperamentally inclined toward rhetorical combat. As Amis put it: ‘He likes the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.’ This is true, but another source of Hitchens’s ferocity in print and on the stage was the fact that his positions were natural extensions of his core principles. It is easier to hold and defend a controversial position when you have internally coherent reasons for doing so.

What you think – or at least what you purport to think – tends to matter more than how you think these days. The best path toward a lucrative career as a political or cultural commentator is the development of a brand that serves a particular set of information consumers. There are plenty of fiery pundits and Twitter warriors out there today, but how many reliably outrage and alienate their own ‘side’? How many are willing to publish an article or a podcast that will result in a loss of followers and prestige within the group?

Although platforms like Patreon and Substack have ‘democratised’ the media, they are also powerful engines of tribal consolidation. When writers and podcasters are beholden to paying customers rather than advertisers, they are swapping one form of coercion for another. Instead of staying away from potentially contentious issues that might frighten advertisers, they avoid issues or positions that will upset their patrons. Meanwhile, they adopt a tone and arguments that will appeal to those patrons.

There are many examples. When the American pundit and YouTube personality Dave Rubin started the Rubin Report in 2013, he presented himself as a disaffected liberal who was honestly questioning the dogmas of the left. Now he is a militant right-wing partisan who hosts interviews with conservative politicians about subjects like the ‘Plan to Destroy America from Within.’ The American evolutionary biologist and commentator Bret Weinstein was once just asking questions about COVID-19 policies and mRNA vaccines, but he is now convinced that there is a grand conspiracy – implicating the federal government, pharmaceutical companies, journalists, public health experts, and many others – to mislead the public about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. ‘All our institutions have failed us,’ he recently declared to his followers.

Hitchens never pandered to his audience. Many American liberals who embraced his criticisms of the Christian right despised his support for the Iraq War and decried his attacks on Islam. Conservative supporters of the war, on the other hand, were dismayed when he vehemently criticised Israel, declared that waterboarding is torture (after subjecting himself to the procedure), and signed up as a plaintiff in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Bush administration for its warrantless surveillance operations. He had no problem sharing the stage with people who were natural allies on some issues and adversaries on others:

‘Any cause worth fighting for will attract a plethora of people: I have spoken on platforms with Communists about South Africa and with ‘Cold Warriors’ about Czechoslovakia; in the case of Bosnia I spoke with Muslims who disagreed with me about Salman Rushdie and Jews who suspected me because I have always supported statehood for the Palestinians.’

At a time when associating with or the ‘platforming’ of controversial figures often has serious reputational consequences, Hitchens’s ‘First Amendment absolutism’ is an anachronism. He once debated Tom Metzger, the former ‘Grand Dragon’ of the Klu Klux Klan, and his son on live television (see the YouTube clip above) and he argued that the work of Holocaust denier David Irving should not be suppressed. He believed that a genuine commitment to free expression could not be encumbered by concerns about guilt by association, and he thought the best way to expose bad ideas was to resist them publicly.

It is true that, these days, we are living in an era of algorithmically boosted speech, which is often weaponised to intimidate and harass people in the real world. It is unclear how Hitchens would have responded to the efforts of the sulphurous American conspiracist, Alex Jones, to pile further misery onto the lives of grieving parents who lost their children in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting by sending an online mob after them (Jones told his audience that the massacre was staged as a ploy to steal Americans’ guns). What would Hitchens have said about the responsibilities of social media platforms in such a case? Even though he almost certainly would have despised President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press as the ‘enemy of the people’, it is difficult to imagine that he would have supported the decision to ban Trump from Twitter.

Would Hitchens have tempered his views on free expression in any way once it became clear how fundamentally the internet has altered the ways we share information and interact with one another? It seems unlikely, as he was so committed to the view that bad ideas should be openly and relentlessly challenged. But it is impossible to know.

There is one sense in which Hitchens’s position on free expression could not be clearer or more relevant: he believed writers should never censor themselves in order to remain in good standing with some party, faction, or political community. Nor should they allow the whims of public opinion to influence their work. ‘I don’t care about the crowd,’ Hitchens said in 2006. ‘I don’t care about public opinion.’ During the same discussion, Hitchens observed that the ‘main threat to free expression comes from public opinion’ and described this form of pressure as the ‘hardest to resist’.

The American essayist George Packer, a friend of Hitchens’s, echoed this observation when he observed that many writers today are hobbled by the ‘fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism.’ One of the reasons Packer believes a ‘career like that of Christopher Hitchens [is] not only unlikely, but almost unimaginable’ nowadays is the fact that writers ‘have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community.’ As this incentive becomes more powerful, our political culture will become more intolerant and censorious – and vice versa.

Hitchens understood how painful it can be to confront and ultimately part ways with your own side. He admitted that he sometimes missed his old political allegiances as if they were an ‘amputated limb’. But there were also times when the decision to abandon those allegiances felt to Hitchens like removing a ‘needlessly heavy overcoat’. Freethought is often thankless and difficult, but it can also be liberating – now more than ever.

Matt Johnson’s book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment (Pitchstone Publishing), is out on 28 February 2023.

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The post Christopher Hitchens and the value of heterodoxy appeared first on The Freethinker.

The new politics of marginalised identities, now marching across the West, frequently clashes with classical liberal values like freedom of speech and association. Nowhere, however, is this clash and its consequences for civic life more obvious – and dire – than when it comes to the trans movement.

What began as an informal social and economic pressure campaign has crossed over into a formal effort by coercive state agencies to restrict freedom of expression, assembly, and conscience. In Norway, a feminist organiser named Christina Ellingsen could face up to three years in prison for tweeting that males who identify as women cannot be lesbians or mothers, because this statement violates Norway’s newly expanded hate crime laws. In Canada, a human rights tribunal entertained the complaints of a trans-identified male against religious-minority women who refused to provide intimate hair-removal services. Professors like Selina Todd and Kathleen Stock have needed security to accompany them on their own university campuses after voicing concerns about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In England, police have investigated ordinary citizens for tweeting salty limericks or displaying ‘transphobic’ stickers.

In the United States, with its uniquely robust First Amendment protections, we are unlikely to see police sent to investigate violations of new identity doctrines. But here, as elsewhere, activists rely on aggressive use of private coercion to shut down dissent, targeting critics’ reputations and livelihoods. In November 2020, a prominent lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that ‘stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on’—referring to a book that questioned the sudden spike in girls identifying as transgender. Feminist groups attempting to organise in-person meetings have faced bomb threats and cancellations by venues nervous about optics and security risks. Teachers have been suspended or fired for refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns.

Then there is the soft pressure campaign underway across the West, involving the expectation that good, progressive people will not exercise certain freedoms: that lesbians will not refer to themselves as same-sex attracted, that women’s groups will make space for males, that everyone will engage in routine self-censorship, lest feelings be hurt or certain uncomfortable realities be drawn into the light. What is politically inconvenient becomes unfashionable, morally objectionable, even ‘dangerous’. Civil liberties have become distinctly uncool, panned by young activists, and more than a few grown-ups who ought to know better, as tools of marginalisation and oppression. Advocate for the right to freely speak your mind and activists will accuse you of harbouring specific heresies. In an interview with the BBC in September 2021, Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, defended his party’s decision to cast out a female member for asserting that women are adult human females: ‘Well, we absolutely believe in free speech but we also believe that we need to protect human rights and we believe in equality.’

Civil libertarians who have sat this conflict out so far may be startled to see free speech set up in opposition to human rights and equality. But when it comes to gender, an atmosphere of wartime censorship has set in. Trans activists claim these strictures save lives, but in reality it is the survival of the cause itself that requires such exceptional treatment.

So why do civil liberties violations and calls for further clampdowns follow trans activism wherever it goes?

The short answer is that the trans movement threatens civil liberties because the movement is not what it claims to be and thus is threatened by free and open enquiry. If a movement cannot withstand scrutiny, it will create and enforce taboos—and undermine civil liberties in the process. One of the trans movement’s central claims is that there is no conflict between its claims and demands and the rights of any other group. Stonewall, a leading trans rights organisation in the United Kingdom, states upfront that ‘we do not and will not acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and “sex based women’s rights”.’ Merely ‘claiming [that] there is a conflict between trans people’s human rights and those of any other group’—such as women, children, religious minorities, or lesbian and  gay people—is defined as transphobic hate speech that governments and private corporations alike should censor.

Unfortunately—for the trans movement and the rest of us—the conflict exists, whether we are free to acknowledge it or not.

To put the conflict in plain language: trans activism argues that gender identity should override sex in law and society. Trans activism redefines ‘women’ and ‘men’ from sex classes based on reproductive role into mixed-sex classes based on individuals’ inner sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither. A mixed-sex definition of ‘woman’ will put males on women’s shortlists, in women’s sports, prisons, and domestic violence refuges. Even if we were to believe that redefining women as a mixed-sex class inclusive of males who identify as women is an urgent and just cause—that is, even if we believe that the outcome should be settled in a particular way—there remains a conflict between two clashing interpretations of the law and two distinct groups of people.

Rather than acknowledge this conflict and propose a satisfactory resolution, trans activists seek to deny it altogether—largely by stripping meaning from language. This is how the ubiquitous claim that ‘trans women are women’ functions. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter if ‘trans women’ outcompete female athletes in women’s sports. In fact, if ‘trans women are women’, then questioning whether Lia Thomas should compete against female athletes becomes part of a ‘long tradition of “gender policing” female athletes’. Rather than make a compelling case for why trans inclusion should trump fairness, trans activists seek to make sex—the very crux of the conflict—unspeakable. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter whether or not placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons puts female prisoners at risk. ‘Trans women are women’ means no scrutiny and no debate.

We see the same approach at work when it comes to ‘gender-affirming care’ and its casualties. If activists inside and outside the medical profession want to remove barriers to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, then the experiences of detransitioners and people who have been harmed by transition represent a serious challenge. Rather than address these concerns head on, organisations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health seek to reframe detransition in an attempt to deny its relevance. Detransition, regret, and medical harm become ‘gender journeys’, ‘non-linear gender transitions’, or ‘gender dimensionality’—just another exciting detour on a patient’s lifelong quest of personal discovery, with no implications for clinical assessment, treatment, and accountability.

This insistence that there is no conflict lodges a falsehood in the very heart of the trans movement. When a movement is not what it pretends to be, this creates a vulnerability that activists must defend.

There is a parallel here to when individuals come out as transgender and seek to be seen by others as members of the opposite sex (or as sexless, in the case of non-binary people). When someone comes out as trans, they ask other people to overlook their sex. Ideally, they want everyone they come into contact with—family and friends, classmates and colleagues, even perfect strangers—to personally redefine sex and re-educate themselves to see trans people as they want to be seen. You will reinforce your trans friend or family member or colleague’s self-identification with your speech and actions. At a minimum, you will keep your perceptions and objections to yourself, lapsing into polite silence so as not to upset your interlocutor’s feelings. Trans activism operates with the same expectations, but on a society-wide scale, and with civil liberties as the target.

The temptation to violate civil liberties and undermine the basic principles of a free and open society will remain as long as the need for cover remains. Whenever activists attempt to smuggle undeclared goods under the guise of a civil rights movement, undressed speech becomes a threat that must be managed.

The only way out of this situation is for the trans movement to reconnect their public pronouncements with their actual agenda: they must make their case in the open and anyone must be allowed to question it.

However, there are compelling reasons to think that the trans movement would not have got this far operating in the open. The lobbying guide by IGLYO, ‘the world’s largest LGBTQI Youth and Student organisation’, even seems to acknowledge as much, urging campaigners to ‘get ahead of the government agenda and media story’, ‘tie your campaign to more popular reforms’ and ‘avoid excessive press coverage and exposure’. The guide praises Irish activists for piggybacking on marriage equality and using it to provide a ‘veil of protection’, since ‘marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for’. It then observes that: 

‘[M]any believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress, as much of the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise. In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue.’

This approach has been a success for trans lobbyists in countries like Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, but it has done great damage to the fabric of civil society. If the trans movement insists on its current course—shutting down public debate, subverting open democratic processes, and punishing critics—the movement will create openings for opponents with much more objectionable agendas than recognising that sex matters and advocating caution on youth gender transition. As Jonathan Rauch warned in his 1993 book, The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought:

‘[No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.’

The realities the trans movement is so keen to suppress will persist—no matter how doggedly activists hound dissenters. It is time for them to return to the public sphere and play by the same rules as everyone else: no special pleading and no final say. And it is time for every institution that has enabled this movement to put an end to trans exceptionalism. Free and open societies depend on it.

The post The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement appeared first on The Freethinker.

I spoke to Pragna via Zoom, to find out more about her story, motivations, personal challenges, attitude towards religion, and the changing nature of the problems facing women of minority backgrounds since she first became involved with SBS in the early 1980s.

Freethinker: What motivated you to become involved in campaigning for minority women’s rights?

Pragna Patel: I grew up in a traditional Indian family where women were expected to conform to strict gender roles and patriarchal norms – where they were expected to get married, to have their marriage partners chosen for them, to stay in the home and look after children and in-laws. These were all mapped-out routes for women that nobody questioned. I remember all the women around me who followed these paths unquestioningly. I always felt curious about why that was the only route open to women.

In my family, men would talk politics at events, while the women would be in the background serving the men. I was expected to be in the kitchen helping out, but I much preferred listening to the sometimes heated political debates that the men were having.

These things led me to question why women were relegated to certain roles. I felt it was unjust, not quite knowing why, and also that I did not want to go down that path. I do not think I recognised then that I was questioning the patriarchal order around me. When I was growing up, if you questioned the status quo, even in a mild way, you were told, ‘That is our religion and our culture, and that is the way things are.’ Religion and culture were always leaned upon to explain why there was such division between men and women. My work for women’s rights originated with that gut feeling of there being something more for women than these traditional roles.

My father was born in Kenya and I was born there too, but my family were Indian in origin. My mother is from India, and she was expected to live wherever her husband lived. And so she moved to Kenya after her marriage. We came to the UK in 1965, just as many African countries were in the grip of nationalism, independent movements and a wider Africanisation policy. This left many Asians who had been brought to Africa by the British in a precarious position. My father decided that, before things got worse in Kenya, he should look for a better life for us. He had a British passport, so he came here as an economic migrant.

I came to the UK at the age of five, in December. I still remember vividly coming down the stairs of the plane and everybody staring – I did not know why. I now realise that there were two reasons. One, there were not that many Asians at the time, so we must have stood out. Two, I was not prepared for the English weather – I was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress.

My formative years were shaped by experiences of racism in school. Even at primary school, children would constantly be telling us to go home, to go back where we came from. Being called ‘Pakkies’ was normal, being told that we smelt of curry or were smelly. Racist banter and name-calling was very much there. Nobody did anything about it in those days, mainly because racism just was not acknowledged. When I went to secondary school, from when I was about 14 onwards, the racism was far more menacing. Even in the playground, the name calling was more vicious. My parents faced much worse racism – discrimination in trying to get employment, housing and so on.

So you always felt an outsider. I also think that teachers never acknowledged that even if you were different, your identity mattered as much and was as valid as any white English identity, and that your background was as interesting as a white English background.

Freethinker: What did you do when you left school?

Patel: I went to a college of higher education in Liverpool. I did not get brilliant grades at A-level, partly because it was a time when I went through a very traumatic experience of almost being forced into a marriage – something which was also not recognised in those days, and which I rebelled against. From when I was 16 to 17, there was a war of attrition between me and my parents. They did not mean to do me harm: they thought that was the right way and I was just rebelling. But the struggle took up a year and a lot of my energy and time.

Anyway, I scraped through and managed to get away as far as I could, which was Liverpool. I studied English literature and sociology. Becoming involved in student politics, I began to understand my formative experiences of patriarchal oppression, sexism and racism. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was in the sixth form, I had heard about the racial uprisings that led to the death of Blair Peach and to the arrest of hundreds of community activists and members who were challenging the presence of the National Front in Southall. Although I was not there personally, these events left an indelible mark in my mind.

So when I was at college, I got involved in student activism, going to places like Manchester and joining anti-deportation demonstrations. Campaigning with other Asian students and young men and women was a real eye-opener for me, because up until that point, I had not realised that you could resist. I had grown up feeling that, as far as racism was concerned, it was about tolerating it and being a perpetual victim, whether you liked it or not. The civil rights movement in America was also a revelation to me.

Freethinker: What did you do after college?

Patel: During the holidays I would be back in Southall, where my family lived. I saw a group of young Asian women, about my age, who were part of those anti-racist mobilisations in 1979, who were selling black feminist magazines on the high road in Southall, and were calling themselves the Southall Black Sisters. I was motivated by their stance as anti-racist feminists. So I joined the group. When I finished College, I realised that I wanted to come back to Southall and work on women’s rights.  

SBS were a mixture of women from many minority backgrounds. There were some African Caribbean, some Asian, some Middle Eastern. They adopted the term ‘black’, as did many Asian activists at the time, to signify a common struggle against racism, common histories of colonialism and imperialism, and to reflect a growing feminist consciousness amongst black women. It was a time when anti-racist and feminist activism was gathering momentum. Women’s groups were setting up all over the country.

Freethinker: When you did eventually marry, was it arranged?

Patel: No – it was an absolute choice. I married someone who I was working with. There is no way that I would have carried out a whole year of civil disobedience and then gone back to just being compliant.

Freethinker: How has your work, and the nature of the challenges that you have faced, changed over the course of your career?

Patel: Around the time when I joined SBS, all the founding members left. I resuscitated the group and then set up the advocacy centre in Ealing. I began to realise that the issue that most women presented us with was violence – domestic abuse or other forms of gender-related violence such as forced marriage, honour-based killings, honour-based violence, suicide driven by domestic abuse, abusive men killing women.

In those days multiculturalism as a policy had just become dominant in state institutions. But the way that they interpreted it was basically to leave minority communities to resolve their own affairs internally without state intervention, because they felt that intervention would mean being insensitive to culture and religious values, or even being racist. We were constantly banging on the door of the police and social services saying, ‘You must intervene – this is not about cultural sensitivity, this is about a risk to women’s and children’s lives.’

One of the positive changes since then is that through our campaigning work and our refusal to back down in the face of non-intervention by the state, we have finally managed to force a change in the way in which the authorities deal with issues like domestic abuse or forced marriage. We have forced them to realise that intervening in these issues is not so much about safeguarding cultural identity as about safeguarding women’s and children’s lives – to recognise that these culturally specific forms of gender-based violence are actually abuses of women’s human rights. That is a huge achievement.

Freethinker: So the authorities are now more willing to intervene in these matters?

Patel: Absolutely. We now have statutory guidance on honour-based violence, on female genital mutilation, and on other forms of gender-based harms.

We have also made considerable progress in the way in which the immigration authorities respond to women who are subject to abuse and who have insecure immigration status. That is an even bigger mountain to climb, because we are going through a period of extreme anti-immigration policies.

There are two areas that are particularly challenging now. One is neoliberalism and the shrinking of the welfare state, because women, in order to achieve rights, need the welfare state – we need access to legal aid, lawyers, justice, protection through the courts. The other area is the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Freethinker: How important is secularism to your campaigning?

Patel: Starting out in the ’80s, we were all secularists. We did not even need to call ourselves secular. It was taken for granted because our organisations were based on secular values. For example, the term ‘black’ was a secular term. It signified common histories of racism and resistance to colonialism and imperialism. It allowed unity across different minority groups.

Now, sadly, the fragmentation of identities in minority groups has meant that we no longer mobilise around these kind of expansive, inclusive terms. We have become more parochial and inward-looking. We coalesce around faith identities, becoming Sikh, Muslim or Hindu communities. This has had a huge impact on feminist mobilisations within minority communities. In the past, we could be of Sikh, Hindu, Muslim backgrounds and still come together, recognising our shared experiences as women. Now that kind of fragmentation of identity focuses much more on the differences. Even though we share the same cultural landscape of South Asia, the same language, food and so on, the groups are mushrooming up all over the place, calling themselves Sikh Women’s Groups, Sikh Women’s Aid, Muslim Women’s Network, Muslim Women’s Centre, Hindu Women. That has fragmented our solidarity, and made it more difficult to come together and show support.

Freethinker: Why do you think this happened? This fragmentation and increasing emphasis on religious divisions at the expense of shared culture?           

Patel: There are several processes at work here. We are in the grip of identity politics, which I find to be incredibly regressive. Back in the ’80s, we began by calling ourselves ‘black’. In a sense, that too was identity politics, but it was always invested with values and with politics that were far more outward-looking, inclusive, and more focused on solidarity. The end game was to make connections with other groups who faced other forms of oppression but were part of the wider struggle for social justice and equality.

We have lost that progressive political foundation. The rise of religious fundamentalism has not helped, because it has shaped the way communities organise themselves. It has enabled faith-based leaders to monopolise resources, to speak on behalf of communities and to claim to represent them, always with a very patriarchal agenda as far as women are concerned. Instead of seeing identity politics as a springboard to solidarity, we are now seeing it as an end in itself. Dominant fundamentalist leaderships are demanding resources on behalf of so-called faith communities and claiming to speak for them, but are not acting in the interests of women, children or other oppressed minorities-within-minorities.

Freethinker: Identity politics is a complex issue because it depends on which perspective you look at it from – left-wing, right-wing, religious, etc. How do all these different aspects fit together?

Patel: We are seeing a dogmatism that has set in on both sides. I think that there is a serious problem with the Left, if we are not able to criticise faith identities internally, or to criticise religion or cultural aspects that actually oppress sexual minorities or women. Both Left and Right, I think, are in the grip of a frightening authoritarianism. We have to assert that our politics is a secular feminist politics, because labelling ourselves as ‘faith communities’ begs the question of whose faith, who is entitled to interpret that faith, and whether that faith serves the interests of those who are powerless within minority communities.

Those of us who consider ourselves on the Left have seen a descent into dogmatism and a politics of identity that actually prevents us from developing a politics of solidarity. In the ‘80s, our politics of resistance was more hopeful and inclusive, because it was focused on forging solidarity with other oppressed groups.

Freethinker: When I interviewed Maryam Namazie, who is a communist, she said that one of the problems with the Left is that they want recognition for minorities, but that leads them to go too far. She suggested that there was a tendency for those on the extreme left to get into bed with fundamentalist Islamists, because they identify with their goal of revolution. Yet political Islamism, she argued, is actually fascist.

Patel: Yes. The problem with the Left is that it wants to decry the fascists on the outside, but will not decry the fascists on the inside. If we want to resist authoritarian politics, we have to resist the authoritarianism from above as well as from below.

We need to point out the fascist tendencies in our own communities, where they get mistaken as progressive because they are vaguely about resisting the state, about resisting white fascism or racism. Hindu fundamentalism has monopolised the so-called ‘Hindu voice’, Islamism has monopolised the so-called ‘Muslim voice’, and so on. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism share the same tactics and agenda, and they mirror each other, as do Jewish fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism on the global scale. All these fundamentalist forces actually work together, because they have common enemies and a common agenda.

On the international human rights stage, all these fundamentalists come together to undermine the safeguards and standards that have evolved around women’s reproductive and other rights. They want to enter reservations if they happen to be fundamentalist regimes, and want to dilute the rights that women have gained through years of struggle, such as the right to abortion, to access information about abortion, to say no to a forced marriage, and so on. The religious fundamentalists do mirror each other, even if they publicly decry each other as enemies.

That is something that we within the Left are failing to recognise. These are political movements using religion for political ends, not authentic cultural or religious forces. They have a regressive illiberal agenda, and a misogynist agenda when it comes to women. Many of the demands that they make in the name of ‘respect for religion and culture’ are about controlling women: controlling women’s desires, their minds and bodies. Take demands for gender-segregated schools or public spaces, or the demand for religious laws such as sharia to govern family relationships.

It is hard to see how such demands could be progressive in any real sense. Rather, they are a threat to black feminists, who have campaigned for three decades or more to get the state to acknowledge abuses against minorities as abuses of human rights. Yet there are very few minority women who will speak out – because they have been browbeaten into believing that to speak out is somehow to paint minority communities as barbaric or backward, or to give more power to the state.

We do have to challenge the fascism of regimes, such as the Hungarian or Polish regime, or the US under Trump. We have to challenge the kind of jingoism and nationalism that has been disguised in the Brexit debates, and the racism of the immigration system. But we also have to challenge illiberal politics and the culture of authoritarianism within the Left.

Freethinker: You stood down as Director of SBS in January 2022. What are your plans now?

Patel: I am still adjusting to life on the outside, but in the meantime, I am working with many women’s groups on a range of projects, including Centre for Women’s Justice on the issue of access to justice. I am also active with Maryam Namazie in One Law for All and in Feminist Dissent, because I believe the struggle against religious fundamentalism is one of the major feminist issues of our time.

Freethinker: Do you have any religious beliefs?

Patel: No. My parents are of Hindu background, but they themselves were not particularly religious. I have always resisted religion, because I have found it to be patriarchal and restrictive in terms of my rights as a girl and as a woman. The rise of Hindu nationalism amongst the Indian diaspora is a chilling development and a warning sign of fascism that is already in our midst.

Freethinker: Do you have any message for readers of the Freethinker about what should be important for us as a society, whatever background we come from, and how we can work together to improve things for all of us?

Patel: We have to foster a culture of public and civic good based on human rights principles. We have to safeguard human rights law and the associated culture of human rights, because it is under threat at this very moment. We must do so with kindness, care and empathy for each other – we have lost these qualities. We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity.

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