How Genderwoo Took Over Middle Class Britain
A review of ‘Middle Class Holes’ by Gareth Roberts
“I come not to bury the Middle Class Holes, but to shake my head and stare balefully at them.”
Gareth Roberts has written a compendium of 25 British personalities making everything worse for everyone. His criteria for the category are rigorous: “They must be actively dangerous, or deleterious, or hilarious, or they must exemplify something.” Gender identity ideology runs through the entire book as a glaring thread to highlight the flimsy, diminished quality of British cultural and political fabric these days.
Conservative MP Carolyn Nokes exemplifies the nonpartisan nature of the problem. In 2022, as Chair of the Parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee, Nokes championed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would have made it simpler and easier for any man to ‘identify’ as a woman. Appalled by the populist reaction against this endeavor, Nokes wailed over the “abuse” and “vitriol” she received for simply trying to bring legislation from 2004 into the “modern day”, the poor dear.
Tories are not supposed to advance the fashionable delusions of the left, yet this was the defining issue of Nokes’s tenure. Why? To Nokes, who presents herself as an educated, middle class feminist, the ‘culture wars’ are irrelevant, a distraction from ‘real issues’ that require middle class holes like herself to exist, so they can resolve those alleged problems on our behalf.
Of course, one of those issues is ‘gender equality’, or the ‘gender pay gap’, phrases that become meaningless when a middle class hole says them. “I particularly like women who are prepared to stand up for themselves and for what they believe in”, Nokes said in 2020. “Particularly, it seems, if those women are actually men”, Roberts adds with the scorn of Rumpole.
Nokes once defended the burqa from Boris Johnson, arguing that “it’s not for any man to tell any woman what she should wear”, unless of course that man is Muslim. Using Nokes, Roberts introduces us to the “dinner party problem”, a term coined by writer Tom Jones for the social pressure that makes anyone, even a Tory, adopt liberal positions so their friends do not disown them.
Nokes has been “dinner partied to maximum strength”, he writes. This phenomenon explains why gender ideology gained ascendancy under a Conservative government in the UK. It also applies to Washington, DC, where Republicans are rewarded by their dinner party friends for every move to the left, while no Democrat is ever rewarded for the smallest ideological infraction — and the punishment of activist pressure groups is always swift. It is a politics of respectability that keeps the “semi-posh” in line.
