The campaign to cancel Natalie Bird began with an item of clothing.
She was standing in the sandwich queue when a woman marched over asking ‘Why are you wearing that T-shirt?’
The T-shirt in question had the words ‘Woman: Adult Human Female’ emblazoned across it. To some, an indisputable fact. To others, a red rag to a bull. Either way, it proved a provocative choice for a Liberal Democrat gathering.
How basic biology can ever be 'provocative' I can't imagine, but then thankfully, I'm not a LibDem...
‘I told the woman I was wearing it because I wanted debate,’ says Natalie, 45.
‘She asked me if I was an approved party candidate and I said yes, and she said: “Well, we’ll see about that.” ’Days later, in December 2018, Natalie received a letter telling her she was banned from standing as an MP or holding party office for ten years.
Not that the chances of them winning any are particularly huge, but still...
Natalie, who says the party’s focus ‘has moved from women’s equality to trans rights’, believes it is pushing more and more women out of politics.
‘For speaking out, I’ve been bullied, harassed, hounded... and received twice the punishment [with the ten-year ban] that people receive for electoral fraud,’ she says.
Well, yes, I mean, electoral fraud is clearly a lesser crime in the eyes of the people who want it in order to get into power...
Louise Distras, 36, a singer-songwriter from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, believes the music industry is ‘so captured by gender ideology that they don’t know what a woman is any more’.
She adds wryly: ‘Yet the “mob” always hounds women who speak out more than men. So they do know what a woman is, really.’
Bullies always target the weaker victim. They have an unerring sense for it.
And in this topsy-turvey world the progressives and rabid trans-cult followers are building, anything can be a trigger for the mob:
Artist Sonya Douglas, 52, is another whose livelihood is under threat. She was dropped from the Critically Speaking arts podcast after she refused to give her pronouns and, according to a tweet made by the podcast, for ‘sharing transphobic content’. The repercussions have been far-reaching.
‘I decided not to put anything and simply said: “It’s not important how people refer to me.” But I knew that I’d stuck my head above the parapet.’
Sure enough later that day the podcast team emailed her: ‘They told me — a black Welsh woman — that they were an “inclusive and diverse” team and wouldn’t be platforming me any more.’
There's 'diversity', and then, there's diversity, clearly...
