“Just be yourself.” This strikes me as the worst advice I have ever been given – and yet, of course, I often find myself saying it to others. Being oneself has somehow become the new religion underpinning much of the madness surrounding us.
I wrote this week in The Daily Telegraph about John Lewis, which owns Waitrose and has recently issued its 70,000 employees with a magazine called Identity. The mag contains advice on preferred pronouns and gives the dates for all the days we need to note, from International Transgender Day of Visibility to International Asexuality Day; Pansexual and Panromantic Awareness and Visibility Day to People For Whom The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Weak Day.
I am as keen as anyone else to celebrate Asexuality Day, and I can’t imagine anything better than browsing energy-efficient appliances at John Lewis while doing it.
There is also advice on breast binders and a photography exhibition in which John Lewis employees reveal their “true selves,” where we get Merchandise Operatives warbling on about being trans, non-binary and pansexual and how difficult it all is: ‘I struggle with the war of having birthed a child yet not being female and how society as a whole tries to erase my gender.’ A happily married Lib Dem councillor reveals himself as bisexual. Lovely. A young man who works in the kids’ department is photographed in a BDSM harness, and a transgender person who works in the Brighton Waitrose poses with a whip. Inevitably other pictures featuring various flavours of fetish-type stuff emerged.
You’ll never guess what happened next… Or will you?
Yes, the individuals featured ended up being abused. That, of course, is horrible but really, in this day and age, what did anyone think would happen?
Fight discrimination in the workplace, sure, but does anyone really need to know anything at all about the sexual identity of people who work in a shop? Who and what is this information for? If co-workers or managers are giving these people a hard time, then it could possibly be relevant, otherwise not.
Several things are happening here, all going to show just how muddled our public institutions and private companies have become. The impetus behind it seems to be that people should be empowered to be their true selves at work. I disagree. Has no one ever heard of alienation?!
Some of us would never go to work, or we’d be very rude while we were there, if we were being “ourselves”. This push for diversity in the workplace sounds like a laudable goal until you realise that only certain kinds of diversity are welcome. As someone tweeted me, how come none of the staff represented in Identity. were of the “Meet Dave, I’m straight and I like to go dogging at weekends in my Toyota” variety?
As usual, lots of people were very angry with me for raising my criticisms, pointing out that I don’t have to shop at John Lewis, which is true, and arguing that people should be able to bring their “gender identities” to work.
There are two things I object to here: first, that in the name of “inclusivity,” a particular gender ideology is being pushed, which excludes those who don’t buy the premise of “gender identity” in the first place. The other is that this is a pretty superficial way of dealing with serious issues in the workplace. Someone who actually works at John Lewis told me about a series of bad management decisions, big losses and huge upcoming redundancies. The company is in trouble and, though it may refer to its staff as “partners”, the hard reality is that a lot of them will soon have to identify as unemployed, never mind anything else
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