James Esses is one of many whose careers and/or education were severely impacted by the campaign of harassment initiated by gender ideologists over the last decade or so, when LGBTQ+ demands for trans ‘self-ID’ clashed with single-sex services and child safeguarding practice. Like many of those who were given a hard time, James reacted superbly by making himself an expert on the topic whilst standing up for lesbian and gay youngsters, and publishing some extremely useful research and commentary on the harms gender ideology was inflicting, particularly on young people.

That’s why I followed his Substack. I knew he wasn’t at my end of the political spectrum but then – loads of people aren’t. I didn’t give it much thought, even when the ‘gender critical’ women’s movement fell out with itself, after a really remarkable few years of practical solidarity. Even in the heat of that battle, I was more proud of the years we’d managed to hold it together than concerned or surprised to find that ultimately, right wingers and grifters can’t get along with socialists and anti-racists.

There were still plenty of people (such as Esses) who seemed happy to keep their heads down and get on with the necessary work but then in August 2024, he announced on his Substack some ‘Exciting News’. He was amalgamating his Substack with Matt Goodwin’s. He said he didn’t agree with everything Goodwin stood for but that the combined numbers would be the benefit – well, there was the problem right there. He was proposing to carry his ‘gender critical’ following into Goodwin’s sphere of racist, rabble-rousing influence. 

I left a comment somewhere saying ‘thank you for your work, but this is where we part company’. I could just feel all those ‘non-political’ women thinking ‘oh, another one of those purity-seeking head girls’. But what the heck, if you’ve stood for sex-based rights in Corbyn’s Labour Party, in the LRC and in your union, as I have, you’re not scared of a bit of disapproval (or toxic-dump level bile, in fact). The thing is, that was the summer of the ‘Wednesday gatherings’ – do you remember? Some daft entity was suggesting sites for anti-immigration rallies, designed to intimidate and endanger asylum seekers. Anti-racists were working flat out to debunk all the lies, and to muster defenders for refugees. It really was not a good time to give oxygen to ideas like Goodwin’s.

Cross-party working

There’s an interesting distinction to make. Politicians in Westminster often work cross-party on issues of wider human concern and I am very proud of the fact that I once addressed a workshop on women in politics that had an attendance of members from seven different political parties. In the course of the women’s campaigns, I worked with Conservative women (and even trickier than that) right-wing Labour Party women. It’s fine, if you are, for example, discussing how to deal with misogyny in your branch, gathering numbers for a petition, or setting out to demonstrate that there are women in every political party who want to be heard on issues that impact women and girls.

But there’s something you shouldn’t do – something that I think is very dangerous, and it’s all too easy to do it by accident.

Political miseducation

After I’d made that comment about signing off from Esses’ following, I got curious, and decided to stick around and watch for a while. I was quite astonished at what I saw. It’s one thing accusing people of stoking racism but, if you’re not in the habit of going to Nigel Farage rallies or whatever, you’re not necessarily aware of how it’s done. I found out.

This is What Esses’ amalgamation had carried his followers to: Goodwin’s blogs often took the line about immigration being ‘out of control’ then, around September I think, he did one that dredged up the Oldham scandal, and also the story of Lee Rigby, a British serviceman murdered by a man involved with something that was involved with Al-Qaeda.

Okay, those are two horrible things that happened, but a few blogs later, in amongst all his stuff about being overwhelmed by immigrants, Goodwin is talking about ‘events like’ Oldham and Rigby’s murder, building the impression that such things happen regularly – so that’s ONE case of a child abuse gang being largely Pakistani, and ONE case of an Islamic activist attacking a British serviceman in Britain.  Over the course of years and years, years in which we’ve picked up hints of sexual exploitation everywhere including the government, the royals’ social circles and most churches –and you know what, just as we learned from Gisele Pelicot’s case, if you add up all of them, the predators turn out to be ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE. the only common denominator I can see is that most of them are MALE.

But Goodwin kept on happily with his mythical ‘events like’ Oldham and the Rigby murder, and linking the idea to Starmer’s government, and how they aren’t admitting the ‘immigration problem.’ No mention of the fact that if you really look into it, you’ll find the immigration problem we have in this country is the same as the NHS problem and every other problem we have. That is, it takes time to sort out who immigrants are, what they need, whether they can get asylum status here or not – it takes time, and staff. And we’ve had a succession of governments that simply will not fund and will not hire enough staff to complete the tasks that need doing.

That’s why we have a backlog of immigrants, and no-one’s really on top of who’s where and why. It’s nothing to do with the number of immigrants. There has never been a year in the whole history of the UK when there haven’t been large numbers of people both arriving and leaving. Similarly, we have crises and chaos in the NHS, in housing and in social care – not because there are too many people, or because the government has ‘run out of money’ or is ‘spending it on the wrong people’, but because we’ve had a series of governments that would rather fund wars and big business than social infrastructure and public employees.

And every single one of those governments had their destructive works made easier by racial and class-based divides people like Goodwin provoke, using misplaced fears and resentments to get attention.

Non-political people

Anyone who is seriously involved in politics, or refugee work, or anything else related to the topic, would know that, and recognise Goodwin’s line as typical of right-wing blame-shifting – but the trouble is, if you’re not politically aware, you would not know that, nor would you know that attacks such as the one that killed Lee Rigby are very, very rare (it’s so long ago I’m not sure, but I have a feeling the last ones to attack UK servicemen in this country were IRA – does Goodwin want militant nationalists thrown out as well, I wonder?)

So anyone involved in the women’s rights campaigns who was ‘not political’, who went on following Esses after his amalgamation, probably now thinks we’re in danger of being attacked by ‘swarms of’ immigrants. And that is how Reform UK win their following. That’s what is known as ideological capture, I believe.

And that’s where the irony comes in because one of the highlights of Esses’ work for me was his investigations and demonstrations of how organisations can fall to such capture and, for example, start demanding that their staff and clients renounce single-sex spaces and sign up to the transwomen-are-women, born-in-the-wrong-body narrative, merely because one person inserted an ‘inclusivity’ document that was not in line with the law into one meeting somewhere.

Negative ideological capture

Oh, and that reminds me – one of the recent wielders of the Oldham misinformation trick is Goodwin’s friend Elon Musk. I really, really worry about all those ‘gender critical’ campaigners who are well disposed towards Musk because he let the women’s rights campaign back onto TwitX, who are now reading this guff….

And one of the reasons more than a few lefties are clinging to the (largely discredited) policy lines of gender ideology is that Musk very pointedly DOES NOT agree with it. Musk thinks it’s wrong ergo it must be right – that is negative ideological capture, and yet another way of allowing yourself to be fooled.

New Year, new projects

Well, that’s that situation finally written up. I went into my Substack notifications this morning to sign off from the Esses/Goodwin blog, and found he’s still on about Oldham…

And then this…

Happy to say that that project is done and dusted. I have unfollowed that Substack. Phew.

I’ll finish with what’s always on my mind when I talk/write about people being fooled – I wonder what I’ve been misled over? What am I currently going around believing, that’s just not true, and on the other side of the coin, what am I NOT believing just because someone ghastly is saying it? Asking those questions is one political exercise we can all do every day, to combat the kind of nonsense that’s currently being hurled around by the likes of Musk, Farage and the far-right Tories, apparently in order to promote the even farther right far-right.

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