Iranians stand up for women, the West erases them

A young woman waves a hijab as she stands atop a car during a protest in Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, on September 20. Picture: AFP

In the West, progressives fight for the right of men to be treated as women. In Iran they fight for the right of women to be treated as human beings.

This wildest of culture clashes – between a West that has lost the moral plot and Iranian protesters who are driven by the truest of moral convictions – has been thrown into sharp relief during the past week.

Here we can’t even say what a woman is. “Can a woman have a penis?” the leader of the UK Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was asked a few months ago. He couldn’t answer. “I’m not … I don’t think we can conduct this debate with … I don’t think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone,” he madly mumbled.

Last year he was cornered over Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s entirely correct comment that only women had cervixes. Was that right, he was asked. It was “not right”, he replied. That was “something that shouldn’t be said”.

Take that in. The leader of His Majesty’s opposition, the former director of public prosecutions, doesn’t know what a woman is.

They know what a woman is in Iran. They’re the people who don’t have penises and who are treated as second-class citizens. They’re the people forced to cover their hair in public or risk being roughed up by the morality police.

They’re the people taking to the streets in their thousands – cheered on by thousands of men – to burn their hijabs and liberate their locks.

During the past week, the difference between progressive activism in the West and progressive activism in Iran has blown my mind.

UK Labour leader Keir Starmer. Picture: Getty Images

We’ve just had the Labour Party conference in Britain. One of the big talking points from that was a speech by the aforementioned Duffield in which she committed the blasphemy of saying comedian Eddie Izzard is a man.

Izzard now uses female pronouns. Duffield – one of a tiny number of progressive politicians willing to call a spade a spade and a bloke a bloke – told a gathering at the Labour conference: “Eddie Izzard is not a woman.”

Astonishingly, she said this in a venue whose details were given to attendees only at the last minute, such is the fear of gender-critical women that their meetings will be attacked by woke mobs.

So as women were bravely casting off their hijabs in Iran, left-wing women in Britain were surreptitiously gathering so that they might utter that most verboten of views: “Men are not women.”

This matters. It matters that Western progressives have gone so far down the rabbit hole of bonkers identity politics that they can no longer even say what a woman is. It matters because you cannot offer solidarity to women if you don’t know what women are. How can woke Westerners who believe that people with penises can be women offer real, meaningful support to women in Iran who are rising up for their rights against a deeply sexist Islamist regime?

It isn’t only on the issue of sex that the woke West has lost its way. There’s religion, too.

Over here, criticising Islam is frequently referred to as “Islamophobia”. Some Western observers even use the word “hijabphobia”. The Huffington Post describes hijab­phobia as “hostility towards the hijab”.

The Guardian has published articles saying the hijab is fab, actually. It has “nothing to do with oppression”, said one piece. It signifies “self-respect”, said another.

Tell that to the women of Iran. Yes, women. People with cervixes. Adult human females.

Tell those brave women that they are tearing off a “self-respecting” garment. That they are being hijabphobic. That it is Islamophobic to bash Islam.

They will laugh in your faces. Or possibly cry over your moral delusions, your apologism for Islamic authoritarianism, your inability not only to say what a woman is but also to say that women should be free to uncover their hair and live as they please.

The relativistic rot in the 21st-century West makes it harder for us to stand side-by-side with the brilliant rebels of Iran.

Until we recover the ability to say that there are men and there are women, and to defend the freedom of both to defy religious diktats, we will never be able to empathise with Iran’s brave dissenters. It is not transphobic to say men are not women. It is not Islamophobic to criticise Islam. And it is not hijabphobic to question the hijab. Forget all this phobia nonsense – it’s freedom people need. In Iran and everywhere else, too.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer at Spiked.