Getting smashed in the face by the patriarchy!

Trigger Warning – May Offend Female Police Officers. If you don’t like what you read, don’t criticise me—I suffer from ITCD (Incapable of Taking Criticism Disorder). If you do criticise me despite knowing about my disorder, then you have no respect.

I was chatting recently with a surgeon friend who was bemoaning the lowering of standards in the NHS. The medical students coming in are, in his words, “cognitively insubstantial.” Many are given extra time in exams because they would struggle to meet the required standard otherwise. It likely doesn’t matter all that much—robots will replace them in a few short years—but in the meantime, we might expect some extra time added to our hip replacement surgery. What’s another few hours when you’ve already waited five years?

In January 2025, as massive fires tore through the City of Angels, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s diversity chief defended DEI hiring practices, saying: “You want to see someone responding to your emergency… that looks like you,” and that if she, as a woman, couldn’t carry a man out of a burning building, then “he got himself in the wrong place.”

Recently we saw PC Lydia Ward (understandably) screaming, sobbing, and retching after being punched in the nose by an assailant at Manchester Airport.

The Metropolitan Police Act 1829, which established the Met Police in London, did not include any provisions for women to serve as police officers. The initial force was exclusively male, but that was before we ‘woke’ up to injustice and inequality. That was back in the bad old days when we were all horrible sexists, preferring instead to protect and safeguard women as wives and mothers. PC Lydia Ward, crumpled in a heap with blood covering her face, is apparently a sign of true justice and equality in a once sexist world. Or is it?

A recent government report on policing reveals a target of 50% female recruits, and they’re well on their way:

“The figure of 50,364 women in the 43 police forces achieved today means there are now more female police officers pursuing criminals and serving the public than since records began – making up 34.9% of the overall workforce. Of the recruits hired since April 2020, 42.5% (13,326) are women.

Reaching 50,000 female police officers is a really positive milestone. The uplift programme has seen many more women apply to join policing.”

We should be embarrassed by this, not celebrate it. Despite appearances, not all police work involves arresting people for misgendering others online. Dangerous criminals still exist, and it is policemen who stand at the forefront of protecting us from them. This is men’s work.

True equality is not uniformity; it lies in recognising the nature of a thing and arranging society so that nature can flourish. Why do we balk at lions pacing in zoos, at circus bears, or battery farming? Because we know these creatures were not made for such things. I suppose there may be some trans-lions who enjoy lying in glass cages being looked at all day. Nevertheless, to do this to Tufty goes against his very nature. And we know it.

Well, unsurprisingly, we humans also have a particular nature—as expressed by the great champion of social justice, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum:

“Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.”

As Catholic Marine Captain Christopher Check pointed out:

“When Pope Leo penned those lines more than a century ago, the world was already well in the throes of modernity, but it had not yet begun to indulge in the fringe fantasy that the sex roles revealed in the natural law could be flat-out denied. His words will be unpopular in our deeply disordered age, but that does not make them any less true. Speaking the truth in and out of season is the special responsibility of the Church. Let the clergy and episcopacy come forth and do so before any more members of the gentler sex are called to violate the nature that God gave them.”

Our clergy have allowed feminists to capture the moral high ground in this argument by making their case from a “rights”-based paradigm. But rights talk separated from the faith becomes a kind of Christianity without Christ. The bishops and priests need to recapture the true moral high ground by defending the nature of women—defending them from becoming wage slaves, cannon fodder, and replicas of men.

They are uniquely placed to do this, charged as they are with overseeing more than 2,000 Catholic schools in the UK. Here they could draw attention to the propaganda used to invert the natural order, articulate the unique role of women with force and precision, and speak out against policies designed to uproot women from the home.

There are already too many abortions; destroying the womb of the family is another devastation we could do without. Nor is it disconnected from the educational drive to push women into STEM, celebrate the United Nations, and apprise girls of their ‘rights’ as atomised, emancipated women. All of this is happening in Catholic schools up and down the country. There may be more degrees of separation in the abortion debate than are immediately obvious, but to play any part in unbalancing the natural order is to do the devil’s work—and surely Catholic schools serve a different master, don’t they?