The Boris Johnson landslide spared us trans-inclusive Christmas carols, according to this Times journalist
Boris Johnson greets a man dressed as Father Christmas while campaigning in the North West ahead of the general election. (Toby Melville/WPA Pool/Getty Images)
If Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had won last week’s general election, the British public could have been forced to sing Christmas carols that recognise the existence of non-binary people, Giles Coren wrote today for The Times.
In a piece apparently mocking the fact that some non-binary people use they/them pronouns, Coren wrote that a Corbyn win might have “had us all singing… ‘We Three Male-Identifying Non-Binary Citizens (he/him) of Orient Are’.”
Coren was writing about a school in east London that has removed the word “Lord” from Christmas carol ‘Away In A Manger’ in order to be more inclusive of non-Christian pupils.
He wrote: “It’s all so pre-election, isn’t it? So clumsily anti-elitist. So impotently iconoclastic. So rancidly Corbynite.
“It is the sort of thing we (well, you) voted Boris back in to stamp out, and offers an opportunity to give thanks for the collapse of a political movement on Thursday that might otherwise have had us all singing, ‘Once in Some Bloke David’s City’, ‘Mr Wenceslas Looked Out’ and ‘We Three Male-Identifying Non-Binary Citizens (he/him) of Orient Are’.”
Before the election, Downing Street was accused of engaging in Trump-like tactics by testing how “culture war” issues like transgender rights could be weaponised in northern Labour-voting towns.
Coren’s comments come after another journalist, Helen Lewis, wrote for the Atlantic last Friday that Corbyn’s support for trans rights might be “extremely popular” on Twitter but is “perhaps less interesting” to voters in marginal northern constituencies.
“He [Corbyn] also pledged to allow adults to self-identify their gender, and suggested that the law might legally recognise nonbinary people,” Lewis wrote.
“Such policies are extremely popular among left-wing accounts on British political Twitter, but perhaps less interesting to swing voters in places such as Redcar, where the steelworks recently shut down under the Tory government, and where voters nevertheless switched from Labour to the Conservatives.”
The new Conservative MP for Redcar is Jacob Young, a 26-year-old gay man engaged to his boyfriend.
In October, government figures revealed that hate crimes against transgender people have quadrupled since 2015.
