Not believing women isn't confined to the Spanish FA

Not when the object of his unsolicited attention is a star player finally provoked into an unambiguous statement that the embrace was in no way, shape or form “consensual.”

Jenni Hermoso’s anguished response came after days when the Spanish FA, (president Luis Rubiales), astonishingly accused her of instigating the smacker and lifting the poor president off his feet.

Days when she and her family and friends were all pressured to agree to a joint ­statement with the unlovely Luis. To her credit, she finally told the Spanish FA ­precisely what to do with their non-apology, requiring the kind of anatomical manoeuvre not ­normally found in soccer manuals.

As pretty well any woman will tell you, ­receiving unwanted attention of a sexual ­nature is about par for the female course. The group reporting on misogyny in ­Scotland said that 93.4% of the women describing abusive or harassing behaviour to them didn’t bother reporting it to the police. They assumed they wouldn’t be believed or that no action would be taken. Or both.

Not believing women, and/or victim blaming is not confined to the Spanish FA.

That Misogyny and Criminal ­Justice Working Group, chaired by Helena ­Kennedy KC, published its dispiriting ­report on International Women’s Day last March. Helena said that even as a time-served criminal lawyer who had heard some awful stuff, she was still shocked by the evidence presented.

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Her group made four very particular ­recommendations about the creation of new laws to protect women.

The first of these was to have a new statutory law of aggravation attached to misogynistic behaviour. As Roddy ­Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, ­explained last week on what I still regard as Twitter, where there is an aggravation attached, the police are normally required to report an incident to the Procurator Fiscal.

Which is presumably why the verbal ­abuser of Patrick Harvie has been ­arrested and charged. For aggravation already ­applies to abuse concerning a person’s race, religion, or sexual orientation but does not cover misogynistic abuse of women.

The Kennedy commission decided against trying to add this protection to the Equality Act since, self-evidently, ­women are not a minority. But as we know, being in the majority of the ­population is no guarantor of equality.

It’s now 63 years since the Equal Pay Act came into legal force, yet the income gap between jobs done by men and ­women remains stubbornly high. The language used for “work of equal value” turns out to have been sufficiently woolly to have been exploited, sometimes by the very unions supposedly representing the women’s concerns.

Worse still, some men have made tidy fortunes “helping” women access the money they have long been due in back pay. As Roz Foyer, the current general ­secretary of the Scottish TUC pointed out a couple of days ago, it’s only when some of the women themselves took strike ­action that their employers were forced to acknowledge the value of their ­contribution.

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There are myriad reasons for financial inequality. Most part-time workers are women since they often have to juggle child-rearing and housework with the ­external variety. As we all know, men have absolutely no part to play in the ­creation of new human beings subsequently in need of rearing!

Some women take career breaks for the same reasons and then find themselves several rungs further down the promotion ladder when they rejoin the workforce they left.

There were also some “ingenious” wheezes thought up as the Equal Pay Act began to impinge on a few ­employers’ ­radars. Like the national chain which ­promoted all its male staff to avoid ­comparators.

Outside of “normal” sex ­discrimination, women find themselves involuntarily conscripted into the army of biological women who become placed in the firing line for the apparently heinous crime of believing in science.

Women described as “cis”, by those who have spent the last few years ­getting themselves in a linguistic fankle over ­terminology with which most folk were entirely comfortable. Put your head above this particular parapet and ­prepare to be lambasted by those who detect ­transphobia everywhere.

Few people would quibble with the ­assertion that trans rights are human rights. Few would deny that there was a need to simplify the transition process in a way that preserved the dignity and privacy of those wishing to change ­genders. And there are now legal routes to having a new gender identity on all your documentation.

Yet somewhere along the line, women who were content with their current ­status morphed into the enemy. Were listed as “gender critical”. Lost ­positions, especially in academia and other ­institutions running scared of the new thought police.

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In truth, it’s not always easy to keep up with contemporary demands on your own linguistic purity. I give you, as of June this year, the latest acronym: “LGBTQQIP2SAA is an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit (2S), androgynous, and asexual.”

Confused? You may well be. But that is NOT ALLOWED. You must learn and digest this new understanding of current sexual status or be forever condemned to sit on whatever new naughty step is ­devised.

My own credo is that tolerance has to be a two-way street; just as there is an ­obvious need to protect the tiny minority of trans citizens (as there is for every ­minority of whatever size), there cannot be a blanket ban on discussion and ­debate. It’s how the human race has ­always progressed.

Now, however, the very word ­progressive has been captured and weaponised. It no longer means seeking progress in the ­usual sense of that word. Instead it’s code for being pro trans rights and anti-the-so-called gender critical variety.

Frankly, I resent being dumped in a basket labelled “regressive”. So do all the women I know who have spent their lives endorsing human rights of all and every kind. We didn’t suddenly become bigots because the trans lobby found a louder voice and some high-profile allies.

In truth, we were more than happy to be recruited as allies ourselves before word came down from somewhere that if you weren’t sufficiently vocal for trans rights then you were “obviously” against them.

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There is another unspoken problem with this knee-jerk hostility and it concerns all those who have successfully transitioned in earlier years. They were getting on with their new lives maybe with varying degrees of success, but hopefully with much-cherished anonymity.

Now they too have been thrust into an unwelcome spotlight in the communities where they worked hard to be accepted for what they had fervently wished to become.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, trilled Tammy Wynette in a schmaltz-­infused song which would rightly be mocked by any self-respecting young ­female today. Yet that sentiment holds. For straight and lesbian and trans women alike.

There are immense privileges attendant on being a woman. Yet in 2023, it seems we still have to find a way of jettisoning that second-class label. And still rid some of our men of that sense of sexual entitlement displayed by Luis Rubiales and all men who think that women were put on this earth to pander to them.

A good starting point would be mothers not treating their sons like mini gods.

Luis’s mama locked herself in church and went on hunger strike prepared, she said, to die for her son. Get a grip, ­sunbeam. Adjust your priorities. ­

Remember that other line the gooey Tammy sang: “After all he’s just a man.”