Can this really be Oxford University? It’s hard to believe when looking at the pictures of tutor Matt Rattley at the great institution.
Rattley gives lectures on biochemistry at St Hilda’s college while sporting make-up, skimpy dresses and giant prosthetic breasts to rival the late, great Dolly Parton. Those who rock up expecting an Oxford don bedecked in an academic gown, or even just tweed, are in for something of a shock.
I’ve been raised to believe it is unkind to criticise anyone’s appearance. But come on. Rattley is not so much inviting comment as insisting on it. If he identifies as a trans woman, he could easily wear more demure clothing and less obvious fake breasts. Instead he dresses like a pornographic pantomime dame, in a way guaranteed to make students feel deeply uncomfortable.
Indeed, three college graduates have written to the college with the concern that Rattley’s behaviour ‘violates women’s dignity’. They say it would be ‘reasonable for them to feel that it creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment’.
Of course it does. In the right-on world we live in today, we are encouraged not to state the bleeding obvious for fear of hurting feelings. Never mind what your lecturer looks like just keep scribbling your notes and forget about it. Don’t speak out lest you appear to be a bigot or Terf (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist).
But the elephant in the lecture hall is this: wearing exposed fake breasts is a fetish and fetishes have no place in public – let alone in a place of learning.
In 1989 Canadian-American sexologist Ray Blanchard coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ for men who are aroused by presenting themselves as a sexualised woman. Is it a wild assumption to suggest that this may be driving Rattley’s behaviour?
Rattley gives lectures on biochemistry at St Hilda’s college while sporting make-up, skimpy dresses and giant prosthetic breasts to rival the late, great Dolly Parton, writes Clare Foges
One Oxford academic spoke about a session which took place during the summer heatwave. ‘Rattley was sitting with his legs apart in a miniskirt, with his underwear visible.
‘It does feel like sexual harassment. You feel as though you’re being forced to participate in someone’s sexual fetish without being given a choice.’
The academic missed staff training sessions because she found being around Rattley distressing. ‘The worst part was that other people were behaving as though he was dressed normally. It makes you doubt your sanity.’
Indeed. In the topsy-turvy world we live in, everything counts as legitimate self-expression. Be true to you. Express yourself!
What makes this all the more galling is that St Hilda’s was founded as a refuge for female education. It was a women’s-only college for more than a century, only becoming co-ed in 2008. What on earth would the founder – a suffragist, no less – have made of this affront to the dignity of female students?
The case is reminiscent of the Canadian trans woodwork teacher who taught high school pupils wearing size Z breasts, fake nipples prominently displayed. The parents quite rightly revolted and the teacher was suspended.
In contrast, Oxford University is refusing to act.
Instead of politely asking Rattley to cover up, and suspending him if he fails to comply, it has put out the usual mealy-mouthed statement. It is ‘committed to being an inclusive and welcoming place where all members of our community feel respected, valued and able to be themselves’.
Given Oxford’s form for wokeness and weakness this is hardly surprising. In recent years its colleges have taken down a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II ‘because of colonialism’; responded to Black Lives Matter with compulsory unconscious bias training; and published an Inclusive Communication guide encouraging staff to avoid colloquial British phrases like ‘learn the ropes’ lest they exclude foreign students.
What makes this all the more galling is that St Hilda’s (pictured) was founded as a refuge for female education. It was a women’s-only college for more than a century, writes Clare Foges
The fact they are doing nothing about the patently absurd Rattley situation demonstrates something that has long been true of the so-called progressive left. They profess to care about equal rights for all, but somehow women’s rights always seem to come last.
We see it in pro-Palestinian campaigners who have a blind spot about the sexual atrocities perpetrated on Israeli women on October 7. Or those who ignored young teenage girls being groomed in Rochdale and Rotherham because of sensitivities around race.
Or those – including British universities – who happily allow gender-segregated dinners, marches, even fun runs in the name of religion. Yes, they’ll shriek about sandwiches containing the patriarchal ingredient Gentleman’s Relish, but not about women stuck eating their dinner behind a screen like something from medieval times.
And, of course, no one is marching for the truly oppressed women of Afghanistan either.
But it’s the issue of trans rights which again and again exposes the hypocrisy in the left-wing progressive position. University campuses have been utterly craven in bowing to the trans mob, cancelling speakers and casting those who want to protect single-sex spaces as bigots. For progressives, women are always at the bottom of the pile. And in case anyone should be tutting that this is nonsense, imagine this: a lecturer at an Oxford college turns up to work wearing blackface and a dreadlocked wig.
Can you imagine the outcry? Left-wing papers would be beside themselves. Students would be rioting. There would be letters to The Guardian signed by a hundred luvvies. But when the grotesque parody is not of a black person but of a woman, the lefties are curiously silent.
It’s strange, because progressives normally have so much to say on appropriation. In recent years we have had celebrities pilloried for wearing Native American costumes with feathered head dresses, and complaints about straight actors getting a gay part in a film.
Yet when a lecturer straps on a pair of plastic breasts, the young women in the lecture hall are meant to brush aside their discomfort and allow him to be himself. The double standards can be seen from space. Speaking of double standards, it would be unthinkable for a woman to wear such a grotesquely low cut top to work.
Why, then, is this to be celebrated as self-expression when the breasts are strapped to a lavishly bearded man?
No doubt Oxford academics are terrified of being accused of bigotry – or even sued for discrimination – if they ask Rattley to tone it down. But carrying on pretending this is normal or acceptable in the name of ‘inclusivity’ is not serving anybody, least of all the students to whom Oxford has a duty of care.
There is a clear difference between freedom of expression and abusing this right for your own gratification in public, and most right-thinking people can see what this is.