JULIE BINDEL: Oxfam is a toxic charity that has shifted so far from its original aims

I’m no stranger to the bile spewed at feminists like me by trans-activists online, but the Oxfam video I watched yesterday left me deeply disturbed.

It is a vile, misogynistic attack against JK Rowling, simply because she has so bravely championed the rights of biological women.

And it speaks volumes about Oxfam, a charity which still trumpets its primary purpose as a desire to ‘help end poverty’ but which today is captured to such an extent by extreme political ideology and trans-lunacy that it is no longer fit for purpose.

It’s a deeply sad demise for the charity, founded in 1942 with the noblest of aims to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece.

From these simple beginnings it expanded to provide international aid around the world, helping to combat poverty and hunger, as its fuller name, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, makes clear.

It is a vile, misogynistic attack against JK Rowling (pictured in 2018), simply because she has so bravely championed the rights of biological women 

For decades, all manner of people have been pouring their hard-earned cash into this worthy project, in the belief that they were helping those in real need.

But priorities at the charity have changed. Should you click on Oxfam’s website today, the first thing you will see – against a backdrop of rainbow flags and banners – is the slogan ‘diversity makes us’.

What on Earth, you may think, has this got to do with those starving in Somalia, currently in the grip of a catastrophic famine; or Ethiopia, where millions are tormented by drought and conflict?

Or for that matter Afghanistan, where an entire population has been pushed into poverty?

Nothing, of course. Instead, it is a cloak of worthiness which conceals some ugly truths.

Under the leadership of its highly-paid executives, Oxfam has succumbed to an offensive agenda that is damaging to its reputation – as well as to those of its staff who dare to publicly disagree with its stance on trans issues and diversity.

Let us not forget that behind those friendly rainbow motifs lies a charity that in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti launched an investigation into reports that its own employees, including senior figures, sexually abused local women, hiring prostituted women and girls for orgies.

Seven members of the Oxfam team in Haiti, including the head of the operation, Roland van Hauwermeiren, resigned or were sacked for sexual misconduct in 2011. 

And yet disgracefully, Oxfam declared such behaviour was not a case of exchanging ‘sex for aid’ because the prostitutes weren’t actually beneficiaries of aid. What is more, it failed to publish its 2011 report of the investigation, whose contents only became known in 2018.

A whitewash then, and one which concealed an undeniable truth: that those employed by Oxfam exploited the desperate and damaged people they are meant to protect. The furore that followed should alone have been a wake-up call and a push for major grassroots change.

Instead, even as the Charity Commission imposed a 19-month supervision order on Oxfam to investigate what it called ‘safeguarding failings’, and the charity introduced cuts and laid off staff, its LGBT+ network miraculously found the money to produce a training manual called ‘Learning About Trans Rights and Inclusion’. 

For decades, all manner of people have been pouring their hard-earned cash into this worthy project. Pictured: Julie Bindel

Among the 2021 manual’s claims was that ‘mainstream feminism is supporting the root causes of sexual violence’ because it ‘centres privileged white women and demands that ‘bad men’ be fired or imprisoned’

In other words, rather than accepting that sexual violence is a problem that Oxfam ought to combat, it seemed to be saying that women who complained about it were the issue. It was another deeply concerning insight into the nonsensical world view of Oxfam’s senior executives, who have latterly travelled so far through the looking glass that they are no longer remotely in touch with the real world.

How else can you view it when a female employee I know called Maria (not her real name) was effectively hounded out of her job for coming to the defence of JK Rowling? A member of staff had asked on an internal forum whether, given her ‘transphobic views’, it was right to sell Rowling’s books in Oxfam’s charity shops.

Responding, Maria pointed out that Oxfam’s shops stocked books by people with all kinds of different outlooks, and asked for evidence of this supposed transphobia. It was – is – a legitimate response in a nation which purportedly protects free speech.

Yet in a now wearyingly familiar modern version of the Salem witch trials, Maria was instead subjected to a gruelling internal investigation which, ultimately, led her to have a nervous breakdown. While Oxfam eventually offered a grovelling apology – there’s a pattern here – for what it called ‘procedural mistakes’, she felt she had no choice but to leave a job she loved.

Despite this apology, I am under any no illusion that any lessons have been learned. In fact, I know of many more female employees in the charitable sector who live in terror of expressing their belief that sex-based rights matter, knowing that even an accusation of transphobia can lead to them being blacklisted from employment.

Oxfam’s obsessive focus seems no longer to be its founding mission of alleviating poverty and helping the most vulnerable but instead a culture war. Earlier this year, it published an ‘Inclusive Language Guide’ during which, over the course of 92 self-flagellating pages, it apologises for the English language, describing it as ‘the language of a colonising nation’, and offering a lengthy list of words that should be avoided.

Among them are ‘mother’ and ‘father’ which they claim ascribe ‘gendered roles’ which could upset transgender people.

Again you might ask what any of this has to do with the dispossessed women in developing countries? Striving to survive in places with no access to contraception and abortion, and where rape and male brutality is a daily reality, they have no choice but to face the punishing reality of their biology.

These are the women for whom Oxfam are meant to advocate and create meaningful change. Instead, they are pouring resources donated by a well-meaning public into nonsensical pamphlets and nasty, virtue-signalling videos that only serve to highlight that this toxic organisation has shifted so far from its original aims as to be almost unrecognisable.