JULIE BINDEL: Oxfam is a toxic charity that has strayed so far from its original goals

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

It’s a vicious, misogynistic attack on JK Rowling simply because she stood up so bravely for the rights of biological women.

And it speaks volumes about Oxfam, a charity that still proclaims its primary purpose as a desire to ‘help end poverty’, but today is so caught up in extreme political ideology and trans insanity that it is no longer fit for purpose .

It is a profoundly sad demise for the charity, founded in 1942 with the noblest of intentions to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece.

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

It’s a vicious, misogynistic attack on JK Rowling (pictured in 2018) simply for standing up so bravely for the rights of biological women

For decades, all kinds of people have poured their hard-earned money into this worthy project, believing they were helping those in need.

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

What on earth does this have to do with the people starving in Somalia, currently in the throes 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 forced into poverty?

Nothing of course. Instead, it’s a cloak of dignity that hides some ugly truths.

Led by its well-paid executives, Oxfam has succumbed to an offensive agenda that damages its reputation – and that of its employees who dare to publicly disagree with its stance on trans issues and diversity.

Let’s not forget that behind those friendly rainbow motifs is a charity that, in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, launched an investigation into reports that its own employees, including high-ranking figures, have been sexually assaulting local women and hiring prostitutes and girls for orgies .

Seven members of the Oxfam team in Haiti, including the chief of operations, Roland van Hauwermeiren, resigned or were fired in 2011 for sexual misconduct.

And yet Oxfam disgracefully stated that such behavior was not a case of trading ‘sex for help’ because the prostitutes were not actually beneficiaries of aid. In addition, she has not published her research report from 2011, the contents of which were not known until 2018.

A whitewash, then, and one that obscured an undeniable truth: that those employed by Oxfam were exploiting the desperate and damaged people they were supposed to protect. The ensuing furore should have been a wake-up call and an impetus for major changes at grassroots level.

Instead, even as the Oxfam Charity Commission imposed a 19-month oversight order to investigate what it called “protecting shortcomings,” and the charity made budget cuts and laid off staff, its LGBT+ network miraculously found the money to producing a training manual called ‘Learning about trans rights and inclusion’.

For decades, all kinds of people have poured their hard-earned money into this worthy project. In the photo: Julie Bindel

One of the 2021 manual’s claims was that “mainstream feminism supports the root causes of sexual violence” because it “centers on privileged white women and demands that ‘bad men’ be fired or jailed”

In other words, instead of accepting that sexual assault is a problem Oxfam should be fighting, it seemed to say that women who complained about it were the problem. It was another deeply disturbing insight into the nonsensical worldview of Oxfam’s senior executives, who have lately traveled so far through the mirror that they are no longer remotely in touch with the real world.

How else can you see it when a female employee I know named Maria (not her real name) was effectively fired from her job for defending JK Rowling? An employee had asked on an internal forum whether, given her “transphobic attitudes,” it was right to sell Rowling’s books in Oxfam thrift stores.

Maria replied that Oxfam stores stocked books from people of all different views and asked for proof of this alleged transphobia. It was – is – a legitimate response in a nation that supposedly protects free speech.

But in a now tiresomely familiar modern version of the Salem witch trials, Maria was instead subjected to a grueling internal investigation that eventually led to her having a nervous breakdown. Although Oxfam eventually issued a rude apology – there’s a pattern here – for what it called ‘procedural errors’, she felt she had no choice but to quit her beloved job.

Despite these apologies, I have no illusions that lessons have been learned. In fact, I know many more female charitable workers who are afraid to express their belief that gender-based rights matter, knowing that even an accusation of transphobia could lead to them being blacklisted.

Oxfam’s obsessive focus no longer seems to be its original mission of alleviating poverty and helping the most vulnerable, but instead a culture war. Earlier this year it published an “Inclusive Phrasebook” in which it apologized for the English language in 92 pages of self-flagellation, describing it as “the language of a colonizing nation” and a long list of words to avoid.

Among them are “mother” and “father” who they say attribute “gender roles” that can upset transgender people.

Again, you might ask what all this has to do with the dispossessed women in developing countries? In their struggle to survive in places where there is no access to birth control and abortion, and where rape and male violence are a daily reality, they have no choice but to face the punitive reality of their biology.

These are the women for whom Oxfam is meant to advocate for and create meaningful change. Instead, they pour resources donated by a well-meaning public into nonsensical pamphlets and filthy, virtuous videos that serve only to emphasize that this toxic organization has strayed so far from its original goals as to be almost unrecognizable.