So much for a juicy scandal.
In a world filled with pressing issues – climate disasters, economic hardship, and geopolitical unrest – it’s baffling to see major newspapers like the Telegraph and Daily Mail waste their ink on something as trivial as Sadiq Khan’s pronouns disappearing from his X profile.
But sadly the ‘story’ made its way into the national news cycle.
The Telegraph ran a piece entitled: “Sadiq Khan appears to have dropped ‘he/him’ pronouns from social media profile.”
The article goes into detail about how the London mayor, an outspoken critic of Elon Musk and Donald Trump for their attacks on “wokeness,” had previously used “he/him” pronouns on his X account, but now they are mysteriously missing.
The piece points out that there is growing migration of left-wing users to the social media platform Bluesky, partly in protest the changes Musk has made to X since he bought it in 2023. They’re not wrong there.
Only in the last sentence does it mention that a spokesperson for Khan attributed the missing pronouns to a technical glitch, with an assurance that they would be reinstated soon.
So much for a juicy scandal.
The Daily Mail took a similar approach, but with its own spin. The headline assured readers that Khan would restore the pronouns, only to then pivot into an unrelated tangent about a leaked inclusivity guide at City Hall.
According to the Mail, the guide advised City Hall staff to avoid terms like “asylum seekers” in favour of “people seeking asylum,” and suggested replacing “men and women” with the more inclusive “people” or “Londoners.”
Conservative MP Tom Hunt was quoted lashing out that this as “absurd.”
“This is the sort of nonsense that would be imposed on the whole country if Labour were ever to get into power,” Hunt is quoted saying in June 2023.
The disappearance of Khan’s pronouns on a single social media platform is a minor technical issue, nothing more, nothing less.
But for the Telegraph and Mail, it’s yet another opportunity to stoke division and ridicule ‘inclusivity,’ while detracting from the far more important issues facing the country. Distract from meaningful discussions by focusing on manufactured controversies, seems to be their agenda.
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