For the first time ever, women are allowed to serve in every single role in the RAF. It's great and good news for the UK's defence teams, with defence secretary Michael Fallon saying back when he announced the change in June that: 'Individuals who are capable of meeting the standards for the regiment will be given the opportunity to serve, regardless of their gender. This is a defining moment for the RAF.'
Tobias Ellwood, current defence minister and a former soldier, said it's a 'Proud moment in RAF's history'. But of course, this news has upset an important man who's voiced this upset. Col Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told BBC Essex that he thinks women shouldn't battle alongside men.
‘My concern is primarily in terms of physical capabilities and the effects that long-term stresses and strains of infantry training and operations will have on a woman’s body’, he said.
Explaining that training ‘puts enough of a strain on a man’s body’, he added: ‘if you can imagine the stresses that is going to put on a woman’s body over four years minimum – and many cases much longer – we will have some pretty severe problems for women.’
Not only is he worried about ‘significant compensation payments being made out of the defence budget’, but he’s freaking out that training could affect women’s ability to have kids, making the injuries ‘more significant’, and concerned the training standards will fall.
To back up his argument, Col Kemp explained that men and women don’t play professional football or rugby together, do they?
While it’s irrefutable that women and men’s biologies can be fundamentally different, what Col Kemp might be missing, is that people can be individuals. Maj Judith Webb told The Guardian: ‘Being aware of our physical differences is an important aspect, but that is where I feel research has now been carried out.
‘We want to promote diversity and get the best people, and if we have got women who want to do it and who are capable of doing it, then of course they should be able to do it.’
Plus, unlike rugby or football - both segregated-sex sports which Col Kemp cited as proof of women and men’s different capabilities - you don’t need 11 or 15 people to enter the field. There may indeed be plenty of women who aren’t physically up to the training and selection. But perhaps some, even just a tiny few, totally are. If they’re willing to fight and train, why should the army miss out on their skills? Look at the fire service, the police force; they have mixed sex patrols and teams, don't they?
Finally, has this Colonel paid attention to the only conflict that the UK is fighting right now, in Syria?
Because towards the north of the country, the Women’s Protection Unit, a Kurdish force which goes by the acronym YPG, has long been battling for the liberation of towns and cities occupied by ISIS. Not only do these women go into battle with ISIS, but they pose an additional threat to the Islamist extremists. You see, to ISIS, while dying in battle renders a fighter a martyr, destined for paradise and maybe 72 virgins, if you’re killed by a woman, you don’t get to paradise.
The reasoning is, even though it’s alright to stone gays and use kids as human shields and rape women and girls and blow up innocent people, it’s such a shameful thing to be killed by a woman you don’t, unlike your kid-killing raping-pillaging cohort, deserve eternal happiness.
British women, like Kimberley Taylor from Blackburn, are already fighting alongside the Kurdish troops to defeat ISIS. Earlier in 2017, as part of a fantastic piece in* The Guardian* on anti-ISIS fighters in northern Syria, Taylor pointed out, on her way to the western front to defeat ISIS in their quest to hold Raqqa, that ‘Sure, women have personal freedoms, but western society is not free’.
Col Kemp can prattle on all he likes about football teams and women’s injuries, but why on earth wouldn’t he want to have brave women like Taylor fighting for Britain? If she's up for it, that is.
You might also be interested in:
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.