Why is an Oxford lecturer allowed to wear fake breasts to work?

Once again, professional standards take a back seat to identity politics.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The viral images shared online this week of Matt Rattley, a lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Oxford, were first assumed by many to be satirical. For here was a bearded, middle-aged man with large prosthetic breasts who proudly wears this garb to work. It looked like a meme created by AI.

Was it a joke? Most of us will recall the case of Kayla Lemieux, the woodwork teacher in Canada, who wore fake breasts the size of basketballs to his school. At the time he claimed that the breasts were real, the result of a rare medical condition called gigantomastia, but this was almost certainly all part of the trolling. For one thing, he was working extremely close to the circular saw, which would surely be a safety hazard.

While the matter was never resolved, most assume that Lemieux was testing the system, mocking the school for its own woke excesses. If this was satirical, it was all the more satisfying to hear the school’s spokesperson interviewed on television and asserting that ‘her’ gender identity must be validated.

By contrast, Rattley seems to be a sincere case of a man who is goading his employers and students by wearing fetishistic attire to work. Many have speculated that he might be an autogynephile, a man who is aroused by dressing in stereotypically female attire. But this is to indulge in armchair psychology; Rattley has made no statements, and so his motives remain unclear.

What we do know is that he is behaving unprofessionally and the university has thus far failed to reprimand him for it. Whatever one’s views on ‘gender identity’, it should not be controversial to point out that dress codes in an academic workplace should not permit the wearing of fetish gear. When I worked at Oxford, if I had turned up to my tutorials in skin-tight studded rubberwear and a barbed-wire whip, I would have expected my students to complain. I would have been fired, and rightly so.

Rattley’s conduct is even worse than this theoretical scenario, because it strikes many as inherently misogynistic. If it is not calculated to offend women, then it represents a baffling ignorance on Rattley’s part. There can be few less subtle methods of caricaturing, and thereby sneering at, the female anatomy. Worse still, he works at St Hilda’s College, which was a single-sex institution for over a century, only admitting men after 2008.

So how is it that a question of professional conduct has been subsumed into a debate about gender expression? It points to the sacralisation of identity in our era; the fulfilment of one’s ‘authentic self’ is deemed non-negotiable, and must supersede all societal conventions.

Behind the shield of ‘gender identity’, men are able to insult and abuse women and then cry victim when their targets object. Rattley will surely know that any female student who complains about his fake breasts will be accused of bigotry, and will possibly face disciplinary measures. Public displays of private fetishes are often associated with a sense of power over others. This may or may not be relevant to Rattley, but he is surely intelligent enough to understand that it is a reasonable inference.

Some have argued that Rattley’s behaviour amounts to a form of sexual harassment in the workplace. The employment and discrimination barrister Akua Reindorf has considered this point, noting that ‘it’s strongly arguable that wearing giant prosthetic breasts at work is conduct related to sex. Then the question is whether it’s either deliberately violating women’s dignity etc or it’s reasonable for women to feel that way’. She goes on to note that if Rattley’s defence was that his attire is related to his protected characteristic of gender reassignment, then a female student’s objections could not be taken as discriminatory (given that gender-critical views are likewise protected by law).

Of course, it is incredible that such debates are necessary at all. Only in the woke era would a university not immediately dispense with the services of a lecturer who insists on wearing fetish gear to work. With any luck, Rattley is just a misunderstood satirist, lampooning the identity-monomania of higher education. On balance, that seems to be wishful thinking. And if academics at Oxford can’t be trusted to adhere to a professional dress code, it might be time to bring back the old gown and mortarboard.

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