James Esses: The Trans TAKEOVER of John Lewis. Part 3 in my trilogy on how institutions have been CAPTURED

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This is the third and final piece in a trilogy that has shown how major household names, including the Financial Times and BBC, have been captured. The pieces are by our new columnist James Esses who writes each Monday. You can support his work by upgrading.

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John Lewis Partnership (JLP) first appeared on my radar when I was contacted on Twitter/X by a mother whose son had recently started working for the company.

Within a couple of days of starting work, he was asked by his appointed mentor where his pronoun badge was. When he questioned whether it was mandatory, the response was “no but it’s transphobic not to”.

You can tell a lot about a company from the attitude of its frontline staff. This gave me an indication that certain ideologies were prevalent within JLP.

To find out whether this was simply an isolated incident, I put a call out on Twitter/X, asking for individuals with connections to JLP to get in touch with me.

What followed was truly shocking  - employee after employee contacting me to raise concerns they held regarding the ideologies being imposed upon themselves and their colleagues. It soon became clear that JLP has been completely and utterly captured.

Let me show you why —and why this is just as shocking as what we have seen taking place in both the Financial Times and the BBC.