Every few years, usually when geopolitics turns ugly, a rumour does the rounds: there will be a draft. And almost immediately, a second rumour follows: some groups will be exempt. Recently, social media has been alive with claims that if Britain ever reintroduced conscription, Muslim migrants would be exempt.

This is nonsense — legally, constitutionally, and practically. The UK has no draft, no plans for one, and no lawful way to exempt people on religious grounds even if it did. That claim collapses almost instantly.

But dismissing the rumour misses the more interesting question it accidentally raises. Because if a draft were introduced in a modern liberal democracy, the real problem would not be religion or migration at all. It would be women.

Equality Meets the Front Line

For most of my adult life, we have been told — insistently, sometimes aggressively — that equality means sameness: equal rights, equal opportunities, equal outcomes where possible. In peacetime, this doctrine is enforced with bureaucratic zeal. Any deviation is treated as a moral failing.

War, however, is not peacetime.

Conscription, if it returned, would force a choice the equality project has spent decades avoiding: is equality about equal status, or equal burden?

If equality is genuine, then women must be subject to conscription on the same basis as men. Not symbolically. Not administratively. But materially — including exposure to death on the front lines.

There is no third option that survives scrutiny.

The Legal Trap

A men-only draft in the UK would almost certainly face immediate legal challenge under the Equality Act. Women now serve in combat roles; the old "protective" justification no longer applies. If the state asserts that women are equally capable of command, authority, and violence, it cannot coherently argue they are uniquely exempt from mortal risk.

A gender-neutral draft, therefore, is not radical. It is the legally conservative option.

And this is where the rhetoric begins to wobble.

The Sound of Cognitive Dissonance

Ask the question plainly — should women be drafted and sent to the front line? — and watch what happens.

Among radical feminists in particular, the response is often not argument but outrage. The contradiction produces visible distress. Equality, it turns out, was never meant to include disposability.

The moral energy that fuels demands for representation, pay parity, and institutional power evaporates when equality demands blood rather than benefits. What was framed as a universal principle suddenly becomes "context-sensitive", "complex", or "deeply problematic".

In other words: equality is affirmed right up to the point where it becomes costly.

What States Actually Do

Interestingly, when nations face real existential threat, ideology retreats. Even the most egalitarian societies quietly reintroduce asymmetry.

Women are encouraged to serve, praised when they volunteer, but less often compelled. Men are restrained, mobilised, and treated as a strategic resource. This pattern holds in Israel, Ukraine, and Scandinavia alike — regardless of the slogans printed on government websites.

Everyone knows this. No one wants to say it.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The truth is not that feminists are hypocrites, or that conservatives are secretly right about everything. The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable:

Modern equality discourse was built for peacetime.

It was never designed to answer the question war asks: who is expected to die?

When that question is forced into the open, the moral architecture buckles. And so we retreat into silence, euphemism, or denial — because admitting the asymmetry would shatter a comforting fiction.

A Conservative Conclusion — But Not Only Conservative

From a conservative perspective, this outcome is unsurprising. Societies have always distinguished between roles, obligations, and risks. Attempting to flatten those distinctions works only until reality intrudes.

But here is the key point: the contradiction is not imposed from outside. It flows directly from the internal logic of radical equality itself.

If equality is absolute, then so is shared sacrifice.
If shared sacrifice is intolerable, then equality was never absolute.

You cannot have both — and the draft, hypothetical though it may be, exposes that truth with brutal clarity. It exposes the paradoxes of feminism.