Physics teacher and trade unionist.
Is Britain a hostile environment for trans people? The United Nations’ independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity has delivered his verdict – and it isn’t good. Victor Madrigal-Borloz, a lawyer from Costa Rica, said following a ten-day visit to the country: ‘I am deeply concerned about increased bias-motivated incidents of harassment, threats, and violence against LGBT people, including a rampant surge in hate crimes in the UK.’
When will sporting governing bodies see the reality that we all know to be true – that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies? Granted, many organisations have seen the light and taken action, but others remain in some sort of cloud cuckoo land where transwomen – biological males – are allowed to compete against biological females.
For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex.
Daniel Radcliffe has told a group of young people that adults worried about children changing gender have a ‘slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, well, people are young and like… that is a huge decision’.
Kemi Badenoch is considering a change to the Equality Act 2010 that would restore the meaning of sex to what everybody once understood. I am a science teacher, so I know this. There are two sexes: male and female. Females produces large gametes called eggs while males produce small motile gametes called sperm. Science doesn’t care whether it happens in frogs, monkeys or people – sexual reproduction is a robust process that has been around for millions of years.
Today* is International Transgender Day of Visibility – just like the preceding 89 days of 2023. But, jesting aside, it has prompted an astonishing proclamation from the White House. ‘Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,’ president Joe Biden has announced.
Really? Who did Biden have in mind? Maybe he was still entranced by Dylan Mulvaney, a self-absorbed social media influencer who shot to fame last March after documenting a gender transition. Since then, Mulvaney has relentlessly taken to TikTok chronicling each ‘day of girlhood’ in nauseating detail.
On day 222 of this egregious series, Mulvaney was invited to the White House to interview Biden. Trans privilege really does know no bounds, it seems. The president told Mulvaney:
‘I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to [ban gender affirming healthcare].’
Joe Biden
He added:
You should have every single solitary right including the use of your gender identity bathrooms’.
Joe Biden
Does Biden understand the implications for single-sex spaces? Does he even care?
That was October. Now the president has issued his ‘Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility’. In it, Biden takes a shot at states such as Florida and Tennessee, which have stepped in to protect children from the sex-change industry. In his proclamation, Biden suggested that, ‘A wave of discriminatory State laws is targeting transgender youth, terrifying families and hurting kids who are not hurting anyone.’
Biden is scaremongering. What Biden calls ‘transgender youth’ are indeed being targeted, not by state legislators, but clinicians who have spotted a cash cow and advertise their services on social media to impressionable girls.
And terrifying families? It’s hardly terrifying to be denied experimental treatments involving drugs where the long term prognosis is unknown. Disappointing perhaps, but only because these youngsters were made promises that could never be delivered.
Language like Biden’s feeds into a victim narrative. It does not help children struggling with gender distress to be told that the president thinks they may be terrified. Rather, it may well drive them further into despair and detachment from mainstream society.
As for ‘hurting kids who are not hurting anyone’, what’s hurting those children is the insidious ideology that has told them that they can change their sex – and that their satisfaction in life depends upon access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. This is a tragedy.
Biden is not merely a fool, he is playing with fire. Under his watch, gender identity ideology has driven the United States apart into a great schism of so-called red-states and blue-states. In the former, laws are being passed to protect vulnerable kids; the latter, meanwhile, like the president himself appear to celebrate what has unfolded under his watch. State has been set against state. Blue California even passed a bill to make the state ‘a refuge for transgender youth and their families’.
This rift needs to be healed fast with cool heads and clear minds. But while America divides, Biden fiddles. Yesterday, gun control activists stormed the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville and a ‘trans Shaman‘ joined an occupation of the Kentucky legislature; the same day, Biden signed off his statement with hubris, ‘NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim 31 March, 2023, as Transgender Day of Visibility.’
What will Biden make of 1 April, I wonder? Some agitators in Washington DC are not satisfied with mere visibility. They are planning a ‘Transgender Day of Vengeance’ in the capital tomorrow.
‘We choose to fight’, organisers declared. A dangerous cocktail of self-righteous indignation, victimhood, and the perceived support from the president himself has the potential to create enough chaos to wake up even Joe.
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.
* This article was first published by The Spectator on 31 March 2023: The trouble with Joe Biden’s trans declaration.
Debbie Hayton