Category: Transgender
Transgender issues in the law, politics, sport, and the impact on children
July 2023 could soon be declared as the hottest month on record. Few doubt that climate change is real and that it is in our interest to do something about it. So, of all the parties competing for votes next year, you might imagine that the Green party of England and Wales would be single-minded in the goal of championing planet-saving research and promoting ways in which we can all do our bit. This is a golden chance for the party to welcome anyone who shares those objectives.
The organisation has followed swimming’s lead on female competition.
World Aquatics’s new open category is a welcome development
The Department for Education has delayed yet further its long-awaited transgender guidance for schools. Rishi Sunak had pledged that the document would be in our hands ‘for the summer term’, but that looks increasingly like another broken promise.
Who can compete in women’s sports? This week’s* decision by the European Court of Human Rights further complicates the debate. Judges in Strasbourg upheld Caster Semenya’s appeal against World Athletics regulations that requited athletes like Semenya to lower their testosterone levels to be allowed to compete with women. The court ruled that those regulations were ‘a source of discrimination’ for Semenya ‘by the manner in which they were exercised and by their effects’, and the regulations were ‘incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights’.
The decision by two judges to refuse to allow the trans charity Mermaids to proceed with a bid to strip LGB Alliance of its charitable status is nothing short of a victory for gay and lesbian rights.
This morning’s* news that the LGB Alliance has won its case to retain its charitable status is a victory and a relief for everyone who wants to live in a free and progressive society. That status was challenged by Mermaids and Jolyon Maugham’s so-called Good Law Project. Their argument seemed to be that it was not acceptable for gay and lesbian people to set up a charity to promote gay and lesbian rights. If LGB Alliance had lost, we might as well have returned to the 1950s when same-sex attraction was practically unspeakable.
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Rishi Sunak is no transphobe
Does a woman have a penis? Of course not. Until recently, that basic biological fact was accepted by almost everyone. Perhaps it still is but, with the transgender thought police waiting in the wings, it is a truth that few politicians are willing to articulate.
If the LGBTQIA+ community has become a church for the new millennium, it is certainly attracting adherents across the world. A survey by Ipsos of 22,500 adults across 30 countries showed that nine per cent of adults now identified as LGBT+. Among Generation Z – those born after 1997 – the figure is even higher: 14 per cent claimed to be LGB, 2 per cent said they were asexual, and 6 per cent placed themselves somewhere under the transgender umbrella.