Transgender issues in the law, politics, sport, and the impact on children
Debbie Hayton sitúa la denuncia contra Lidia Falcón en el contexto de la campaña previa a la presentación por el gobierno de una mal llamada Ley Trans. «Estas leyes ofrecen pocos beneficios a los transexuales como yo, que ya estamos bien protegidos por la legislación existente. En España, como en Reino Unido, las personas transexuales pueden incluso cambiar su sexo legal, si así lo desean. Pero eso es insuficiente para los grupos de presión LGBTQ que buscan sacudir radicalmente la sociedad».
Lidia Falcón O’Neill is a legendary figure in Spanish politics. Half a century ago, she stood up to Franco as head of a cell in the communist Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. In 1974, this opposition led to her being brutally tortured:
‘When she fainted they untied her and laid her on the ground. They woke her up with a bucket of water. … She stayed on the ground, wet, for hours, until they took her down to the cell. … On the sixth day, the torturers could not continue with the same sessions. They could no longer hang her on the wall because she was rapidly losing consciousness because of it. So, when she woke up, she kept getting punched and kicked while lying on the ground.’
Alejandro Torrús writing in Público (translated into English)
Joe Biden has wasted little time grabbing rights from women and girls across America. On day one, he signed an Executive Order on ‘Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation’. This is being hailed as a pivotal moment for transgender rights. But it’s nothing of the sort.
We’ve got to get real about the dangers of allowing vicious sex offenders with male anatomy to serve their sentences alongside vulnerable female prisoners. They are violent predators who pose a clear threat to women.
To those who believe that transwomen are women, the answer is simple: transwomen must serve custodial sentences in the female prison estate.
Objections can be dismissed as transphobic attempts to exclude one type of women just because they had the misfortune to be born with the wrong set of genitals.
2020 will, of course, be remembered as the year in which Covid-19 was unleashed on the world. But it is one in which another menace – gender identity ideology – was put firmly in its place, in the UK at least.
The Keira Bell judgment, which said that children are unlikely to be able to give informed consent for taking puberty-blocking drugs, ‘puts trans people everywhere’ at risk. That’s the verdict of Grace Lavery, a professor of English, critical theory, and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. From the other side of the Atlantic, Lavery described the case in an article for Foreign Policy as ‘an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K.’ It is, of course, nothing of the sort.
If the Keira Bell judgment did not sufficiently expose the shortcomings of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) – the only NHS clinic in England for children presenting with gender dysphoria – then another recent study published after that key ruling must surely now trigger a full-blown inquiry.
As we reflect on the Keira Bell case last week, spare a thought for another young person who is challenging an authority that has been bewitched by gender identity ideology.
Keira Bell has won her case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. As a transgender person, I am delighted for her but I am also relieved for the thousands of children who are chasing the impossible dream that it is possible to change sex.
Debbie Hayton