The heated transgender debate is aggravated by muddled language that has obfuscated discussion and clouded understanding. Dispute resolution requires clarity of thought, which in turn needs precision of language. In transgender politics, that starts by unravelling sex and gender, description and definition, and even the verbs to be and to do.
The U.K. government has a rare opportunity to help trans people restore societal fairness and trust.
Like an out-of-control juggernaut, transgender ideology has steamrolled through legislatures and institutions, leaving irrational and unscientific policy in its wake. But there’s been some promising pushback in London this summer where the British government might be about to say no to the transgender lobby.
Gender recognition is the ultimate political hot potato. Three years after Justine Greening — the then Equalities Minister — announced a public consultation on changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, and two years after the public were finally asked for their views, we are still far from resolution. As the months passed, many assumed that the Government had kicked it into the long grass, if not the primeval forest.
The consultation itself came and went a year later in 2018 amid fervent campaigns by transgender activists eager to allow legal gender changes on demand, and women’s groups concerned that their boundaries would be rendered meaningless as a result. If men can identify as women — for whatever reason they might choose — how can they be kept out? It is naïve to rely on the argument that “men wouldn’t do that, would they?” Spaces such as changing rooms are most often cited, but also at risk are prisons, hospital wards, reserved places on committees and boards, scholarships and, indeed, every sex-based protection.
For the past two years, the hot potato never went cold — on the contrary, it ignited a social media inferno. The furore surrounding JK Rowling — condemned as a transphobe for reclaiming the word woman to describe her sex — is remarkable only because she is a public figure.
Coronavirus has closed schools, grounded planes and even delayed the start of the cricket county championship, but it has not shut down the transgender debate. This often toxic and divisive issue has proved to be one of the hardiest items in the news agenda in recent years. And even a pandemic has done little to limit the exposure.
Birth certificates are the latest topic to provoke fury. But now there is a difference. While the discussion up to now has broadly surrounded the documents of transgender people, the Court of Appeal has just upheld a ruling about the documents of their children.
As Covid-19 spread across every continent, the world changed in ways that we could not have anticipated as recently as Christmas. “Self-isolation” and “social distancing” have entered the lexicon and taken root in my mind to such an extent that video clips of people breaking the two-metre rule seem to belong to another age, like old silent movies. These are – to use an overworked expression – unprecedented times.
But trans people have been living in unprecedented times that go back further than Christmas. While previously we were largely ignored by politicians and the media – apart from occasional salacious and often unwelcome feature articles – trans issues have been high in the news agenda for the past three years. That has not always been a blessing.
As the United Kingdom plunges into an unprecedented crisis, the time has surely come to halt the reforms to self-identification of gender. Schools are closing; London could be locked down; even The Archers has an uncertain future – this really is a crisis. At such times, we can no longer afford the luxury of devoting time and resources to the foolish idea that biology matters less than feelings, when we divide humanity into male and female.
The transgender crisis that has engulfed the Labour Party has now lurched into a new and previously unimaginable phase. When the hitherto unknown group, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) launched its egregious manifesto last week, peak-lunacy seemed to have been reached.
Following demands for compliance — including “pledge 4: Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary” — they condemned what they considered to be transphobic organisations, naming Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance and calling for transphobes to be expelled from the party.
The butterfly effect describes how the flapping of tiny wings in China may cause a hurricane in the Caribbean a couple of weeks later. The hurricane tearing through social policy in Scotland at the moment also had small beginnings: not in China 14 days ago but in Yogyakarta, Indonesia 14 years ago. This, however, was no accident of chaos — it was deliberate and planned.
Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.
Este texto es una traducción del artículo publicado por Debbie Hayton en su blog el 29 de noviembre de 2016. Es necesario contextualizar la preocupación de Debbie como presona trans ante la posibilidad de que se modificaran las leyes del Reino Unido para favorecer la llamada “identidad de género” como criterio jurídico suficiente para reconocer a una persona como transexual. Para ello, recomiendo la lectura de la entrada de Wikipedia sobre la situación de los derechos de las personas trans en el Reino Unido.
Sir,
As a transwoman I second the offer by Janice Turner (“Swinson chose wokeness over women’s rights”, comment, Dec 7) to send a bunch of flowers to Jo Swinson. By exposing Lib Dem plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) as incoherent and inexplicable Turner has alerted the electorate to concerns that I have been raising for three years.
Debbie Hayton