If a week is a long time in politics, then nine years is surely an eternity in the transgender debate. I began this blog in September 2016 to record my thoughts and archive my published work. If it has my byline, there’s a copy here somewhere.
What is a woman? That once-simple but now-controversial question divided opinion in the 2024 Paris Olympics, where boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting both won gold medals. The International Boxing Federation had previously excluded them from women’s boxing, reportedly because they have XY chromosomes, denoting them as males. But the International Olympic Committee saw things differently. IOC spokesman Mark Adams claimed that, “They are women in their passports and it’s stated that this is the case, that they are female.”
Deep within the workings of an electric motor lies a split-ring commutator. It reverses the current flowing through the coil every half rotation so that the force on the coil also reverses as it spins between a pair of opposing magnetic poles.
If the country has not had enough sex by now, it may have by the election*. Political sex, that is – Rishi Sunak has clearly spotted an opportunity for a fully frontal attack on one of Labour’s weak spots. This morning, the Prime Minister promised that if re-elected, his government would rewrite the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biological sex.
Gillian Keegan has declared that she will no longer use the slogan, ‘trans women are women’ because, as she explains, her understanding of the issue has ‘evolved’. Good for her; it is far better that politicians develop their positions than dig their heels in and refuse to countenance the concept that they were ever wrong.
The decision* by Glasgow’s Sandyford gender clinic to pause the prescription of puberty blockers to children is good news for the children of Scotland. In due course, a public inquiry is needed into how doctors ever got involved in what may possibly be one of the greatest medical scandals of all time. For now, however, it’s important that no more children are harmed by an experimental treatment that in many cases did not improve children’s mental health and sometimes made the situation worse.
Children in England will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at NHS gender identity clinics. This is good news: it was never appropriate to halt the normal physical development of young people struggling with the concept of growing up into the men and women that nature intended.
This piece was written in response to an exchange in Parliament; it draws upon ideas that I developed in my book, Transsexual Apostate.
The transgender row isn’t going away. Prime Minister’s Questions this week was dominated by a jibe Rishi Sunak made about Keir Starmer’s stance on gender. The Labour leader then lashed out at Sunak for criticising him on the topic while the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey was in the Commons.
Debbie Hayton