Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organization For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones.

Additionally, no matter what his personal confusion over identity, he does not get to count as a “lesbian”, and nor does he get to gatecrash designated lesbian-only social events or dating pools. (This last finding was of particular delight to me, since the organization I co-direct with Julie Bindel, The Lesbian Project, was one of a number of “lesbian interveners” in the Supreme Court case.)

This judgment was a humiliating failure for certain members of the Scottish government past and present, not least the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The ministers’ position, that Equality Act protections for sex and sexual orientation pertained to “certificated” sex, rather than biological sex, was said by judges to exhibit “incoherence and absurdity” — a description which, to seasoned observers of SNP-related gender fiascos, seemed altogether too kind. But the result was also a wider defeat for the US transactivist movement as a whole: the end of a campaign so catastrophically overreaching and self-owning that it has to be up there with Operation Barbarossa.

Around 10 years ago, most organizations didn’t think twice about the relation between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, and were prepared to turn a blind eye to both men and women with GRCs using the facilities and services of the opposite sex. Given the small numbers of trans-identified people making use of this privilege, and the fact that many of these people exhibited medically-induced physical changes, the general public was none the wiser, and most wouldn’t have cared if they had been. But then transactivist organizations had the brilliant idea of pushing for a shiny new prize called “self-ID”. Any man with surging feelings of inner girlhood should count as a woman for all legal purposes, and vice versa for any woman in touch with her inner man. All of a sudden, there was supposedly no need for any certificate at all, and certainly no previous encounter with any doctor.

If one of the now-burgeoning numbers of trans-identified people did want a GRC, they should get one automatically, without professional oversight — or so a nationwide transactivist campaign, backed by every major political party, proclaimed. But even if they chose not to get a GRC at all, they still had the right to walk into whichever single-sex space or service they pleased, on the basis of however they felt that day. As a result of this piece of strategic brilliance, widely enacted on the advice of Stonewall by thousands of supine institutions, self-ID is now dead as a political project. What’s more, the complete irrelevance of GRCs in relation to single-sex protections has been legally established with maximum publicity.

Like a military historian reviewing the mistakes of wartime generals, we might ask: where did it all go wrong? One big problem was the abilities of the generals themselves. Under Ruth Hunt, Stonewall unilaterally embraced self-ID while still purporting to advocate for LGB people, ushering in what became known as its “no debate” era (as in: “Transwomen are women, no debate!”). In 2019, Hunt apparently gave the self-interested game away to the Guardian: “It’s about treating people as they want to be treated, and when it causes no disadvantage to me whatsoever, who am I to challenge it?”. Next at the helm was statistician Nancy Kelley, perhaps best remembered for likening lesbians to “sexual racists” for their failure to feel attraction towards men professing womanhood, although there was a notorious Census-related balls-up too.

Meanwhile over at Mermaids, the nation’s foremost charity for transitioning children, then-boss Susie Green was busy falsely telling already anxious young people that Mermaids’ critics hated them and wanted them to die. On her watch, there was a series of scandals and tactical missteps, including a disastrous legal attempt to get the LGB Alliance’s charity status removed. This was immediately followed by an embarrassing Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids itself. Green is now reduced to co-directing an “online telehealth service” selling “gender affirming care” including puberty blockers; while her former close associate Dr Helen Webberley is on TikTok, making videos about the supposed ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of trans-identified people, using footage of Auschwitz as a backdrop.

Aside from these personnel issues at the top, another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.

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The result of the first of these was fancy-sounding obfuscation about spectrums, social constructs, and the supposedly close relation between trans-identified and so-called intersex people. But this was only ever likely to work with the young or dull-witted, while cleverer minds watched and learned from the mistakes. Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.

At first, the ludicrous name-calling hurt quite a lot, particularly when it seemed those around you were in danger of believing the hype. But after endless mechanical repetition, the words start to bounce off. At that point, you have removed all the fuel from your opponents’ rhetorical flamethrowers, and no attempt to shame you in public is ever going to work again.

In other words: thanks to opponents’ heavy-handed tactics, an army of highly motivated and competent women emerged. These women could no longer be cowed or controlled by the fear of having their reputations destroyed. And even worse for their opponents, despite all the bullying, many proud inhabitants of Rainy Fascist Terf Island maintained an irreverent sense of humor, something nobody has ever said about British transactivists with a straight face.

After self-ID started to affect the Highgate Women’s Pond in 2018, an intrepid group known as “Man Friday” wore fake mustaches and beards to swim in the Men’s Pond. When David Lammy called us “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights”, activist Kellie-Jay Keen brought dinosaur costumes to protests. The passing of Scotland’s shameful Gender Recognition Reform Bill was met with horror from onlookers in the parliamentary chamber, but campaigner Elaine Miller defiantly highlighted its sponsors’ moral indecency by flashing a fake pubic wig. And while many hilarious placards and posters have been seen at protests over the years, my personal favorites were also Scottish ones: “No laddies in the ladies” and “Yer daw is not yer maw”.

So, while the other side most definitely had all the gender identities, our side had more tangible assets in the shape of brains, guts, and heart. Given the damage done by Sturgeon to the cause of women and girls north of the border, it is fitting that the biggest victory in the gender wars should belong to members of that esteemed company, the women who wouldn’t wheesht. In the former First Minister, we are given a perfect encapsulation of the tongue-clucking, eye-rolling, mostly performative feminist attitude favored by women in the progressive establishment. But thanks to For Women Scotland and their many grassroots allies, we have been given the real thing.

Labour’s class of 2017, of which I am a member, has struggled through the past few years of Brexit legislation, the Corbyn era, our party’s greatest election defeat in history, the shame of both antisemitism and the Forde report, and the virtual-voting lockdown Covid parliament.

We are no longer the new kids. We have graduated to “middle school” and are starting to establish ourselves as members of the Shadow Cabinet, junior prefects, Head Girls and Boys under our current Headmaster. This week, he doled out the Senior School roles first, then the prefects and milk monitors were appointed. Our sports teams were fully filled and kitted out for the start of the new competition season.

It’s always fascinating to watch from the sidelines as this charade plays out.

First comes the not-so-subtle toadying up to teachers (aka lobbying), then the speculation and rumours, followed by the seething rage as current shadow ministers have to endure the humiliating and crude discourtesy of reading another’s appointment to their role via a Labour Party tweet. Watch them quietly boiling away for days, with a rictus grin plastered on as they wait to announce themselves “thrilled” with whatever’s left. Which kind of begs the question: how did they grin and bear the past 10 months or two years as Minister for Endangered Birds if what they really longed for was to be Minister for Ethical Fashion?

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The Labour Party has a woman problem

By Rosie Duffield

As somebody who wandered into this Hogwartian world from an ordinary job, I am a stranger to the dark art of “spin”. I do not come from a long and distinguished line of former wizards working at the Ministry of Magic, I did not get a scholarship here because my friends or family saved me a seat and I did not go to kindergarten with anyone who works in the Headmaster’s office.

So I watch with amusement at those who slotted into the very safest Labour seats — where they replaced disgraced, retiring or fed-up former colleagues — get promoted to the shadow frontbench after a mere handful of appearances in the chamber (of secrets) and without so much as attending even the first lesson in How to Communicate Well With Muggle Voters. Hardly the most obvious possessors of sparkling charisma or subject specialism, they are tweeting their gratitude before even the first chair is installed in their new offices. So what is their secret? What is the magic needed to proceed so effortlessly at such rapid speed?

I feel like a muggle. I do not possess that particular spell — it seems to be a closely guarded one, handed down through families or magical societies. But I’m not a dunce at this school. My own achievements may pale in comparison but I am proud of them: winning a seat never before held by a woman, or any member of my party; refusing to allow fear or threat or the silence of those around me to stop me from calling out antisemitism and telling the most basic of truths about male violence and biology. But more than that, I appear to have influenced not only Government policy but my own school rules as well. Something that I have been campaigning on, along with friends at other schools, has now made it into our mission statement. But I found out in the same way that those anointed to the front row did — through social media.

So, back in the real world, I will continue to fulfil the role I have been permanently cast in: the child announcing the Emperor is stark naked as he parades a new suit of clothes spun by a couple of charlatan tailors, versed at spinning tall tales to please those in power.

Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.

Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.

More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools.

I first started tweeting about the issue in 2018, back when the UK government was consulting on whether to reform the Gender Recognition Act to gender self-ID. My remarks were deemed so outrageous that the Center for Global Development (CGD) decided not to offer me further employment.

In 2019 a judge declared that my belief (that there are two sexes, that human beings can’t change sex, and that sex is important) did not count as a philosophical belief for the purposes of the Equality Act, that it was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The day after I lost my case JK Rowling tweeted about it, bringing me more public attention than I had bargained for. When my case became internationally newsworthy, lies were circulated about me, meant to discredit Rowling. Tweets and YouTube videos and even newspaper articles have said I “misgendered” or harassed a trans colleague. In fact, I had no trans colleagues, and I told CGD from the start that I would always treat people with respect and politeness in any professional situation.

In June 2020, I won an appeal to overturn the initial judgment. The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal determined that my ordinary belief about male and female people, which I share with the vast majority of people in the world, is not only in line with the UK legal definition of the sexes, but also “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This meant I can continue my discrimination case against my ex-employer. It also means that other people can now seek legal redress if they are harassed or discriminated against, at work or as a service user, for believing that men are male and women are female. If people face workplace harassment for speaking up on this issue, they can point to the precedent of “Forstater”.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

Stonewall’s strategy of “no debate” on its push for gender self-ID has backfired. The unreasonable and unrelenting attacks on people as obviously calm and compassionate as Professor Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling have led more people to look again at the policies being promoted in the name of “trans inclusion”, which chip away at areas of life formerly designated female-only.

My case will be back in the Employment Tribunal starting on 7 March, three years to the day from when I lost my job. It has been a long, slow process to clear my name. And it is vital that I win this final stage — not just so I get justice, but also to demonstrate to employers that these rights don’t just exist on paper. You cannot disregard the usual frameworks of non-discrimination and respect for everyone’s human rights, just because someone points a finger and whispers “transphobe”. And employers should stop doing the bidding of organisations like Stonewall that tell them to do so.

By standing up to the gender bullies in whatever way we can, we are breaking through the culture of fear. My case and others have shone a light on areas of institutional capture. Harry Miller challenged the College of Policing over Humberside Police Force’s heavy-handed response to a complaint about his comical tweets. Keira Bell, a young detransitioned woman, brought a case against the NHS Tavistock gender-identity clinic challenging the experimental medical treatments being given to gender non-conforming children. Other cases are coming, most notably that of Allison Bailey, a barrister and a lesbian who is suing Stonewall, the influential LGBTQIA+ organisation, for colluding in a witch-hunt against her by her legal chambers.

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All these voices and so many others have brought the debate out into the open. As a result of that debate, the UK government ditched the proposal for gender self-ID (although Scotland is still planning to go ahead), and has commissioned an independent review of children’s gender-identity services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK’s human rights law watchdog, intervened in my case to say that my belief is indeed protected. And it has gone on to change its position on gender self-ID laws.

If it wasn’t obvious before that my belief is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, it is now.

One of the worst things about being a claimant in an employment tribunal is how it isolates you. People who know you professionally keep their distance. They imagine I might have done something awful to lead CGD to argue that I engaged in speech so offensive that it “causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act”. And I could not clear my name. My tribunal is the first chance for the full truth to be heard.

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It is perhaps worth noting that the organisation I worked for is the European subsidiary of a parent organisation based in Washington DC. The complaints by people who read my tweets came from the US. The consultants who investigated me were from the US, and so were the decision makers who decided to let me go.

Radical gender ideology arose in the campuses of elite North American universities and has spread to the UK, and other countries. This is not a positive cultural import. The idea of replacing sex with “gender identity” is institutional kryptonite, corrupting organisations, preventing people from speaking truthfully and recording data accurately. It turns organisations away from their principles, in ways that particularly harm women and children, even while allowing those organisations to wave a superficial flag of “inclusion”. This is an American import we should reject. We would be better off without it.

Local groups of gender critical feminists have sprung up throughout Scotland, from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands, and are making their mark both online and on the streets. Stickers, posters, postcards and suffragette ribbons all bear the same message for Nicola Sturgeon’s government: “Women Won’t Wheesht.”

As Covid restrictions ease and May’s local elections draw close, these women are ramping up their campaign to make the Scottish government think twice about its plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Currently, if you want to legally change your gender in Scotland, medical evidence is required; you must have lived in your “acquired gender” for at least two years. The Scottish government’s proposed reforms would mean that no diagnosis or medical reports would be needed, and the period in which applicants must have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months.

In other words, self-identification of gender would be introduced. The SNP government is expected to reveal its draft legislation in the coming weeks. For Scotland’s gender-critical feminists, their fight has never been so urgent.

Many of these women describe themselves as “politically homeless”. Some are considering breaking the habit of a lifetime and not voting in May; others will spoil their ballots. Some are considering whether to vote for the new Alba party, which has pledged to protect and preserve the rights of women and girls. The Scottish Conservatives have also realised this is an issue on which they can appeal to female voters — several Conservative MSPs visited a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by For Women Scotland in September.

For my research published this week into what I term a Scottish “cooperative constellation” of gender-critical feminists, I spoke to a coalition of women that reaches across the independence/unionist divide and includes women from all sections of society and political tribes. Some began their feminist careers on Greenham Common. For younger members, this is their first step into the political public sphere.

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Putting aside what divides them, these women are united by concerns about the impact of the GRA reforms on women’s sex-based rights: the implications for women’s sport, refuges, prisons, and the myriad services achieved by feminist campaigners since the Seventies.

I carried out 18 in-depth interviews with politicians, researchers, journalists, bloggers, creative artists and grassroots campaigners — all of whom were promised anonymity. I asked all of them to disclose any abuse they had suffered due to their involvement in the constellation. After all, women’s livelihoods have been threatened because of their opinions on the GRA reform, and many involved in the debate are concerned for their personal safety.

What they had to say made for grim listening: they spoke to me of death and rape threats, demands that their employer sack them and attempts at “cancellation”. One interviewee described the response to an essay she posted online, in which she expressed her opinion that being a lesbian is the same as being same-sex attracted. “Almost minutes after it was published, I got a message saying, ‘I hope you get raped, or, better yet, killed. LOL’.” She also had another abuser post pictures of her home and her home address: “And this account was filled with things like, ‘Kill TERFs, TERFs don’t deserve rights. TERFs aren’t women’.” As another interviewee put it: “We seem to have become like the new witches, it’s like the new Salem”.

Of course, during lockdown the activities of this constellation of feminists were confined to social media. Women shared, debated and organised on Twitter, Facebook and sites like Mumsnet, where feminist forums offer a comparatively safe space for gender-critical discussion. Women could keep their anonymity but signal their stance by using the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. In recent months, David Lammy’s dismissal of gender critical women as “dinosaurs hoarding rights” has offered another eye-catching addition to Twitter handles and Mumsnet usernames: the T-Rex emoji.

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The term “cooperative constellation” comes from the literature surrounding a phenomenon of feminist cooperation that took place in the EU and Nordic countries in the Nineties and early Noughties. In order to achieve women’s rights, female politicians, researchers, activists, and policy advisors worked together across political divisions. The researchers provided the theory, while the activists and grassroots led demand for change, which policymakers and politicians could then use in their push for new legislation.

The cooperative constellation also, importantly, included — and continues to include — female members of the media. The women I interviewed for my project acknowledged how crucial it is to achieve mainstream press coverage of their concerns. In recent years, though, the growth of online commentary has meant that gender-critical voices are less reliant on  the mainstream media. The contemporary constellation in Scotland has expanded to include bloggers and writers with large online followings — including, of course, J.K. Rowling.

But that is not the only difference between today’s Scottish activists and those who came before. Unlike the cooperative feminists 20 years ago, these Scottish women are focused on slowing down policy change, asking policymakers to think more carefully about how proposed changes will impact the sex-based rights of women and girls. And, in comparison to other constellations — where the networks were often supported by national governments that desired an academic underpinning for their sex-equality ambitions — the Scottish feminists are acting as outsiders. Those members of the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Labour — including Holyrood and Westminster politicians — who belong to the constellation are acting in direct contradiction of official party policy.

Although they come from all corners, the majority of the women I interviewed are largely positioned on the centre or Left of Scottish politics. They are women who have been used to supporting, and being supported by, institutions like the BBC, The Guardian and trade unions. Yet when they appealed to these organisations to discuss their concerns about GRA reform, not only did they find their worries dismissed, but they were also vilified and accused of transphobia. One interviewee who had raised her concerns on an email list for union activists was immediately expelled from the group. The heading of the email, sent to all members, was “Fucking transphobes, fuck off”.

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And as well as being rejected by their usual allies, the constellation has also been thoroughly snubbed by established women’s organisations in Scotland. Interviewees stated that they felt betrayed by organisations such as Engender or Rape Crisis, which do not represent their views. In fact, established women’s organisations were perceived to be in a feedback loop with the Scottish government, and to represent only a small section of Scottish women, with no interest in alternative points of view. It was frequently suggested that this was a necessary position, given their reliance on the government for funding. And so gender-critical feminists had felt compelled to start their own grassroots organisations, including For Women Scotland or Frontline Feminists Scotland.

As a result, they have found themselves vilified and abused. But they have organised, and are fighting back. For many there is a new sense of sisterhood and solidarity with women throughout the country. “It’s united people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience,” one interviewee told me. “That’s been one of the most rewarding things.”

With lockdown lifting, they are back out on the streets with their leaflets, ribbons, slates and dinosaurs. “It’s almost like a guerrilla network, getting out there instead of just sitting around talking”. Forget devolution — Nicola Sturgeon is about to discover there’s a new dividing line in Scottish politics.

The Council of Europe is the older and larger of the two organisations. Founded in 1949, it now comprises 47 members: every European country with the exception of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and the Vatican City. On paper, it purports to have three core values: democracy, the rule of law and human rights. But in recent years it has found a new cause: the promotion of gender identity ideology across the continent.

When Maria Miller, then the Chairwoman of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, first introduced the concept of gender identity and sex self-identification to Westminster in 2016, she cited Council of Europe Resolution 2048 as good practice to be followed.

Resolution 2048 had been passed by the Parliamentary Assembly the year before by 68 votes to 23, with 12 abstentions. I was unaware of the vote when it took place — and I am transgender — so it is probably safe to assume that the few Europeans understood what was being decided.

And yet whether they realise it or not, Resolution 2048 remains influential to this day. After deciding that transgender people were subject to widespread discrimination and “frequently” targeted by hate speech, the Assembly called on member states to:

• enshrine gender identity as a protected characteristic in anti-discrimination legislation and policies;
• allow legal gender recognition on the basis of self-determination, and “make these procedures available for all people who seek to use them, irrespective of age” (meaning children were included);
• pay for gender reassignment treatment and make that treatment accessible to adults and children alike and
• re-educate society.

It was a veritable land-grab, and it was forged in collaboration with the transgender lobby. In particular, TGEU — or Transgender Europe — a well-organised NGO which at the time in 2015 had an annual budget in excess of €700,000 and employed at least 12 staff members.

On the day Resolution 2048 was passed, a TGEU policy officer highlighted how the organisation “is grateful for having been able to contribute to the work of the committee”. The TGEU co-chair added: “Now, it is upon member states to make this benchmark resolution a lived reality.”

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So when Millar stood up in the Commons, she intended to do just that. In her opening statement, she called on the Government to change the Gender Recognition Act “in line with the principles of gender self-declaration” and create “a new protected characteristic of gender identity”. And in doing so, she opened up a can of worms that has far from improved the lives of transgender people.

On the eve of that debate, I warned that even if the proposed law was approved, it is impossible to regulate social groups that create their own boundaries. As I wrote at the time: “Transwomen in particular may find that goodwill is replaced by suspicion should abusive men spot an opportunity to exploit women’s spaces and protections.”

Self-declaration, to use Miller’s term, has not yet come to pass in any part of the UK — but the Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg remains as enthusiastic as ever: last week, its Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination Committee published a provisional report on “Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe”.

The report’s “rapporteur” was Fourat Ben Chikha, a Green politician from Belgium. His report is worth reading in its entirety — not least because its Draft Resolution has now been adopted by the committee. The language is uncompromising: “[The Parliamentary Assembly] condemns with particular force the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people that have been occurring for several years in, amongst other countries, Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

You could be forgiven for wondering why the UK would be lumped together with the likes of Russia and Turkey, two countries which have come in for international criticism for their treatment of minorities. There are clues in the test that follows:

“The Assembly condemns the highly prejudicial anti-gender, gender-critical and anti-trans narratives which reduce the fight for the equality of LGBTI people to what these movements deliberately mis-characterise as ‘gender ideology’ or ‘LGBTI ideology’. Such narratives deny the very existence of LGBTI people, dehumanise them, and often falsely portray their rights as being in conflict with women’s and children’s rights.”

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It seems to me that such language is a veiled attack on those campaigns in the UK which have been openly critical of Resolution 2048 — organisations such as Woman’s Place UK and For Women Scotland, which are concerned about women’s sex-based rights. The draft resolution, in contrast, calls on member states to “amend antidiscrimination legislation as necessary to ensure that it covers all forms of discrimination, in all areas of life, based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics”. Sex, itself, is absent.

The explanatory memorandum that follows clarifies Ben Chikha’s thinking. Paragraph 52 concerns the United Kingdom. The emphasis is mine.

“In the United Kingdom, anti-trans rhetoric, arguing that sex is immutable and gender identities not valid, has also been gaining baseless and concerning credibility, at the expense of both trans people’s civil liberties and women’s and children’s rights. At the IDAHOT Forum 2021, the Minister for Equalities stated, in contradiction with international human rights standards with respect to the rights of trans people, ‘We do not believe in self-identification’…

The ‘gender-critical’ movement, which wrongly portrays trans rights as posing a particular threat to cisgender women and girls, has played a significant role in this process, notably since the 2018 public consultation on updating the Gender Recognition Act 2004 for England and Wales. In parallel, trans rights organisations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented.”

But as far as human beings are concerned, sex is immutable. That is a biological fact. I am a trans person and I live in the United Kingdom. I do not recognise the picture painted by Ben Chikha. Trans women are not being vilified and misrepresented; rather, the public is waking up to the fact that people cannot change sex, and disagree with outlandish claims. As for the memorandum’s later claims about increased levels of violence against trans people, it’s worth noting that its source is a Galop online survey based on 227 responses — of which only 147 declared a trans history; hardly the basis on which to drive the agenda across an entire continent.

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So who is Fourat Ben Chikha, and how did he become so influential that his reports are adopted by a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly? Unlike the EU Parliament, there are no direct elections to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Its 324 members (and their nominated substitutes) are appointed by national parliaments. They attend week-long plenary sessions in Strasbourg, four times a year. The UK delegation comprises 18 MPs and peers from across politics.

Ben Chikha was nominated by Belgium, where he is a member of the Belgian Senate. But that body is not directly elected either. Its 60 members are either appointed by regional and community parliaments or co-opted. Ben Chikha was co-opted.

Tony Benn’s famous five questions have never seemed so pertinent: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”

We can’t get rid of Ben Chikha, but he has the power to write reports and draft resolutions that affect, and should concern, us all. After all, in whose interests is he exercising power? He has certainly been talking to TGEU — and perhaps he has been talking to activist groups in the UK as well. What is clear, however, is that the British public is largely unaware of what he has been doing.

But that doesn’t appear to matter: his recommendations have been approved by his committee and the next step is the Parliamentary Assembly itself, where it will be debated at the next plenary which opens on 24 January 2022. There, Assembly Members such as Ben Chika would do well to remember that the Council of Europe was designed to be accountable to the people of Europe — a Europe that still includes the UK.

His report needs to be scrutinised, not nodded through, because the repercussions will be felt in the UK. Women’s sex-based rights are at stake. The British public might not care much about Strasbourg, but Resolutions of the Council of Europe carry weight in the minds of politicians. When neither Boris Johnson nor Keir Starmer are willing to declare that only women have cervixes, the situation is desperate. They must not be gifted a new Council of Europe Resolution to hide behind.

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.

Fast forward to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

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A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

The impact on society is profound. At this very moment, Scotland is considering a change to the law that would allow people to change their legal sex without producing evidence of a psychological need. While they are not protecting gender identity — that would require a change to the Equality Act, which is not a devolved matter — it will have much the same effect.

“The Scottish Government seem bent on pushing badly written and poorly defined legislative change,” the Scottish campaigning group forwomen.scot tells me, “without due consideration for the potentially massive implications for the social and legal position of women in Scotland.”

Legislative change that has been planned in the dark. According to recent guidance for activists uncovered by the legal website Roll on Friday, secrecy is crucial: “Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure,” it urged. If society had been aware of the implications, those campaigners may not have been given such a free run as they lobbied governments to adopt Resolution 2048.

The tactics were highly effective. Immediately after the 2015 UK election, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee turned their attention to Transgender Equality. Following a consultation that provoked just 208 responses, the committee report recommended that the Government should introduce self-declaration of gender, and establish gender identity as a protected characteristic. In the ensuing Parliamentary debate the Yogyakarta principles were cited as some exotic sounding authority.

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

Elsewhere in Europe, the tide kept advancing. As Malta and then Ireland both passed laws based on Resolution 2048, liberals and progressives were kept on board or — more likely — in the dark. Meanwhile, the occasional dissenter could be denounced as a hateful bigot and probably a Nazi.

Government consultations were announced at Westminster and separately in Scotland, where gender recognition is a devolved matter. Few people cared apart from transgender activists. Small groups of women did meet to share their concerns, but their gatherings provoked outrageous responses from supposed progressives.

Politics changed at Speakers’ Corner in London on 13 September 2017 when 26-year old Tara Wolf — a self-declared trans woman — assaulted 60-year old Maria Maclachlan before one of those meetings (Wolf was fined £150 by magistrates). A group of female trade unionists decided enough was enough, and two months later their new group, Woman’s Place UK, held its first meeting in Cambridge. They drew in big name speakers including Linda Bellos and Beatrix Campbell, and the tide began to turn. Within two years they filled the QE II Conference Centre in Westminster.

In an increasingly febrile environment, governments dithered. The consultations were delayed creating a political vacuum that exacerbated the situation: hope and good will were replaced by fear and anger; compromise was out, confrontation was in.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Scotland consulted first. By 1 March 2018, 15,697 responses had been submitted — rather more than 208. Westminster began its consultation four months later. When it closed on 22 October that year, more than 100,000 responses filled the electronic postbag, according to unofficial reports. The official figure is still not known because over a year later the findings of the Westminster consultation remain unpublished. Priorities have moved on, and it seems unlikely that Boris Johnson’s government will want to devote any time to gender recognition legislation. If it weren’t for Scotland, that may have been the end of it.

Scotland continued to dither. They neither threw out gender recognition nor moved forwards with confidence. They drafted a bill but started consulting a second time, a process that is currently underway. It closes on 17 March this year. The outcome will be felt south of the border and beyond our shores as the world watches Scotland deal with the hurricane.

The political divisions are profound. On one side are the arguments that we trans people have a difficult time, and simplifying gender recognition makes our lives a little easier. But this is about more than trans individuals, it is about society.

Allowing male people to declare themselves female for reasons known only to themselves is open to abuse, and any law that relies on well-meaning people declaring that (abusive) men wouldn’t do that, would they? is questionable at best.

suggested reading

Don't give in to the bullying trans activists

By Graham Linehan

Women’s spaces are not protected because all men present a hazard, but a few do. In the same way, we don’t lock our doors at night because all passers-by are a hazard. But in both cases, some people will abuse trust and women need to take precautions just like householders need to take precautions.

The inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male, and — as a group — we present the same hazard that men present. Women can no more differentiate nice trans from nasty trans than they can distinguish nice men from nasty men. Allowing us to declare ourselves to be trans and then immediately self-identify into women’s spaces makes the boundaries meaningless. It is a safeguarding nightmare.

This matters for Scotland. Gender recognition is a devolved matter and it is for Scotland to decide how to progress, but if they are wise they will consider what is happening across the world. In Canada, for example, where the transwoman Jessica Yaniv is making a mockery of a 2016 amendment to the British Columbia Human Rights Code that protects self-declared gender identity. Yaniv took action (later dismissed) against female beauticians for refusing to wax what would in more normal times have been considered to be male genitals.

While the Scottish government may claim in their consultation (Para 3.20) that they do “not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful”, it’s a matter of debate whether being asked to provide medical evidence of a need to change your legal sex is demeaning. I don’t think it is, though like many trans people I have never felt the need to change the sex on my birth certificate in any case. We shouldn’t need to lie about the past in order to live in the present.

suggested reading

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

While the Westminster Government may be less sympathetic to reform, how long would someone need to be resident in Scotland in order to qualify in Scotland? England and Wales would no doubt recognise Scottish paperwork — even ‘Gretna Green’ paperwork — as equivalent to our own, and come under pressure to mirror Scottish legislation. The juggernaut would spring back to life, putting three vulnerable groups at risk.

• Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
• Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
• Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

suggested reading

Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

There is a debate, even among trans people. While Owl Fisher, for example, has spoken about a moral panic over transwomen using women-only services, Kristina Harrison empathised with women when she wrote: “Perhaps you can begin to understand the concerns of many women when it is increasingly being asserted in practice, if not fully in law, that simply identifying as a woman means being able to access women’s and girls’ private, formerly single-sex, spaces — toilets, rape-crisis centres and so on.”

Decisions need to take place in openness and transparency, and following widespread consultation. We can all have an opinion on something as fundamental as what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it determined by our sex, or is it a feeling in our heads? The consultation is open until 17 March, and it’s vital that we all have our say to ensure Scotland gets this right. If Scotland revises the law to allow anyone to change their legal sex, just because they want to, women, children and trans people all become hostages to fortune.

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

This article first appeared on 22 January, 2020

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.

The plans leaked to The Sunday Times, and splashed across yesterday’s front page, sparked uproar. Many transgender rights campaigners were horrified. These were not the plans they were looking for. Nancy Kelly, CEO of Stonewall UK described them as “another blow to our community during a difficult time”, citing the huge amount of abuse they believe trans people suffer in their daily lives.

more from this author

Britain is not a transphobic country

By Debbie Hayton

As a trans person, I take issue with that statement. I very rarely suffer hostility in the UK — there seems to be no a causal link between gender recognition legislation and social attitudes at large. When I am out and about, people couldn’t appear to care less that I am trans, if they even notice, and few would know anything about the rather obscure law under debate.

The plans were not even unexpected. On 22 April, Liz Truss — the minister for Women and Equalities — set out her priorities for the Government Equalities Office. As she closed her statement, she remarked,

“We’ve been doing a lot of work internally, making sure we’re in a position to respond to that consultation and launch what we propose to do on the future of the Gender Recognition Act. We will be in a position to do that by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting place.

First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under-18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future. I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit, but I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities that we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.”

The Sunday Times report suggests that the Government plans to adopt these priorities, and move them forward through guidance rather than fresh legislation.

First, there seems to be no appetite to change the mechanism for legal gender recognition. Anyone wishing to change their legal gender will still need to produce two medical reports to support their application. But a proposed crackdown on “quack” doctors would close the loophole by which disreputable medics could write what the patient wanted them to write. Otherwise gender recognition would still be on demand, albeit on payment of an extra fee for sympathetic medical reports.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Second, women’s “safe spaces” will be safeguarded. Existing legislation — the Equality Act 2010 — was cited, so no change there either. What has been lacking is clear and unambiguous guidance over when women can maintain spaces and services according to their sex. Hitherto, there has been rather too much assumption and too little clarity. The current jargon — “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” — is easier said than applied. In July 2018, the Equality and Human Rights Commission set out to clarify the interplay between different pieces of legislation, but acknowledged that it was a complex area of law, and highlighted the need for further conversation.

The specific mention of toilets has been the lightning rod for concerns. It will never be workable to rigidly police who uses which toilet, but clearer guidelines are needed to empower women to challenge people who they think should not be in the women’s. Though rather than argue over who can have access and who should be excluded, let’s be truly progressive and campaign for additional unisex facilities for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex. Good practice there is good practice for all, and not just those who might identify as non-binary. Long before I transitioned, I found them a godsend when out with my young daughter.

Third — almost as an afterthought — came a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy, mentioning “some church groups”.

Where does this leave transgender people? Some of my fellow transgender campaigners are in no doubt. Helen Belcher, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Chippenham in 2017 and 2019 urged us all to write to our MPs:

“Start writing today, and don’t stop until they drop this awful, discriminatory position”

while the journalist Paris Lees suggested that

 “trans people are scared and upset about our rights being rolled back.”

But I think differently. The problems we face as trans people are not based on a lack of rights, but a lack of confidence. Proceeding, as we have been, on assumption rather than statute, trans people have been taking and women have been yielding. That cannot go on indefinitely. Tensions have been rising — witness the toxicity of social media — and emotions are running ever higher.

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A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

We desperately need clarity, and these proposals are only a start. While self-identification of gender is off the table at Westminster, it remains a policy objective in Scotland. Dr Kath Murray of the policy collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie tells me:

“The draft Scottish Bill would also allow people living elsewhere in the UK but born in Scotland to apply for a GRC under Scottish law, which means that change here has a potential impact outside Scotland.”

But across society organisations and institutions have already been captured. In an apparent rush to get ahead of the law, Marks and Spencer allow shoppers to use whichever changing rooms they wish, while Girlguiding UK allow male children to share tents and showers with female children. In business, Pips Bunce — a cross-dressing “gender fluid” man — won a place on the FT list of Top 100 Women in Business. While we should defend Bunce’s right of gender expression, it’s not progressive to displace a woman from a scheme to promote women. This all needs to stop. It is an affront to women and children.

It was notable that Truss referred to children in her statement, citing the dangers of inappropriate choices being offered. The Sunday Times did not elaborate on the proposed ban on gay conversion therapy. However, clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) — England’s only NHS gender clinic for children — have previously expressed concerns that “some openly homophobic parents sought transition for their children because they were gay”. If dogmatic churches might try to “pray away the gay”, this surely is an abhorrent attempt to “trans away the gay”.

In the short term, the future looks uncertain for trans people. Until the Government publishes its plans — reportedly at the end of July — speculation will be rife. But this is a debate we need to enter. Belcher is right: we should write to our MPs. But not to complain; we need to engage constructively with other groups, and campaign for long-term solutions that accommodate us in society without compromising the rights of women and children. Then we really will be able to live our best lives with confidence and security.

That was Rebecca Long-Bailey’s answer when Laura Kuenssberg asked her about transgender issues — specifically the legal recognition of gender on the basis of self-identification.

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Test article

By Peter Franklin

But does the principle of letting people be who they want to be apply to gender alone?

What about other personal characteristics that are defined in law, such as age? Should people be able to decide what age they want to be and have that legally recognised?

*

You may remember a Dutchman by the name of Emile Ratelband. In 2018 he launched a legal action to change his official age from 69 to 49. “We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can’t I decide my own age?”, he argued.

The Dutch courts, however, disagreed. While Mr Ratelband was “at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly”, the right to change legal documents was judged to be “undesirable”.

Case closed, then?

Not according to Joona Räsänen, a bioethicist at the University of Oslo. In a thought-provoking piece for Aeon, he makes the argument for the right to change one’s legal age. It applies specifically to other people seeking to lower their age, though “in principle”, he is “not opposed to younger people increasing their age”.

So under what circumstances might this right apply? Räsänen sets out three conditions:

“First, the person is at risk of being discriminated against because of age. Second, the person’s body and mind are in better shape than would be expected based on the person’s chronological age (that is, the person is biologically younger than he is chronologically). Third, the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting.”

Ageism certainly exists. People can be discriminated against because they’re considered too old or too young — their actual capabilities discounted in favour of a mere number.

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Test article

By Peter Franklin

But isn’t a better solution to outlaw such discrimination? A lot of progress has already been made. For instance, in the UK it’s now illegal to force employees to retire just because they’ve reached a certain age. The employer has to prove that the employee is incapable of doing their job. So, in that context there’s no need for people to pretend they’re 55 when in reality they’re 65.

Ah, but when it comes to age what is reality? Räsänen draws a distinction between chronological and biological age. It’s true that people age at different rates. People of exactly the same age can differ radically in terms of appearance, physical fitness, mental acuity or other measures of youthfulness. Aren’t these qualities more meaningful than the number of birthdays you’ve had? Why shouldn’t you have your biological age recognised as your legal age if that is what you wish?

The key problem is that, as Räsänen admits, “little consensus exists on how it should be determined”. Who would do the determining? The state? A private consultant? Or would it be self-assessed? There’d be no consistency across the population.

Biological age isn’t even consistent within an individual. Somebody might be a physical wreck, but sharp-as-a-tack mentally. A middle-aged, sun-worshipping fitness fanatic might have a face full wrinkles, but stronger muscles than most people half their age. The gardener Monty Don, who is 65 this year, recently observed that his “shot” knees were 85, while “aerobically” the rest of his body was 45.

*

So, performance-wise, different parts of our selves age at different rates — not that a precise figure could be put on any of it. Chronological age remains the only precise, consistent and objective measure of age that we have. But, of course, the third of Joona Räsänen’s conditions — i.e. that “that the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting” isn’t meant to be objective, it is by definition subjective.

Which is why I doubt that all three of his conditions would endure, if used as a basis for reform. In a post-modern society, subjectivity trumps everything else. Before long, self-ID would come to dominate any alternative to the chronological reckoning of age.

Would that matter? After all, in many circumstances people can lie about their age anyway — or refuse to divulge it. Furthermore, if we’re outlawing ageism, then age really would be just a number.

Except that not all age-based discrimination is bad. In fact, a great deal is necessary or, at least, not unfair. For instance, government has to set an age at which someone qualifies for the state old age pension. We can argue over precisely what age that should be, but a line has to be drawn somewhere otherwise everyone would qualify and the system go bankrupt. In deciding who is legally of pensionable age , the only fair and equal way of doing it is years elapsed since birth. Any system of self-ID would be gamed to the point of absurdity.

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What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

Or what about the age at which older drivers must reapply for their licenses (and declare any relevant medical conditions)? In the UK this is 70, which further re-applications required every three years after that. It’s a somewhat arbitrary line to draw and one which applies to all individuals regardless of variations in capability. And yet it makes sense and affects everyone equally on the basis of the same objective measure of age. Self-ID would drive a coach-and-horses through all of that.

The same would be true at the other end of the age spectrum. If young people could self-ID on age then we would have 13-year-olds taking their driving tests. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, it’s undoubtedly the case that some 16-year-olds would make safer drivers than some 18-year-olds. But that doesn’t mean that the driving age of 17 is ‘unfair’. It’s perfectly fair because it collectively applies the same requirement to everybody equally and does so for the common good. The loss of opportunity suffered by the potentially safe-driving 16-year-old is rightly judged a price worth paying for that common good. Self-ID on age, however, would place the boot on the other foot, empowering individuals at the expense of society.

In an era in which individualism and relativism are intellectually dominant, it’s worth pausing to consider just how much of everyday life still depends on restricting individual freedom of action and doing so on the basis of a shared understanding of reality.

*

Is our shared understanding of age under any serious threat? After all, Emile Ratelband’s legal challenge didn’t get very far — not even in a notably liberal country like the Netherlands. However, fringe ideas can become mainstream in the space of a generation or two.

Alongside Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey is a candidate in the current Labour leadership contest. Now compare that field with the candidates in the 1976 contest — James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland. Can you imagine any of those gentlemen supporting the idea of self-ID on gender? I doubt the concept would have even occurred to them — and that includes Jenkins, author of the permissive society. A lot can change in a few decades.

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How Boris could blow his majority

By Peter Franklin

However, viewed from a different angle, Long-Bailey’s position is consistent with the 19th century philosophy of utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

In furthering the liberty of the individual, Mill not only believed in limiting the power of the state, but also the power of society. This is how he puts in his most famous work, On Liberty:

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

When the contemporary Left — which combines Mill’s liberalism with over-confidence in the state — says “we have to let people be who they want to be”, I want to ask who do they mean by “we” and what do they mean by “have to”? Are we to be forced to speak and act as if something is real when we know very well that it isn’t?

*

Terry Pratchett once said that “inside every old person there’s a young person wondering what happened”. As a middle-aged person, I find that feels truer every day.

And yet the actual truth about the date of my birth remains the same. No one should be compelled to deny it just because of how I feel (especially as feelings are hardly the most constant thing in the world).

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to go down the street in a pair of spray-on jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt if I want to (don’t worry, I don’t). It isn’t the job of state to protect me from public embarrassment. But, equally, the state has no business forcing society to play along with my delusions. I have no right to falsify my birth certificate. Or to claim a young person’s railcard. Or to claim that I’m 25 on a dating app.

The fact is that I can’t be whoever I want to be. Reality is real and I am what I am.

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What Sajid Javid should say at Davos, but won’t

By Peter Franklin

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.

Fast forwards to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

by the same author

A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

The impact on society is profound. At this very moment, Scotland is considering a change to the law that would allow people to change their legal sex without producing evidence of a psychological need. While they are not protecting gender identity — that would require a change to the Equality Act, which is not a devolved matter — it will have much the same effect.

“The Scottish Government seem bent on pushing badly written and poorly defined legislative change,” the Scottish campaigning group forwomen.scot tells me, “without due consideration for the potentially massive implications for the social and legal position of women in Scotland.”

Legislative change that has been planned in the dark. According to recent guidance for activists uncovered by the legal website Roll on Friday, secrecy is crucial: “Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure,” it urged. If society had been aware of the implications, those campaigners may not have been given such a free run as they lobbied governments to adopt Resolution 2048.

The tactics were highly effective. Immediately after the 2015 UK election, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee turned their attention to Transgender Equality. Following a consultation that provoked just 208 responses, the committee report recommended that the Government should introduce self-declaration of gender, and establish gender identity as a protected characteristic. In the ensuing Parliamentary debate the Yogyakarta principles were cited as some exotic sounding authority.

suggested reading

Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

Elsewhere in Europe, the tide kept advancing. As Malta and then Ireland both passed laws based on Resolution 2048, liberals and progressives were kept on board or — more likely — in the dark. Meanwhile, the occasional dissenter could be denounced as a hateful bigot and probably a Nazi.

Government consultations were announced at Westminster and separately in Scotland, where gender recognition is a devolved matter. Few people cared apart from transgender activists. Small groups of women did meet to share their concerns, but their gatherings provoked outrageous responses from supposed progressives.

Politics changed at Speakers’ Corner in London on 13 September 2017 when 26-year old Tara Wolf — a self-declared trans woman — assaulted 60-year old Maria Maclachlan before one of those meetings (Wolf was fined £150 by magistrates). A group of female trade unionists decided enough was enough, and two months later their new group, Woman’s Place UK, held its first meeting in Cambridge. They drew in big name speakers including Linda Bellos and Beatrix Campbell, and the tide began to turn. Within two years they filled the QE II Conference Centre in Westminster.

In an increasingly febrile environment, governments dithered. The consultations were delayed creating a political vacuum that exacerbated the situation: hope and good will were replaced by fear and anger; compromise was out, confrontation was in.

suggested reading

Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Scotland consulted first. By 1 March 2018, 15,697 responses had been submitted — rather more than 208. Westminster began its consultation four months later. When it closed on 22 October that year, more than 100,000 responses filled the electronic postbag, according to unofficial reports. The official figure is still not known because over a year later the findings of the Westminster consultation remain unpublished. Priorities have moved on, and it seems unlikely that Boris Johnson’s government will want to devote any time to gender recognition legislation. If it weren’t for Scotland, that may have been the end of it.

Scotland continued to dither. They neither threw out gender recognition nor moved forwards with confidence. They drafted a bill but started consulting a second time, a process that is currently underway. It closes on 17 March this year. The outcome will be felt south of the border and beyond our shores as the world watches Scotland deal with the hurricane.

The political divisions are profound. On one side are the arguments that we trans people have a difficult time, and simplifying gender recognition makes our lives a little easier. But this is about more than trans individuals, it is about society.

Allowing male people to declare themselves female for reasons known only to themselves is open to abuse, and any law that relies on well-meaning people declaring that (abusive) men wouldn’t do that, would they? is questionable at best.

suggested reading

Don't give in to the bullying trans activists

By Graham Linehan

Women’s spaces are not protected because all men present a hazard, but a few do. In the same way, we don’t lock our doors at night because all passers-by are a hazard. But in both cases, some people will abuse trust and women need to take precautions just like householders need to take precautions.

The inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male, and — as a group — we present the same hazard that men present. Women can no more differentiate nice trans from nasty trans than they can distinguish nice men from nasty men. Allowing us to declare ourselves to be trans and then immediately self-identify into women’s spaces makes the boundaries meaningless. It is a safeguarding nightmare.

This matters for Scotland. Gender recognition is a devolved matter and it is for Scotland to decide how to progress, but if they are wise they will consider what is happening across the world. In Canada, for example, where the transwoman Jessica Yaniv is making a mockery of a 2016 amendment to the British Columbia Human Rights Code that protects self-declared gender identity. Yaniv took action (later dismissed) against female beauticians for refusing to wax what would in more normal times have been considered to be male genitals.

While the Scottish government may claim in their consultation (Para 3.20) that they do “not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful”, it’s a matter of debate whether being asked to provide medical evidence of a need to change your legal sex is demeaning. I don’t think it is, though like many trans people I have never felt the need to change the sex on my birth certificate in any case. We shouldn’t need to lie about the past in order to live in the present.

suggested reading

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

While the Westminster Government may be less sympathetic to reform, how long would someone need to be resident in Scotland in order to qualify in Scotland? England and Wales would no doubt recognise Scottish paperwork — even ‘Gretna Green’ paperwork — as equivalent to our own, and come under pressure to mirror Scottish legislation. The juggernaut would spring back to life, putting three vulnerable groups at risk.

• Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
• Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
• Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

suggested reading

Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

There is a debate, even among trans people. While Owl Fisher, for example, has spoken about a moral panic over transwomen using women-only services, Kristina Harrison empathised with women when she wrote: “Perhaps you can begin to understand the concerns of many women when it is increasingly being asserted in practice, if not fully in law, that simply identifying as a woman means being able to access women’s and girls’ private, formerly single-sex, spaces — toilets, rape-crisis centres and so on.”

Decisions need to take place in openness and transparency, and following widespread consultation. We can all have an opinion on something as fundamental as what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it determined by our sex, or is it a feeling in our heads? The consultation is open until 17 March, and it’s vital that we all have our say to ensure Scotland gets this right. If Scotland revises the law to allow anyone to change their legal sex, just because they want to, women, children and trans people all become hostages to fortune.

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

“Transsexualism has taken only twenty-five years to become a household word,” reads the opening line of the 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The author, Janice Raymond, a renowned academic and feminist campaigner, caused a massive kerfuffle when she published the work, which seriously tackled the theory and consequences of diagnosing the feelings of body dysphoria and the unbearable desire to live and present as the opposite sex.

Raymond wrote TTE as a response to the rising rates of sex-change surgery in the US. She had long been concerned about the medical practices that negatively impacted women, such as unnecessary hysterectomies and caesareans. This led her to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilation inherent in transsexual surgery, and the detrimental effects of taking lifelong hormones.

She predicted that the handful of gender identity clinics treating adult transsexuals – the first of which opened in 1967 – would become what she calls ‘sex role control centers’ for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender identity centers are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, before arguing that these centres would proliferate.

There are now at least 40 such clinics treating children’s ‘gender dysphoria’ in the United States, and in England there are seven treating adults, and only one at present that specialises in under 18s, but with calls for more. This is in spite of concerns about the effects that such treatment might have on individuals legally considered too young to make most major life decisions.

More from this author

How transgender turf wars put lives in danger

By Julie Bindel

Small wonder, then, that 40 years after it was first published, TTE is perceived as an important foundation stone in gender critical feminist thinking.

In 1979, the word gender was understood to be separate from the word sex. Sex was what defined a person biologically; gender was understood to mean the sex-appropriate behaviour that was socially constructed. Today, gender has replaced the word sex in common parlance, as if gender itself were biological.

Raymond foresaw this shift. “As I saw it then and see it now, transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotyping in a role-defined society,” wrote Raymond in her preface to the 1994 reprint of TTE. When I interviewed her recently for this article, she added that “only feminism can challenge the idea of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain and notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ being innate”.

And only feminism can defend the rights of those born into the bodies of women – though it sometimes feels as though we’re not allowed to call ourselves ‘women’ anymore. Instead we’re uterus-owners, egg producers, chest feeders and even non-men. Abortion providers now often use the term ‘pregnant people’ rather than ‘pregnant women’ so as not to exclude trans men.

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What does gender have to do with genitals?

By Julie Bindel

One of Raymond’s transsexual interviewees, quoted in TTE, proclaimed: “Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. All you have left is your ability to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that’s a negative asset.”

Today, trans women are asking for womb transplants and the ability to breast feed. By demanding the ‘right’ to give birth, they are rendering natal women obsolete.

Suggested reading

Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

Forty years ago Raymond wrote, “Masculine behaviour is notably obtrusive”. She was referring to the level of notoriety achieved by the trans woman Renee Richards “in the wake of the Tennis Week Open”. Richards fought to compete on a level playing field with natal women. The New York Times review of TTE read: “The transsexual propagandists claim to transform ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’ into ‘real’ women and want them to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis).”

Not only was The Transsexual Empire prescient – so too was the response to the book. Raymond experienced the kind of backlash that is endured by anyone who questions trans women’s rights today. Martina Navratilova was hounded on Twitter after she wrote a piece examining transgender participation in women’s sport; upon the publication of TTE, the transsexual lobby accused Raymond of bigotry and said the book constituted ‘hate speech’. Navratilova was thrown out of an advocacy group for LGBTQ sportspeople, which accused her of ‘transphobia’; Raymond was turned down for grants, reported to her university and publicly harassed and threatened with violence on a regular basis.

With the advent of the internet, a cesspool of vitriol aimed at anyone who dissents from transgender orthodoxies has gone viral. Since I first wrote about the issue I have come in for the same treatment as Raymond, as have scores of other women.

And the bullying doesn’t stop there. Today, many lesbians who will not date trans woman say they feel under pressure to do so or risk being labelled transphobic. In recent years, the term ‘cotton ceiling’ is used by some trans-activists to describe the difficulties faced by male-bodied trans women in persuading lesbians to have sex with them. Recently published research on the ‘cotton ceiling’ phenomenon found that significant numbers of lesbians have encountered bullying and sexual harassment by ‘trans lesbians’. Reading the chapter, “Sappho By Surgery”, it’s hard not to think she must have a time machine: she writes that men who asserted they were women would also claim to be ‘trans lesbians’ and expect access to natal women’s bodies.

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Twitter's dangerous approach to 'hate speech'

By Meghan Murphy

“It is significant that in the case of the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist,” wrote Raymond, “often he is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women’s spaces because the women involved do not know he is a transsexual and he just does not happen to mention it.”

Four decades ago, Raymond saw how in a society obsessed with gender rules which determine how women and men should behave, that it would become easier and more acceptable to change bodies rather than behaviour. Did she also foresee how aggressive and demanding trans activists would eventually become, where ‘mis-gendering’ a trans person can be treated as a ‘hate crime’ and reported to police?

“Yes” she tells me. “I always suspected that transsexualism would change women’s lives in a way that would attempt to define us out of existence.”

Even West Yorkshire police appear to be under their cosh. Last week, a verbal harassment warning was issued to Graham Linehan, the co-creator of the sitcom Father Ted, for pointing out that the transwoman Stephanie Hayden was biologically male, and tweeting her two previous male names – a practice known in the transgender universe as “deadnaming”. Even though, in the course of their spat, Hayden had posted details of Linehan’s wife’s company on Twitter, she still considered herself to be the aggrieved party.

At the heart of their dispute is the Government’s proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act which, if passed, would allow men to self-identify as women. Those who have raised questions about the issues, as Linehan did, or expressed moderate concern about for example, access to same-sex spaces, have found themselves vilified. Best not mention Karen White, the transgender inmate of an all-female prison who admitted to sexually assaulting other women within days of being incarcerated.

Suggested reading

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murphy

Hayden, who is pursuing civil proceedings against Linehan, having accused him of harassment, defamation and misuse of private information, said that she had spent five hours giving a statement to police. That’s five hours of police time, plus the paperwork involved, and for what? For describing a person with XY chromosomes as “he”.

It’s not just the police who have joined the woke Stasi. The Scottish Government launched the poster campaign One Scotland, warning that “hate crimes” will not be tolerated and that anyone “perpetrating hate” towards disabled, lesbian, gay, and transgender people will be reported. Of course hate crime should be prosecuted, but in today’s climate, this could mean being prosecuted for calling a transgender, though biological male,”he”. It’s the same in our universities. Even neutral investigation of the issues, disinterested academic speech, and differing views are being silenced and howled down.

Suggested reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Perhaps, given the prevailing McCarthyite climate on our campuses, we shouldn’t be quite so shocked by the case of James Caspian. He is a gender identity clinician, and the trustee of a charity that works to help transgender and transsexual people. He had heard from other gender specialists about the growing numbers of female-to-male transsexuals who wished to revert to being female, despite having undergone life-changing surgery. Caspian decided to write his thesis on de-transitioning, and submitted a proposal on the subject to Bath Spa University as part of his Masters degree.

The proposal was rejected by the university’s ethics committee because it could be deemed ‘politically incorrect’, and that such research might “offend” trans people by highlighting the fact that some people regret undergoing sex-change surgery.

Here then is another eulogy for that once prized ideal that universities exist to encourage discussion, research, and to challenge out-of-date ideas. When Caspian complained, he was told the university’s decision was justified because his research could provoke “unnecessary offence” and “attacks on social media”.

Caspian is now crowdfunding online in order to fight the case.

From the same author

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

Similarly supine responses to the bullying have extended to the workplace. Ken Zucker headed the Toronto-based child, youth and family gender identity clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for more than 30 years. He was sacked in 2015 following claims that he had “practiced conversion therapy” on children that identified as transgender, because he advised parents to “watch and wait” before opting for hormone blockers or other invasive treatment. CAMH launched an external review as a result of complaints, and on the day it was published – without consulting Zucker – fired him. Earlier this month, Zucker received a public apology and a substantial pay-out from CAMH.

The shutting down of the debate is ramping up, as the need for discussion becomes more urgent. Earlier this month, an event organised by Women’s Place UK to discuss proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act was cancelled by Leeds City Council with less than three hours’ notice after complaints from trans activists. Merseyside mayor, Joe Anderson, last month used his packed council chamber to make an impassioned speech denouncing ReSisters, a feminist group which opposes mixed-sex toilets in public buildings.

Further reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

Have we forgotten why we need to debate these policies? Shouldn’t we be examining all aspects of the impact the legislation would have on half of the population if it were passed? The changes proposed are far from uncontroversial, and will have real material effects. Discussion of them (as with any proposed change to the law) is what the legislative process is all about.

Making immediate concessions to the bullying eliminates the chance of any rigorous investigation into the evidence taking place. It also grants one group legislative superiority over the rights of any others. It is governance based on who shouts the loudest. Apart from putting lives at risk, it also sets a terrible precedent for other bullies and ideologically driven pressure groups. Police, governments, places of work and learning need to be able to stand up for rights, not illogical and dangerous rhetoric. Otherwise democracy loses. And that should concern more than half of the population.

Further reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers