The answer, it seems, lies in a shift in the global HIV response, one that the United Nations hopes will finally “end Aids by 2030”. To push HIV out of the “crisis” stage, in which it has been stuck for decades, and shrink the rate of new infections, health practitioners want a massive roll-out of the preventative medications that are no longer protected by drug company patents or exclusivities. And they want to target that specific sub-population that is disproportionately affected by HIV: transwomen who have sex with men.

In parts of the world, trans prostitutes are up to 80 times more likely than anyone else to be HIV-positive. It is estimated, for example, that in Brazil, as many as a third of travestis — male prostitutes with a female identity — are HIV-positive. Elsewhere, hijra, kathoeys and waria — names used in different cultures for males who adopt female names, clothing, hairstyles and pronouns — are a significant concern for health officials, since they are tricky to monitor and tend to have risky sex with men who often have a female partner at home.

To encourage these at-risk individuals to take part in HIV testing and treatment programmes, global health experts want to offer them a form of integrated care, which could include hormones, reassignment surgery referrals, and other “affirming” services alongside PrEP. As a study in The Journal of the International Aids Society made clear as far back as 2016: in scaling up PrEP for trans women, it is essential to engage trans communities, utilise trans-inclusive research and marketing strategies and identify and/or train healthcare providers to provide gender-affirming healthcare to trans women.”

In India, for instance, a recent white paper detailed a scheme to incentivise hijra and “transgender persons” to take part in HIV screening that involves a comprehensive package of services including gender-affirming care. In Thailand, one programme found that kathoeys were more likely to show up to clinics if they were staffed by transwomen — inspiring trials of similar initiatives in the Philippines, Myanmar and Nepal. It is a strategy that has been adopted in the developed West, too, albeit one that lacks transparency. In 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services ordered HIV clinics to start offering “gender-affirming care” — a move celebrated in March this year, when the White House made clear that the federal government’s strategy “to end the HIV epidemic” included providing “access to gender affirming care and treatment services to transgender and gender diverse individuals with HIV”.

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It is not unusual for health authorities to group services together, or incentivise individuals to make healthy choices. But we have known for at least two decades that transwomen are inordinately at risk of being exposed to HIV. As long ago as 2009, doctors in community clinics in California reported that the availability of hormones and other affirming care would make trans patients more likely to show up to clinics for prevention.

The shift in attention may be down to the fact that, in recent years, with lesbian and gay equality effectively secured in much of the West, LGBT organisations have started to champion transgender causes. But it may also be down to the fact that, in some countries, HIV transmission is beginning to occur at a faster rate among heterosexuals than gay and bisexual men. And this is perhaps in part due to a subsection of heterosexuals, who have transwomen as partners.

Gynandromorphophilia was first coined in 1984 to describe the sexual preferences of ostensibly heterosexual men who are also attracted to males with exaggerated female features, such as big breasts, hips and lips. Gynandromorphophilic males (or Gamps for short) play a role in the transmission of HIV to the general population because their sexual relations with these often high-risk men put their own female partners at risk, which can also result in the virus being passed to unborn babies. We know, too, that heterosexuals tend to be diagnosed late, once their immune system has already been compromised. This also applies to their female partners, who might never suspect that they have been exposed.

In 1995, when Belgian virologist Peter Piot was entrusted with leading the global Aids response at UNAids, it didn’t take him long to realise that stigma relating to sex was the real barrier to ending the epidemic. Shaming “people with diverse sexuality”, Piot said, forces them into the shadows and keeps the virus in circulation.

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Why gay men ignored MeToo

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In an effort to address the estimated 4,500 undiagnosed HIV cases in the UK and halt the virus, the NHS now recommends that certain at-risk groups “may benefit” from taking the now widely and freely available PrEP medication. These at-risk groups include “trans or non-binary person [who] are regularly having condomless sex”. And with this group, “gender-affirming” incentives will increasingly be a part of that medicalising strategy.

While there is an urgent and noble objective here — the eradication of HIV — my worry is that it is taking place without any serious public debate about the consequences. With so much still unknown about the effects of transitioning, gender-affirming therapy is being made more accessible. And at what cost? Only when the HIV epidemic finally ends, will it become clear how subtly it has reshaped the world it’s left behind.

During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

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It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

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Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

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Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

“Many women only feel comfortable talking about the intimate and devastating details of male violence in a safe environment. And a safe environment means a women-only one,” writes Karen Ingala Smith in a new book, Defending Women’s Spaces. This is her debut, but she is already hard at work on her second, about femicide. Ingala Smith has spent a total of 32 years working in women’s organisations that tackle men’s violence. As the CEO of the nia project, a service for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic abuse, and the founder of both Counting Dead Women and the UK Femicide Census (analysing cases of women and girls killed by men), no one is better-placed to comment on what female victims of male violence need.

However, the existence of Defending Women’s Spaces is deemed so dangerous that the ticketing giant Eventbrite deleted the link to the online launch a few weeks ago, and began issuing refunds. According to Eventbrite’s Trust and Safety team, the event was in danger of violating its policy on “hateful, dangerous or violent content”. Keeping women and girls safe from male violence, and enabling them to recover from it — the main topics of the book — are now seen as hateful activities, according to those that believe excluding trans-identified men is bigotry.

Feminists fought for the introduction of the 2010 Equality Act, which allows for the provision of separate or single-sex services in certain circumstances — for example, in toilets, changing rooms, refuges and hospital wards. So why do our hard-won rights still need defending?

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The toppling of the trans extremists

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In recent years, trans rights organisations such as Stonewall have been campaigning to end female-only provision. For example, in 2015, Stonewall’s submission to the Women and Equalities Select Committee Inquiry on Transgender Equality included demands for a review of the Equality Act to include “gender identity” rather than “gender reassignment” as a protected characteristic. They also argued for removing any circumstances in which single-sex spaces were allowed.

The charity Gendered Intelligence have also made it clear they would do away with our right to single-sex provision by calling for “a comprehensive review of the legislation affecting trans people (and intersex people) with the aim of deleting the exceptions laid out [in the Equality Act]”. Both groups, along with political parties such as the Greens, Women’s Equality Party and some sections of Labour, are also in favour of self-ID, which would allow men to identify as women without the requirement of any medical intervention. Doing so would legally permit them to access women’s single-sex services.

Ingala Smith is fighting back. “This is not about trans people in women’s spaces,” she says. “It is about men in women’s spaces. Declaring yourself to be a woman does not alter that you are male.” She is in step with the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who last week wrote to Nicola Sturgeon to warn her that self-ID would be open to abuse by male sex offenders, and thereby put women and girls in danger. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also raised a number of concerns about such a policy.

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Nevertheless, the Women’s Equality Party last week became the latest political entity to jump on the bandwagon, passing a motion that supports self-ID. (That motion was proposed by its leader, Mandu Reid.) What does Ingala Smith think of a political party supposedly set up to defend the rights of women taking this line? “Reid has just signed the party death warrant.”

For those who want to understand why feminists campaign against trans-identified males being permitted to enter women’s spaces, Defending Women’s Spaces is extremely useful. Most transwomen with a Gender Recognition Certificate retain male genitalia and, as Ingala Smith explains, “criminal behaviours of those who had legally and medically transitioned from men to transwomen follow male pattern offending”.

Ingala Smith examines cases such that of Karen White —a transwoman with intact genitalia who sexually assaulted a number of female inmates when placed in a women’s prison — and transwoman Katie Dolatowski, a child sex offender who gave a false name to staff and ended up living in a women’s refuge for 71 days among vulnerable women and children.

She also points out that there is nothing stopping transwomen setting up services of their own. “Some women would help transwomen set up services for them to escape or recover from men’s violence. But some trans women will not want to use them because they want to be validated as women.” They want their ideology validated, even if it means making vulnerable women physically uncomfortable.

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Ingala Smith’s publisher Polity approached her to write Defending Women’s Spaces because they saw that books challenging trans orthodoxy are becoming increasingly popular. However, its publication was not without its obstacles. Alison Phipps, a former professor of gender studies at Sussex University, tweeted: “I am withdrawing my peer review labour from publishers giving transphobia a veneer of intellectual legitimacy by publishing ‘gender, critical’ books. Very sad that my previous publisher Polity is on that list.”

“There were some trans activists gunning for me even before I was in a position to speak openly about my views of women-only spaces,” Ingala Smith says. “As I’ve spoken out more and more about women-only spaces, what has been hard is a gentle freezing out by some other leaders of women’s organisations. Veiled comments about being aggressive, being accused of being insensitive and causing upset. At the end of the day, my priority is women who’ve been subjected to men’s violence and doing my best for them.”

Ingala Smith is one of only two CEOs running services for victims of male violence putting the safety of women over gender ideology. She openly applies the exceptions permitted under the Equality Act to provide women-only refuge and other single-sex support.

Fortunately, women fighting for sex-based rights are beginning to prevail. The confusing law around gender self-identification has now been clarified thanks to the legal cases brought by, for example, Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey. Those campaigning for self-ID often claim that the law states employers and service providers must treat someone who identifies as the opposite sex as that sex. But that is not the case, and employers who follow the Stonewall rule that “trans women are women” can be sued for unlawful discrimination towards women. Ingala Smith celebrates the victories of those feminists bringing legal cases against their employers, universities, and rape crisis centres.

“Women on TERF Island are fighting back,” she writes. “We are resisting the ideology that threatens to roll back the rights… and services that our fore-sisters fought hard to achieve.”

By the time I cross the Forth and then the Tay, everything is changed: not just the passenger accents, or landscape, or weather, or light — but also the train itself. I would swear the carriage somehow shrinks. And time bends too. By the time I arrive at the tiny station and alight to the familiar sound of Arctic geese in the tidal basin right next to the platform, it feels like I’ve travelled, if not to an earlier time, then certainly to a different one.

A coastal town of 12,000 people, where many of my schoolmates found work offshore in the oil industry, I thought of Montrose last week as Sturgeon delivered her conference speech 40 miles up the road in Aberdeen. Among her key messages was the announcement of a new £50 million award to Aberdeen and surrounding areas from a government fund called Just Transition. This was not, as some might have worried given the SNP’s current preoccupations, a forward-thinking plan to make Aberdonians more non-binary, but rather a fund dedicated to helping the North East move away from oil and ultimately to make Aberdeen “the net zero capital of the world”.

As usual with the SNP, pesky details about the fast-changing status of Scottish oil in the face of Europe’s current energy crisis were unacknowledged in favour of a soothingly principled-sounding headline. Other progressive lures in Sturgeon’s speech included strong support for refugees, much lamenting about lost EU membership, and motherly requests that everyone get their Covid booster. There was also the requisite Tory-bashing, anticipated by Sturgeon the day before with her statement: “I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.”

How did this all go down in Montrose? My hometown is probably one of the most SNP-friendly in the country. Even when SNP MPs were few and far between, we had one in Angus for much of my childhood. Many — perhaps even most — people I know there are staunchly pro-independence. And yet, as you might expect in a place where farming, fishing and oil have shaped the economy, and where golf club membership is practically mandatory from birth, the Montrose civic character is quite far from the rainbow flag-waving ecowarrior to whom the SNP seems to want to appeal.

The main rival for the SNP in Angus is not Labour but the Tories, perpetually edged into second place (apart from one brief period in power between 2017-19). Generally, Montrosians are cautious, wry, and not easily impressed with flamboyant gestures — and this includes the few natural Labour voters I know there, who are more into nationalising the railways than taking the knee. It’s true that there are a few blue-haired teenagers around these days, but I assume it’s a bit like back in 1987, when I bought myself a BOY London baseball hat and matching sweatshirt on an intrepid foray to Kensington High Street. Back under the grey skies of Montrose, I looked ridiculous and everyone knew it.

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Down in Holyrood, the SNP continues to pursue its own ludicrously incongruent fashion item — otherwise known as revising the Gender Recognition Act in favour of self-ID. Blithely ignoring the evidenced concerns of many women — famous and not-so-famous — Sturgeon continues to present this policy as a mere bureaucratic formality, sensibly ironing out a few wrinkles in the existing Act in a way that only morally bankrupt deplorables could possibly object to. Actually, though, her Bill proposes that any Scottish man can legally become a woman pretty much whenever he likes, with practically no meaningful strings attached. According to almost any local standard other than the one set by (mostly English) Edinburgh University students, that’s clearly the project of a total bampot.

It cannot be overemphasised how poorly this culturally radical, sense-defying policy fits with the temperament of the average Scot — and not just in Angus. Much of Scotland remains what it has been for decades: family-oriented, communitarian, and socially conservative compared to the average metrosexual liberal type. Scottish people may be economically more Left-wing than UK voters but they aren’t more culturally liberal.

At the moment, the SNP are making much of recent findings from the British Social Attitudes survey suggesting that 52% of the population now back independence; perhaps unsurprisingly, they say less about other social trends indicated in the last few years, suggesting that there are significant qualms about uncontrolled immigration or that support for the death penalty is higher in Scotland than the UK national average. Indeed, this is perhaps what you might expect in a place where local communities are still relatively strong. For there to be insiders, there has to be outsiders.

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But to marvel at this mismatch between SNP luxury beliefs and the more parsimonious sensibilities of voters is to ignore the distorting influence of the biggest and baddest outsider of all: the one just over the border. For, although it has become relatively taboo to say so, whatever the official talk of civic rather than ethnic nationalism, a big motivator for SNP supporters in Scotland is still animosity towards the English. You can’t raise a population on endless stories about bloody historical injustices at the hands of their ethnic neighbours and then expect them to feel irenic. Certainly, I couldn’t fail to be aware of the enmity during my childhood, where my Southern parentage and wandering accent made me a constant target for cries of “English snob” at school.

Scratch the surface of grassroots SNP support and — not always but frequently — you’ll find slow-burning disdain, perhaps all the stronger for often being suppressed in favour of a more polite narrative. It’s usually confined to living rooms and pubs, but gets permissibly unleashed during football tournaments via support for that other national team, Anyone-But-England. And of course, as Sturgeon knows, an equally traditional means of expressing your feelings in this direction is to say how much you hate the Tories.

In the Scottish cultural imagination, the archetype of the sort of English man or woman that is most hated — Southern, posh-accented, privately-educated, and prone to seeing the country primarily in terms of its potential for invitations to hunting lodges — coincides significantly with the sort of Tory MP the membership still seems to prefer. Everybody knows that in saying you hate the latter, there’s at least the suggestion that you hate the former too. For some extreme nationalist groups, such as All Under One Banner and Siol nan Gaidheal, the equivalence is made without embarrassment.

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Once you understand that, unconsciously or otherwise, a contrarian anti-English sentiment implicitly powers many SNP decisions, a lot of other things become clearer too. You better understand how a party attached to sovereignty and self-determination can be so rhetorically keen on EU membership without perceived conflict; or why Scottish Covid policies were reliably more draconian than in England; or how an otherwise astute politician like Sturgeon could become so psychologically wedded to a baffling policy like self-ID. Though of course it isn’t the whole story, part of the answer is Any-Policy-But-England’s, and a passive-aggressive game of always being seen to stay on the right side of nice, with England inevitably cast as the nasty villain to Scotland’s noble but wounded hero.

In the case of self-ID, the knock-on costs are likely to be borne by ordinary Scottish women and girls, among them the further dismantling of single-sex services proudly built up by Scottish women for other women since the Seventies. Such is the naked contempt for women’s interests here, it’s tempting to see the whole project as a fig-leaf for deep-rooted misogyny. But if SNP supporters don’t already care about the present government’s many failures to govern well in practice, it isn’t clear why they would hold them accountable at the ballot box for self-ID either. Sticking it to the English will continue to be the more compelling goal for many voters over other practical considerations. And this highlights another way in which radical transactivism and Scottish nationalism can be a good fit, at least emotionally if not rationally. In practice, both can be a politics of resentment, pretending to be something finer.

On related issues, our Penny also seems to be a proud member of Team Female. She told Sky News “It makes no sense for government to be prescribing bathroom policies”. She told Twitter that she supported a “science-based approach” to the issue of transwomen in women’s sport, and claimed “It was me that changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender neutral language … to use female terms”. Infamously, Mordaunt is the MP that once mentioned the word “cock” six times in a parliamentary speech, as a forfeit. Is it possible she now believes a woman doesn’t have one?

Yet when as Minister she introduced the highly divisive Gender Recognition Act consultation about moving to self-ID in July 2018, she told parliament: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. And that is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.” Even as late as March last year, she was still intoning the Stonewall-approved mantra. Much of the rest of her narrative has also been contradicted in the last few days by Tory insiders, from former No 10 director of legislative affairs Nikki da Costa, to MP Sir John Hayes, to Attorney General Suella Braverman. This weekend, The Sunday Times revealed leaked documents which suggested that Mordaunt had indeed expressed a wish to remove the dysphoria diagnosis requirement from the GRA — though apparently she had also wished to introduce a medical requirement that the applicant for a legal sex change be shown to be of “sound mind”.

Even treating the matter ultra charitably, and assuming that, in her own mind, she was never in favour of self-ID strictly conceived as including the total absence of medical requirements, it’s still obvious that Mordaunt’s revised proposal, requiring only proof of sanity for legal sex change, would have caused almost exactly the same worries as self-ID — mere proof of sanity not exactly being a high bar in safeguarding terms (ask the victims of Chris Pincher). Equally, on her Ministerial watch a huge number of institutions, influenced by Stonewall, were at that point happily dismantling genuinely single-sex services for women anyway, regardless of whether the male who wanted access to them had a gender recognition certificate or not. This all happened without any interference from government.

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The real interest here is the fact that Mordaunt has felt forced to commit herself to such an easily disproved and desperate lie. I take this to be a fitting tribute to the effectiveness of the grassroots women’s resistance that first formed around 2015 — the year Stonewall first revealed its ambitions to change both the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act in favour of inner gender identity. The fact that the issue has arisen so prominently during the Conservative party leadership contest is the latest indication of this movement’s success. In its infancy, though it’s not quite true to say that women who raised concerns about self-ID couldn’t get arrested — they certainly could, or at least, could be interviewed under police caution – they were treated as pariahs, cranks, or bigoted obsessives. Not so much now.

Today, Conservatives who champion policies based on gender identity are thin on the ground. The focus of public anger rather tends to be upon the embarrassed mutterings of Labour MPs about cervixes. But it’s worth remembering – and especially when commentators talk these days blandly about “toxicity on both sides” of the gender debate – that it’s the Tories who were entirely responsible for setting up the issue to guarantee hot gibbering fury from women from the start. From 2015 on, a succession of Tory Ministers, given jobs in Equalities because they were female, promptly denied that being female was a limiting condition on being a woman. They then sought to dismantle single-sex provision for women without a backward glance at those screaming in frustration in their wake.

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Culprits include Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, and, of course, Mordaunt herself. The trend was set right from the start, with the outrageously biased Trans Equality Inquiry launched in 2015 under Morgan by the Women and Equalities Select Committee, with Tory Maria Millar as its Chair. This Inquiry might have saved itself a lot of trouble by explicitly outsourcing the whole project to Stonewall and Mermaids. Apparently blind to potential clashes with sex-based rights, and on the basis of evidence from some extremely partisan and inexpert witnesses, it recommended both moving to full self-ID — including lowering the permitted age of a recipient of a legal sex change to 16 — and that those males who possessed them should have full access to women’s services, and be able to work in women’s rape crisis services and domestic violence shelters if so wished. The Committee also recommended that the Equality Act should protect the characteristic of “gender identity” rather than “gender reassignment”. Each of these was among Stonewall’s main campaigning objectives at the time.

Other recommendations of this Inquiry have also aged terribly: for instance, that there are only a very few occasions where transwomen can be justifiably excluded from women’s sport; that dysphoric children’s access to puberty blocking drugs should be speeded up; and that all university staff should receive “gender identity awareness training”. Overall, it’s hard to imagine a more divisive bomb to drop on women, parents of dysphoric children, or academics who wished to criticise the problems involved in the proposals.

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Test article

By Kathleen Stock

Most of these recommendations were received positively by the Government in their response, and a year later prime minister Theresa May herself was announcing plans to move ahead with self-ID at the PinkNews awards. I remember my incredulity as I watched these events unfold from the sidelines, each one smoothly presented as sensible and compassionate by whatever Tory woman was championing it, and with all dissenting voices positioned as bigoted or stupidly misinformed. The Tories were in power, but the Opposition offered no hope of relief either – for Labour and the Liberal Democrats enthusiastically agreed with the reforms too. The mainstream media, peppered with Stonewall Champions, was largely complicit or indifferent. It felt like a total stitch-up. I felt like I was going mad.

It takes a special kind of indifference to half the population to be like this. On the modern Left, we can explain the enthusiasm for self-ID partly as an attraction to sexily complicated-sounding ideology, and partly as an attraction to reforming existing cultural traditions generally. But neither of these explanations are readily available to Tories. They are supposed to be both commonsensical and conserving of tradition. One would think that at the very least, they would be prepared to conserve the internationally ubiquitous tradition of naming biological sex in humans.

Perhaps then, it’s a different and more hidden ideological commitment of Conservatism, individualism, that explains the attraction to self-ID and associated lunacies: explains how both the party generally and some women MPs in particular could have got so thoroughly behind such a radical and damaging set of reforms without blinking at the consequences. For, bar a bit of urine on National Trust toilet seats, most of the worries about self-ID won’t make any negative difference to them personally. They won’t ever have to share a prison wing with a male rapist. Their private hospital ward won’t be impacted by the presence of a chaotic male in the bay next to them. If their daughter starts saying she is a boy, they can fast-track her into whatever kind of therapy they want, rather than rely on the mad ministrations of a captured NHS gender identity service. If their cancer screening information talks about “cervix-havers”, their first language and education will give them the ready capacity to work out what this means. Their heterosexual dating life won’t be impacted by males pretending to be lesbians either.

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The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

In other words: in order to care about the multiple impacts of saying that men can become women by declaring they are, you have to be able to care about (actual) women who aren’t just you, or your friends. The Left, and particularly the old Left, has the habit of this. Despite a massive propaganda campaign to deny it, it was largely women on the Left who organised the grassroots fightback to self-ID in the UK. Organisations such as A Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play for Women, and We Need to Talk, were started by (then) Labour members and voters, who were practised in thinking in terms of social structures rather than individuals, and knew how to feel solidarity with the most dispossessed. They also knew how to organise in order to reach a wide range of women, including voices that are often ignored.

A related question concerns why most Conservatives MPs are on board with rejecting self-ID, whereas previously they were indifferent. Do they actually care about women now, or are they mostly interested in the issue only because they have accurately identified it as a wedge, damaging to a Left currently tying itself into knots on womanhood to the derision of potential voters? One promising sign would be if they also prioritised women’s welfare and interests in other less febrile areas: the disproportionate impact of the cost-of-living crisis on women, say, or scandalously low rape conviction rates. But here they seem much less convincing. One is left overall with an impression of opportunism and culture warmongering, not principle.

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Fragile students just need a hug

By Mary Harrington

There are of course exceptions within Tory ranks. In the Lords, Baronesses Emma Nicolson and Anne Jenkin have been committed and courageous in getting the word out to others that gender law reform isn’t the rainbow-bedecked path to universal happiness often presented. More recently, both Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch appear to have grasped this point thoroughly too.

But it should not be presumed that the party is wholly cleansed of the temptation to throw women under a bus. Under Tory Chair Carolyn Nokes, last year the Women and Equalities Committee launched another Inquiry into Reform of the Gender Recognition Act, eventually finding in favour of self-ID yet again. I was called as a witness to this Inquiry, and it was clear to me from observing the process that most of the Committee still had no real understanding of the potential impacts of gender law reform on the interests of women and girls.

Throughout my session, Nokes was dismissive, looked bored, and left early, later predictably painting criticism of the Committee’s position as “bile and abuse”. She is also on record as having no idea why you might want to know someone’s birth sex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the current leadership battle, Nokes has come out strongly for Mordaunt.

I’m sure that both these women think of themselves as enthusiastically pro-women. Arguably, though, a pro-women politician who doesn’t know what a woman is, is worse than none at all.