(Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
The last day of March marks the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which must be in contention for most redundant event in the calendar. Some readers might be of the opinion that a few days of transgender invisibility might be more timely.
As a transgender person, I am tempted to agree. When I transitioned eight years ago the goal was to assimilate back into society, and with the minimum of fuss. Occasional stories did reach the press but, while there was passing interest, they were never high up the news agenda.
While the increased visibility cannot be denied, some people are now claiming that transphobia is taking over the nation. In an astonishing opinion piece for the New York Times earlier this week, Juliet Jacques announced that Transphobia is Everywhere in Britain.
Collins Dictionary defines transphobia as “a fear or hatred of transgender people”, so — if Jacques is correct — this is serious. Are there really hordes of people who are either fleeing from me in terror or on a warpath to my door?
I don’t think so. Certainly it is not my experience, nor is it the experience of my transgender friends. I earn a living as a teacher and go about my life much as I always did. Many things can keep me awake at night, but transphobia is not one of them.
While vociferous transgender activists repeat endlessly their demand for “trans rights now”, it’s much less clear what rights we lack. The 2010 Equality Act established gender reassignment as a protected characteristic to defend us against harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, transphobia is recognised as an aggravating factor in hate crime legislation. We can readily change sex markers on passports, driving licences and other documents. Even the sex recorded on our birth certificates can be amended — or falsified depending on your point of view — if we can demonstrate evidence of need. What more do we want?
Yes, transgender healthcare is buckling under the strain following unprecedented increased demand, and we suffer appalling delays for specialist medical treatment. Scope also remains to further develop additional “third spaces” for trans people, and anyone else who doesn’t want to share with their own sex. However, my fellow citizens do not appear to fear me or hate me because I am transgender.
Some perspective is needed here. Only 12 years ago, a transgender friend was dismissed from her job as an assistant headteacher because she proposed to transition. Her school told her that should she come to work in female attire, she would be escorted straight off the premises. Such outrageous transphobia is no longer permissible or acceptable. Society has been transformed.
So what is this transphobia that Jacques is complaining about? She is not alone; seeking out transphobia in order to moan about it seems to be a key part of transgender activism.
On Monday evening, I was at an epicentre of this so-called transphobic hate: a rally hosted by the Labour Women’s Declaration in support of Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance. Those two organisations were recently singled out by the egregious Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) as trans-exclusionist hate groups. Strong words — and a total misrepresentation of reality.
I not only attended that rally — held in a North Kensington social club — I spoke from the platform. Alongside me were those who the LCTR would no doubt condemn as premier league transphobes.
Kiri Tunks, a founder of Woman’s Place UK, reiterated her astonishment at the controversy Woman’s Place has generated. Their campaign to uphold women’s sex-based rights, as enshrined in UK Law, and defend women’s right to be heard, has been twisted out of all recognition in the minds of their opponents. From the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson described the worst attack on lesbian rights in her lifetime. As sex and gender have been conflated and confused, 40% of people on some lesbian dating sites now have male bodies. She was clear: sex is biology; gender is stereotypes. As a scientist I agree wholeheartedly.
The barrister and former firefighter Lucy Masoud and UnHerd’s Paul Embery called out those leading Labour Party politicians who had signed the LCTR pledges. Masoud described it as “a descent into political lunacy”, but it is an entrenched position in the party. Lachlan Stuart — former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — explained how doors were closed to him in 2018 when he voiced his concerns about the qualifying criteria for all-women shortlists.
Julie Bindel then let rip. The old-style sexism she had grown up with in the 1970s was preferable to this insidious misogyny dressed up as progress. Transgender ideology, she declared, was men’s rights activism. By now my erasure should have been complete but instead I listened intently as Professor Selina Todd — no platformed recently at Oxford University for alleged transphobery — told the packed hall that not signing the LCTR pledges and silence was not good enough, and if the Labour Party disappeared down a rabbit hole of misogyny then the Labour movement will go forwards without them.
If this was the transphobia that Jacques had in mind, trans people need not be concerned. Trans people in the hall were welcomed warmly and treated with dignity and respect. Trans rights are human rights and they were safe in that meeting.
Unfortunately, the sense of solidarity was not replicated outside the building. Throughout the evening a noisy and intimidating group of protesters repeated their catechism ad nauseum, trans women are real women (spoiler: we are not, we are a different sex) and trans men are real men. But after shrieking about terfs on their turf, they exposed their vacuous ideology and political naivety when they ignited smoke bombs outside the building, just two hundred metres from the shocking sight of Grenfell Tower. As smoke entered the room, the tension and fear was palpable. Memories are still raw in this neighbourhood: it most certainly was not their turf.
When I engaged with the demonstrators after the meeting I was met with fear and animosity. There certainly is transphobia in society — we must not be naïve about that — but it wasn’t found in that meeting, it was outside in the darkness. Maybe the frenzied concern that Britain is being consumed by transphobia is a projection of their inner fears?
The view from the New York Times that “Transphobia is everywhere in Britain” is not just nonsense. It deflects us from the work that we should be focusing on. Trans rights are not secure: we suffer appalling delays for specialist NHS treatment, and we would be foolish to think that bigotry and discrimination were behind us. But we are stronger when we find common cause with other groups that face similar opposition, namely women and LGB people; and from a platform inside a North Kensington social club we made that clear.
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Subscribe“Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them…”
They are, and I’d really like to know why. Every single poll shows that the majority of the public – which means most voters – are rationalists who understand that men can’t be women (or vice versa). So why not align with the majority on this issue?
Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?
I agree, but can a Prime Minister be “cancelled”?* It’s a huge shame that he doesn’t have the cojones to find out.
*other than by electoral means.
We’ve created this vast swamp of NGOs and activist orgs that have an outsized influence on politicians. I can only speculate that elected leaders simply don’t interact enough with everyday people – that even their social circles are dominated by people with divergent opinions.
“Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?”
It’s very simple. Leading politicians are ruled not by their voters, but by powerful financial interests. Wealthy NGOs and corporations have a vested interest in backing the trans lobby, making it disproportionately powerful compared to its constituent base. Despite being a supposedly oppressed minority trans rights activists are backed by some of the wealthiest and powerful organisations on Earth, such as Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Arcus Foundation etc. etc. Rishi Sunak fears them over you.
See https://archive.ph/9vaRd – the now deleted from Medium article ‘Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science’ from 2018 which gives a great overview of how fake all of this nonsense is.
Thanks for the link! Another aspect of this madness is that it provides an opportunity for intra-elite vetting and selection of “useful idiots” and a way for elites to compete and weed out people who may not be “loyal” to the cause of the .1%.
Conversion is changing one set of beliefs for another. The vast majority of people don’t care what others believe as long as the beliefs do not negatively impact on their lives. People generally tend to be live and let live. They have busy lives and don’t have time to stay up to date on current trends. It is the trans activists who have been infiltrating the government, the civil service, schools, not for profits, businesses, etc. to spread their doctrine and are using the power of the law to force their beliefs on the majority and silence objections by having all objections classified as hate speech. Using the power of the law to attempt to force beliefs upon the people should be illegal.
Yes, quite. The ‘infiltration’ has been cleverly orchestrated. Everyone has paid Stonewall to ‘train’ them (with our money, tbh) and to give them brownie points for being good, inclusive organisations. One way to comply was to bring in EDI experts (trans advocates – has anyone heard them advocating loudly for disabled employees?) Jobs for the boys – all those ‘gender’ graduates, with one world view, brought in at management level to devastate women’s rights in industry and government. There aren’t that many of them, but they punch above their weight, because they’re not brought in as office juniors.
Quite an effective tactic, it turns out, and massively difficult to undo.
Transgenderism is an occult movement with billions of dollars behind it. It’s a Trojan horse for those with nefarious intentions toward children and provides a convenient path through which the state can circumnavigate parental protections in order to indoctrinate children.
Politicians are not scared of trans activists but those financially backing them.
Do the Tories ever actually want to win again? Being 5% less radical than the radical left seems like a strategy for party annihilation. At what point do the actual conservatives and moderates in the party jump ship?
Who would they vote for? Increasingly moderate and conservative views are being literally banned. Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about women, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t care about the Conservative Party, and doesn’t care about the next election, because he knows he will lose anyway. He’s just focussed on his own employability after that happens.
Rishi Sunak just fancied being prime minister of a country. He had no loyalty to the U.K. as demonstrated by the US green card scandal. The position will have profited him greatly and enhanced his global profile.
In fact, that probably explains why Rishi Sunak has crumbled. He cares most about his position amongst the global elites, especially if he does not expect to win the next election, and they are mostly behind the the indoctrination of the masses with woke ideology.
How about Farage?
I don’t think they want to be elected and I don’t blame them. The next administration will only be issuing WEF directives to usher in Agenda 2030. This is why we are about to have a member of the Trilateral Commission installed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see several members of the next parliament assassinated as people finally wake up to what’s been done to them.
I think the current Tory ‘elite’ are not Conservatives and have no interest whatsoever in those who elected them.
I do wonder if some of the problem here is the tortuous language used by the radical trans lot.
Is conversion therapy what the GIDS at the Tavistock were doing or is conversion therapy talking to a worried teen about their feelings?
If the NHS gives clinical advice on child development, then why are these politicians contradicting medical experts?
They are all, without exception, sinister ideologues pursuing the same neoliberal transhuman creed.
Politics in the UK are getting increasingly surreal. For Mr. Sunak ‘it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”. Presumably this is election jitters, not wanting to disturb the trans lobby wasps’ nest.
Meanwhile, here in Scotland, Mr Youseless plans to SCRAP the current conversion therapy ban, not because Mr Youseless thinks this is a good thing, but in order to save the SNP’s skin at the next election.
So both Mr Sunak and Mr Youseless are doing synchronised volte-faces, but in the opposite direction, both hoping to avoid political oblivion.
It’s crazy. The Tories might even win against the odds if they went full berserker against gender bullish*t – and in fact the whole DEI. They are not conservatives basically. Woke-LITE.
Have you considered running for leadership of the Tory party? I’m pretty sure “full beserker” is exactly what they are going for now!
Bonne chance, cherie!
People can never change sexes. But it seems politicians will always change positions, if it’s perceived to serve their interests.
It’s maddening that — at a time when popular sentiment (even in the United States!) seems to slowly be awakening to the delusion of gender ideology — spineless politicians still kow-tow to transactivism rather than standing for the real and pressing needs of women.
Keir Starmer has been having another of his moments about gender self-identification. But who cares what this creature thinks? It is a war crime to aid or abet a war crime, so that without ever having been a Minister, or even an MP for the governing party, Starmer is already a war criminal, thereby matching his foreign policies to his domestic policies. He is the Kid Starver of Gaza and Gospel Oak, and his White Phosphorus Party would privatise the hospitals at home having already bombed them abroad.
More broadly, with its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, Thatcherism has inevitably ended up as gender self-identification, which was unknown in 2010, and which has therefore arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.
Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.
And if this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 46, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned the England of 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing, into the England of 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to give statutory effect to the rhetoric of Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman, which is pointedly never quite echoed by Rishi Sunak, whose choice of words to the Conservative Party Conference was very careful indeed.
Does everyone get put into moderation, or is it just me? I pay for this. Do you?
I do. Every time. Sometimes it takes hours for my comments to appear. I have emailed numerous times and asked for an explanation but have never received one.
This comment took about ten minutes to appear.
My latest has now been waiting an hour.
You must be considered more threatening/ dangerous than I am.
It no longer even appears as “awaiting for approval”. Hey, ho. See here.
Happens way too often.
“Awaiting for approval.” Pidgin English.
We no longer have proper political representation we have a uni party interested only in promoting the globalist agenda. US is exactly the same.
“People pride themselves on “speaking truth to power” – leaders, big shots. In a democracy, this is easy to do. Usually, you get nothing but applause for it. What is hard is speaking truth to “the people” – for in a democracy, that’s where the power lies.”
Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review, “Cooper’s Union”
“The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy… induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own opinions when opposed to those of the mass… A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch shrinks from opposing an entire community.”
James Fenimore Cooper in “The American Democrat” c. 1835