One could hardly call that efficient. But for patients today, my experience is the stuff of dreams. Waiting lists have ballooned out of all recognition. My former GIC in London is candid: “We are currently offering first appointments to people who were referred in January 2018.” Those people have waited four and a half years, merely to get to the starting line. But dig a little deeper into the data and the forward projections look even worse. In May 2022, there were 11,407 people languishing on the waiting list; just 50 of them were offered a first appointment that same month. This figure seems typical: in April it was 56, and in March it was 33. At those rates it will take between 17 and 28 years to clear the backlog. Typically, the clinic receives around 300 referrals every month, so with each month that passes, those waiting lists get even longer.

Elsewhere, the story is much the same. A GIC in Sheffield is offering first appointments to those referred in March 2018, while one in Exeter has seen nobody referred after June 2016. Behind this data, there are people stuck on waiting lists: almost 4,000 at Exeter in a queue that has stopped moving. The message from the clinic is stark: “Please do not contact the clinic to enquire about waiting times as our staff are very busy and we cannot provide any more information than is provided here. Thank you.”

With NHS services grinding to a halt, it’s not surprising that private clinics have sprung up to provide a faster alternative. Some clinicians are moonlighting alongside their regular jobs for the NHS. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Stuart Lorimer was brutally honest about his reasons: “Doctors have mortgages too, and my partner was on the verge of retirement… I was looking for ways to generate more income.” A tidy income, it seems — Lorimer charges £300 per hour.

Meanwhile, the London Transgender Clinic, a private practice, was established by plastic surgeon Christopher Inglefield in 2015, “in response to a noticeable increase in enquires from transgender and non-binary patients. Many of these patients were unable to access quality and timely care from the overwhelmed NHS gender services.” But his fast-track pass comes at a cost. LTC’s guide price for the management of hormone therapy is £849 for the first year, and £468 per annum subsequently. And that doesn’t include the drugs: “LTC is not a licensed dispensary, therefore, we advise that you take your private prescription to your local pharmacy.” It’s a far cry from the NHS, where a prescription prepayment certificate costs just £108.10, and that covers all your medicines for the year.

While NHS surgery is free to the user, private patients pay the full cost themselves. LTC charges from £27,000 for male-to-female gender surgery, rising to at least £32,000 if a section of colon needs to be used. LTC is perhaps on the pricey side, but their fees are not off the scale. The Parkside Hospital in Wimbledon told me that, “it’s £23,000 for a vaginoplasty”. Alongside their private patients, Parkside has a contract to treat NHS patients — 132 of them in 2019. This suggests the NHS is paying north of £3 million per year to treat around a dozen patients each month.

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This model is hardly sustainable, with the London GIC alone currently receiving more than 300 referrals per month. Even if the clinic somehow increased its capacity to assess those patients in a timely fashion, what happens next? While it is perhaps feasible for the world’s pharmaceutical industry to step up production of hormone therapy and blockers, surgery is a different matter. Vaginoplasty is a skilled job that few surgeons can do. In 2016, GRS surgeon Phil Thomas pointed out that “there are simply not enough people in Britain who know how to make a vagina”. His colleague Tina Rashid said, “attracting new surgeons into the speciality was extremely difficult… GRS is a very niche area.”

As a result, the NHS system of Gender Identity Clinics is not only failing to deliver at present; it’s hard to see how it could ever deliver in the future. Even if, say, £100 million could be found every year to fund around 5,000 surgeries, it is futile if there is nobody to do them. A totally new model is needed, and we do not need to look hard for it.

Last month, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust announced the closure of their Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents (GIDS), the clinic for children who think that they might be trans. It was perhaps inevitable after the Cass review criticised the clinic as: “Not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand.” It will be replaced by regional centres offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

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Adults deserve no less. Patients who should be assessed, screened for comorbid psychological disorders, and perhaps offered counselling are instead being consigned to seemingly endless queues — and told not to bother the staff. Adult Gender Identity Clinics are another broken system in need of replacement.

There is a certain mystique surrounding NHS gender clinics, but they are NHS services like any other, where clinicians meet with their patients and discuss their treatment plans. At the GIC the options are limited, or at least they were for me. I spent less than four hours in that consulting room. After two one-hour initial assessments, the clinic wrote to my GP to recommend hormone therapy: oral estradiol valerate and an injectable GnRH agonist — a “blocker” — that desensitised my pituitary gland, which in turn shut down the production of testosterone in my testes. Whether this is safe or not, nobody really knows. The drugs are not licensed for these purposes.

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I had four further half-hour consultations. During that time, I was referred 200 metres up the road to Charing Cross Hospital for gender reassignment surgery. And that was that. No psychotherapy, and no psychiatry of note. Less than two months after surgery, I was discharged to the care of my GP. If any long-term research is going on, I am not part of it. I’ve had no contact with the clinic since 2016.

If gender dysphoria needs to be treated — and I think it does — then psychotherapy should be the first approach. It seems madness to proceed otherwise. Surely, we need to explore the issues thoroughly with a counsellor before considering hormones and surgery. Therapy can be provided locally and close to home; it certainly shouldn’t need a whole day out in London. And if surgery is what’s needed, it shouldn’t require choosing whether to pay a year’s salary or sit on seemingly endless waiting lists, with no support from the staff. A rigorous, judicious and efficient service is what’s needed. At the moment, it’s failing on every front.

Kathleen Stock recently suggested in UnHerd that autogynephilia (AGP) was a motive for “some but not all within the male trans demographic” to immerse themselves in the fiction of changing sex. Ray Blanchard, the sexologist who coined the terminology, went further. Last year, he told me that “in the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type”.

AGP drove my own transsexualism. But in a debate where the condition is simultaneously denied and monstered, it is unsurprisingly also misunderstood. Stock described it as a fetish and suggested that it was likely to be influenced by pornography. While it might exhibit itself in fetishistic behaviour and be fed by porn, my experience of AGP extends back to my earliest memories. If I was not born with this pervading condition, it had gripped me by age three.

More than 50 years later, I can still picture the scene. I was learning to count beyond 20, and quickly picked up the pattern — 30, 40, 50 — and the repetition. But by the time we got to 60, a chill ran down my spine. We would soon be at 80 — a word sounded similar to “tights”, clothing that I knew was only for girls.

Why this was such a taboo for me, and at such an early age, I don’t know. Clearly I understood the difference between boys and girls; I knew I was a boy, and I knew that we wore different clothes. But I wanted to wear girls’ clothes, something I knew was forbidden. I cannot remember being told such things, but nobody had told me how to breathe either, or know how to feel hungry or thirsty, or go to sleep when I was tired. But every other sexually dimorphic species needs to know the difference between the sexes without being schooled on it. Why should human beings be different?

Clothes were the issue for me throughout childhood. But I had no sisters and I had to make do with my own fantasy world. During primary school, however, I stumbled upon two opportunities to turn that fantasy into reality. I remember them like oases in a desert.

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First, there was a village fete where my ladybird costume involved wearing a tight black jumper and black tights. The red papier-mâché on my back was incidental. Adrenaline overwhelmed me, but I was too ashamed to tell anyone. I was probably aged six. Three years later, a school Christmas play offered another cross-dressing opportunity. Nothing special – I was a carol singer – but for some long forgotten reason, the boys were dressed the same as the girls. But by then I was imprisoned by my own fear and never took the message home. My costume was never made and I played my role in mufti.

In those days, an interest in clothes of the opposite sex was labelled as transvesitism, something distinct from transsexualism, a compulsion to be the opposite sex. But in reality, the two conditions are not so easy to separate. Transvestites may have been ridiculed, while transsexuals were pitied, but there is truth behind an old joke in the trans community: What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? About five years.

These days it seems that we are all transwomen, which may remove the need for any demarcation, but also removes the need to think about AGP. However, while language may change, human nature remains the same from generation to generation. In a 2005 study of 2,450 Swedish adults, Långström and Zucker found that almost 3% of men “reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism”. I wonder how many more did not report their furtive activities? Whatever the truth, this behaviour appears to be rather more common than the 0.3% to 0.7% “tentatively” estimated by the UK government in 2018.

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My experience alone suggests that boys wrestle with AGP long before puberty. But it was during adolescence when my long-running fantasy — usually of waking up to find myself magically transformed into the other sex — became a compulsion to start buying female clothes. By the time I was 16, I would travel to neighbouring towns, buy what I could and squirrel my purchases away in intricate, secure hiding places. Being discovered was the most shameful thing I could imagine. At no point did pornography play a part — this was the Eighties and I had no access to it. The compulsion came from within: my thoughts were driven by my own nature.

Life is very different for children growing up today, and not always in a good way. Transitioning was never an option for me as a child so it was futile to go beyond dreaming about it. Instead, my energies were directed into my studies and my relationships — and keeping my AGP well hidden. The mental stress was incessant.

But I endured. I eventually married a woman, and we had three children. Those four people mean the world to me. Autogynephilia drifted in and out of remission but it never took over. At least not until the internet connected me to other people who had transitioned and had made it work. These were not the exotic transsexuals that I had read about in the Sunday People — high-life celebs who had sex-changes in Casablanca. They were people just like me — engineers, medics, teachers even — who had gone to their GPs to ask for a referral to an NHS gender clinic. When I knew that medical and surgical transition was possible, it rapidly became irresistible.

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But what opened up to me in mid-life, now beckons to children. I worry about both sexes. In her superb book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explores on the transgender contagion among teenage girls. But what about boys particularly those struggling with AGP? These days they might be adorned with new labels — trans girls — but the condition is the same. Who is looking out for them? Who is counselling those who come forwards, and how are they being counselled? I cannot do it — I am no therapist — and I firmly believe all AGP adults, indeed all transsexuals, should stay clear. We come with our own baggage and children need to be able to focus on their own issues when they see a counsellor.

When I was young, I coped because I had to cope. What alternative was there? But it would have helped me to know what was really going on. The tragedy is that the current generation of AGP boys are none the wiser. Either they are cooped up behind the same walls of shame and guilt that constrained me 40 years ago. Or they have been affirmed as “transgirls”. Or they are simply at a loss to understand themselves, feeling like an introvert among a party of extroverts.

These boys need help to understand themselves. Let’s not amplify their daydreams — fantasy does not become reality. But let’s not embarrass or monster them either. We need to be honest: autogynephilia is a psychological condition that we just have to live with. Some may end up transitioning in the end — we cannot put that particular internet genie back in the box — but that is a decision for adults to take, not children. If first do no harm, then second, let them at least grow up.

The UK has left the European Union, but we remain a member of the Council of Europe. The CoE is an older and larger organisation — hence the inclusion of Russia and Turkey — and is built around the European Convention on Human Rights. This week’s meeting revealed just how empty some of those human rights have become.

The title of the resolution passed by its Parliamentary Assembly was noble enough — “Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe” — but, as ever, the devil was in the detail. As well as conflating the UK, where LGB and trans people are well-protected, with the rather different situation in parts of Eastern Europe, the resolution quietly erased sex from its list of protected characteristics.

Deplorably, sex was not even mentioned in respect to refuge shelters. Victims, the CoE ruled, must be protected against “re-traumatisation on the grounds of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics” — but not their sex.

It then got worse: the resolution further demanded that member states “refuse to provide funding to local, regional or national authorities or other State or non-State actors that deny the human rights of LGBTI people, and to withdraw such funding if it has already been granted”. This was, in effect, a call for governments to turn their backs on single-sex provision.

Let’s be clear: the LGBTI community is made up of people whose human rights deserve to be protected. But other groups also have human rights, and sometimes rights need to be balanced. When vulnerable women need single-sex provision, they must not be expected to share with members of the opposite sex, however we might identify.

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It shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to create additional spaces for transsexuals like me so as to assure everyone’s rights. Yes, it might cost more money — but this resolution was driven far more by ideology than economics. A whole paragraph was devoted to stamping out what its author perceived to be 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’”.

It was the kind of statement trotted out in student debates — and you could be forgiven for thinking its impact will be just as small. After all, CoE Resolutions are not binding on member states, and I suspect that few Europeans care enough to know that its Parliamentary Assembly even exists, less still the business conducted by the 324 representatives drawn from national parliaments (including 18 UK members from the Commons and the Lords).

The truth, however, is that it does wield an influence over us all: when issues such as gender identity reach national parliaments, CoE resolutions allow politicians to present their case as a fait accompli. Indeed, when Maria Miller first introduced the concept of gender self-identification to the House of Commons in 2016, she cited: “Resolution 2048 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.”

That isn’t to say that all politicians subscribe to the CoE’s transgender agenda. On Tuesday, five members of the UK delegation tabled 10 amendments in an attempt to rescue the resolution. Just three managed to find their way into the final text. The first, Amendment 11, crucially inserted the word ‘sex’ into paragraph 12.1:

“amend criminal legislation as necessary to ensure that its provisions with respect to hate crimes clearly cover all offences committed against a person or group of persons based on their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics, include proportionate and dissuasive sanctions, protect victims’ rights and make provision for them to receive compensation”.

Amendments 12 and 13 ensured that sex would be protected elsewhere in reference to the criminal law.

In a powerful yet conciliatory speech, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced the 10 amendments. She skewered the most egregious failings of the resolution and the accompanying report that has been forwarded by Fourat Ben Chikha, a Green politician from Belgium. Antoniazzi was clear in her objectives: “We need transparency… I hope to amend the resolution to reflect the reality of the situation.”

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Why indeed had Ben Chikha shackled the UK with Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation and Turkey when reporting on hate in Europe? Without any context, anyone reading his proposal might reasonably imagine that those five countries were hotbeds of anti-trans hatred. In his report, Ben Chikha cited a 2021 Annual Review by ILGA Europe — an NGO which advocates for the “human rights and equality for LGBTI people at European level”. The ILGA review does contain a raft of tables and charts — but their evidence points to a reality somewhat different from the fantasy Ben Chikha presented to the Assembly.

As Antoniazzi pointed out: “The [ILGA] Review links the data source, Rainbow Europe. In the rank order of 49 European countries, the UK was placed fifth in respect of hate crime and hate speech. I want to underline that, it was fifth.” Not the fifth worst, but the fifth best. The table cited by Antoniazzi andplaced Malta at the top, with the UK only four places behind, ahead of France, Germany and Ben Chikha’s Belgium. Turkey, Poland and Russia languished at the foot of the table.

What these figures actually mean is open to discussion: do they reflect law and policy, or the experience of LGBTI people in society? But either way, there was nothing to suggest that the UK had a particular problem. The UK nation was defamed in this report, and Antoniazzi was correct to point it out.

Lord Blencathra, who spoke after Antoniazzi, was equally forthright:

“In my years serving in this honourable assembly, I can say that the report by Mr Ben Chikha is unique. Unique, because I have never before seen such a biased distorted and utterly wrong work of fiction than his comments about the United Kingdom. If [the resolution] goes unamended then it will bring this assembly into disrepute… What it appears to be suggesting is that UK society suffers from bigotry by allowing an open discussion about introducing new laws about self-identification of gender.”

Even worse, perhaps, is the message it sends to LGBTI people suffering appalling treatment in Eastern Europe. In January 2019, it was revealed that around 40 LGBTI people had been imprisoned in just one month — two of whom reportedly died under torture. How can the situation in the UK possibly be comparable? Women speaking up for their rights in the UK should never be conflated with concentration camps in Chechnya — but that, it seems, was Ben Chikha’s intent.

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Antoniazzi’s proposed remedy was straightforward: “Delete the following words, and the United Kingdom.” What followed next was anything but. It seemed at first that the amendment would be discarded without even being put to the vote. Antoniazzi needed the support of at least 10 colleagues. But under Covid regulations, this was a hybrid session and, in a display of anti-democratic farce, those logging in remotely were unable to register their support.

This led to a dramatic intervention by Lord Foulkes who interrupted the debate to express his frustration: “We raised points of order and we were ignored.” After he was supported by an unlikely alliance of Jeremy Corbyn and Lord Howell, a vote was eventually taken.

Yet it was lost by a margin of 61 to 24 — and the resolution was subsequently carried. Despite all the speeches, and all the facts and evidence presented from the UK, the verdict of the Parliamentary Assembly was blunt: “The Assembly strongly condemned ‘the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people for several years’ notably in Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

So for now, at least, we can only take solace in the fact that the arguments were made and there was a debate. Perhaps even more significantly, the debate was recorded for posterity, so that it can be rekindled as soon as it reaches Westminster, Holyrood and elsewhere. For make no mistake: this resolution will reach these quarters, where it will be used by those who hope to paint the UK as a country riddled by anti-trans prejudice. But when that happens, there will be one glaring omission in their arsenal: the truth.

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.

The single quote on the front cover was stark, “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.”

Our new issue is here! On the cover—'Periods on display' and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and #PeriodPoverty.

Plus, @WHO air quality guidelines, low #BackPain management, community-acquired bacterial #meningitis, and more. Read: https://t.co/eP1Lx7D116 pic.twitter.com/DchfiHnYEs

— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 24, 2021

Not even, “people with vaginas”, though that would have been bad enough. The Lancet has now gone beyond the appalling language — “people who menstruate” — that so upset JK Rowling last year.

The excerpt came from a review of an exhibition on the history of menstruation by Sophia Davis, but my complaint is not with her — she used the words woman and women five times in her piece. My concern is that this specific quote was chosen to be used so provocatively on the cover.

The Lancet — one of the world’s oldest and best-known medical journals — is on a mission. The publication might claim that “improving lives is the only end goal,” but editor Richard Horton has grand plans. His vision, which he laid out in 2016 is political revolution.

“The idea of the Lancet was born at an extraordinary moment in the history of the world in the early 19^th century which was a moment of political revolution and social revolt. We have to capture that idea every single day in what we do… What I think we’re trying to achieve now is to capture that original idea – the essence of who we are, our identity, in these campaigns that we are developing.”

This journal is of course no stranger to controversy. In 1998, it published Andrew Wakefield’s now notorious article that linked the MMR vaccine with chronic enterocolitis and autism. By the time that paper was retracted — 12 years later — children had been harmed. According to Public Health England, “It had an important impact on MMR coverage which dropped to about 80% nationally in the late nineties and early 2000s and took many years to recover. … Measles cases continued to rise and in 2006 endemic transmission became re-established in the UK.”

Horton has strayed over the line from medicine into politics repeatedly, covering for example the invasion of Iraq and the conflict in Gaza. While he has been quick to challenge the UK government over the response to Covid-19, he has been rather more forgiving of the Chinese authorities.

It is perhaps no wonder that he has waded into one of the most charged political debates of our time: the material reality of flesh and blood. Yes, some people struggle with their bodies — for any number of reasons, but we can never be divorced from them.

The egregious quote might lead us to think that Horton believes otherwise. Does he really think that “bodies with vaginas” are as peripheral to humanity as, say, cars with a hatchback: mere perambulating devices that transport our metaphysical essence from place to place?

If so, he would be replacing modern science with Gnosticism, a heresy that stretches back much further than the founding of The Lancet in 1823. So ancient in fact, that it was first refuted by Ignatius of Antioch who died around 110 CE.

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In the early second century, Gnostics separated the spiritual from the material. They held that matter was evil and the spirit good. Their focus was on the person of Jesus Christ — claims were made that he did not have a real body but only an apparent or phantom one — and a hope of salvation that came through esoteric knowledge, or gnosis.

There are strong parallels today in the debate over sex and gender. Adherents of what has become known as “gender ideology” might replace spirit with mind, but the schism between mind and body is much the same. Their entire belief system is constructed on esoteric knowledge.  Even small children are understood to be able to discern their gender identity, a mysterious quality that supposedly trumps mere biology when demarcating men from women.

As Mary Harrington suggested in her recent essay about latter-day “luxury Gnosticism”, when we can spend so much time in cyberspace in whatever form we please, it is seductive to believe that choosing our sex in the real world is as easy as toggling a switch and changing our name.

Gender ideology might not be a religion in the traditional sense but it is certainly a belief system. Gender identity — its principal dogma — is unprovable and unfalsifiable, yet we are expected to believe in it or keep quiet. It has its catechisms — Transwomen are women, transmen are men and non-binary people are valid — and its priestly class. They would be transgender people like me, supposedly with esoteric knowledge about what it means to be trans.

The reality — and I chose that word deliberately — is rather different, of course. Nobody, not even transgender people, can discern what it feels like to be someone else. All we have is our own experience. Are transwomen women, or are we men? Not only that, but men with a psychological disorder that drives us to want to become women? In a battle of ideas divorced from objective reality it is one person’s word against another.

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That benefits nobody, not least transgender people who have been plunged into possibly the most toxic and divisive debate in politics. Campaigns that were once important — for example the resourcing of NHS gender services and the protection against less favourable treatment at work — have been overshadowed by pointless squabbles over pronouns.

Words matter, because if we change the words we use we change the way we think. In many contexts, sex has been replaced with gender and — equally troubling to me — transsexual has been replaced with transgender. In both cases, people are separated from their reproductive biology. That doesn’t help anyone live their life in the real world where sex does matter.

Horton’s chosen quote — bodies with vaginas — both extends and focusses the denial of humans as material beings. Not only does he separate people from their entire biology, he directs the attention at just one sex: women. The Lancet used very different language in a Tweet about men’s health last week, “About 10 million men are currently living with a diagnosis of prostate cancer.”

The complaints appear to be piling up at The Lancet, including objections from the medical profession itself. Professor Dave Curtus, a contributor to The Lancet, tweeted: “Just wrote the Lancet to tell them to take me off their list of statistical reviewers and cancel my subscription and never contact me about anything ever again. Absolutely inexcusable language to refer to women and girls.”

The concerns are far more than mere intellectual or academic protests. This type of language makes women yet more vulnerable. The ideologues might convince themselves that womanhood is somehow separate to femaleness but as Professor Selina Todd explained in The Post last week, “Ignoring sex doesn’t make sex-based discrimination and harassment go away, it just prevents you from dealing with it.”

Bev Jackson, founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and more recently a co-founder of the LGB Alliance, went further in her analysis, “Dehumanization is the prelude to violence.”

Moreover, as in the MMR debacle over 20 years ago it is children who are being put at risk of harm. They have no special knowledge about their gender identity — nobody does — but promises are being made to them that can never be delivered: that they can somehow choose to be a boy or a girl. The flip side of course is the implied threat that if they choose incorrectly, they may go through the “wrong” puberty and never find satisfaction in life.

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Now this quasi-religious belief system is being given legitimacy on the front cover of The Lancet. It took the journal 12 years to retract the misinformation over the MMR vaccine. For the sake of the current generation of young people, Horton needs to rectify this current outrage somewhat more quickly.

Gnosticism may be alluring but it is ultimately futile. We are our bodies. It is high time that politicians, policy makers, and even the editor of The Lancet accepts the truth that Ignatius knew by the turn of the second century.

Transgender ideologues tell us that everybody has a gender identity — an innate and immutable feeling of maleness and femaleness — that determines whether we are women or men, or perhaps something else. If that conflicts with the sex “assigned” to you at birth, then come join us under the transgender umbrella. We will even give you a flag to make sure you feel special.

But what if gender identity is bunkum? To the true faithful who dutifully chant “transwomen are women”, even asking the question is tantamount to blasphemy.

The term “gender identity” was coined by Robert Stoller in 1964. He described it as “a congenital, perhaps inherited biological force”. But evidence is lacking. As Alex Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, has observed: “If there is some kind of ‘gender identity’ that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive.”

Rather like the “luminiferous ether” of the 19th century, a hypothetical substance used to explain the transmission of light, gender identity was invented rather than discovered. But when Einstein showed that ether was unnecessary to explain its existence, that idea was abandoned. Presumably, then, if transsexualism can be explained without a mysterious biological force, gender identity can join it in the history books.

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Since the whole debate rests on the distinction between men and women, it makes sense to consider the differences between them. In humans, adult males tend to be taller, while females tend to have wider hips. But the crucial difference — which defines male and female in any species — is the production, or potential for production, of one of two gametes: ova in females and sperm in males.

Having fathered three children in the usual way, there can be no doubt which gametes I produced. I am male, and hence I am a man.

So why am I also transsexual? What could have caused psychological distress so severe that I felt I had no choice but to transition? At the time — nine years ago — the urge to change not only my social presentation but also my body was irresistible. But can this be explained by differences in psychology, rather than a mysterious force?

Male and female psychologies are not the same. The most obvious difference is sexual orientation. According to the Office of National Statistics, 93.4% of men are attracted to women, while 93.9% of women are attracted to men. But to attract partners, men and women also signal sexually in grooming, dress and presentation, and they tend to do it differently. No doubt some of this will be socially conditioned, but that cannot explain our observations of other species. Peacocks not only possess distinctive plumage, they show it off.

In her book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven — currently the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard — builds a persuasive case that testosterone in utero affects the psychology as well as the physiology of the developing embryo. She tells me, however, that unlike other species, “what particular [sexual] signals we use are heavily dependent on culture”.

Like sexual orientation, sexual signalling applies differently to the two sexes. But it is also overt and pervasive, extending far beyond clothes and makeup. Even the words man and woman evoke their sexual signals. When we hear “a real man”, we don’t picture an authentic producer of small gametes; we think of a man with sexually attractive, testosterone-driven male qualities: strong and tough, and probably not wearing a dress.

And so sexual signalling is more than mere gender expression. While gender is a poorly defined term and rooted in culture, sex is the reason our species is here. Sexual attraction involves two vectors: sexual orientation is the sex we are attracted to, and sexual signalling is how we make ourselves attractive. Neither can be disconnected from sex and the biological impetus to reproduce.

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Just as people with an atypical sexual orientation can be labelled as gay, those driven to atypical sexual signalling can be labelled as trans. So isn’t sexual signalling just gender identity by another name? Yes and no.

Yes, it is an innate quality that is hard-wired into us: it is not something that we can choose, and it can lead to transsexualism if we are driven to signal in the way typical of the other sex rather than our own. But no, sexual signalling does not supplant biological sex. When transgender activists chant “transwomen are women”, they are in effect demanding that gender identity replaces biological sex when we demarcate men and women. The deleterious impact of that approach on female people — “birthing bodies”, according to one female health charity — is profound.

Sexual signalling is also an observable reality, and it is a starting point to understand why some people are trans. There may be multiple different reasons, but I will focus on the group I know most about: heterosexual males who transitioned in midlife.

Not only can our maleness not be wished away — we are members of the sex that produces sperm, after all — I would claim that the reason why this group wants to wear dresses and makeup, grow out our hair and develop breasts is linked inextricably to our maleness. To quote another transsexual, Anne A Lawrence, we are “men trapped in men’s bodies”. That was the title of Lawrence’s book that contained a series of narratives written by autogynephilic male-to female transsexuals.

Autogynephilia was a term introduced in 1989 by the American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard. Blanchard told me that autogynephilia denotes “a natal male’s tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.” He added, “in the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type.”

It’s not difficult to conceive why autogynephilia can lead to severe psychological distress in heterosexual men attracted to their own bodies. Because their sexual and romantic interest is directed inwards — a target location error according to Blanchard  — they respond by sexually signalling to themselves. But while their interest is in females (they are heterosexual), their bodies are male. Clothing may help to create an illusion of femaleness but, for some, medical transition may seem to be the only way to square the circle.

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This scientific approach to just one form of male-to-female transsexualism is a world away from a metaphysical claim that “transwomen are women”. But the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s theory provokes a very strong reaction in some.

It should not, however, be ignored: gender identity has caused significant collateral damage to children and adolescents, women’s rights, biomedical science and Western political life. Moreover,  it is as unnecessary as the ether. Transsexuals — and other gender non-conforming people — do not need to invent an innate gender identity to understand ourselves.

We just have a need to communicate ourselves — sexually signal — as other human beings do, just in a way more typical of the opposite sex. There may be a host of reasons why that happens, of which autogynephilia is just one, but gender identity explains nothing. Worse, it hinders exploration into the conditions that make us the people we are.

The Irish “success story” has been trotted out and swallowed down whole. Ireland was an early adopter of “self-ID”: since 2015 the state has allowed individuals to change their “gender”  — their legal sex, effectively — just because they want to. There are no background checks and no medical reports.

Let’s be clear, that is an affront to safeguarding. But that has not stopped activists claiming Ireland to be an example of “international best practice”, and framing it as a great model for Westminster and Holyrood. But while politicians may still be lapping up whatever activists tell them, recent polling suggests that the Irish public is not convinced.

It does not take a legal expert to see the dangers. If biological males can access women’s single-sex spaces including hospital wards and prisons simply by making a statutory declaration, it was only a matter of time before there was an outrage. In fact, there have been at least two in one prison.

Barbie Kardashian is a troubled teenager who was “born a male but identifies as female”, and has a history of particularly nasty physical and sexual violence towards women. Having previously torn the eyelids from a female care worker, Kardashian was jailed last year in the women’s wing of Limerick prison following threats of violence against two individuals. According to the court report, Kardashian was “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females, as she identifies as a female”.

Already there was a “pre-operative, pre-hormone therapy”, male-to-female transgender prisoner who had been convicted of ten counts of sexual assault and one count of cruelty against a child.

Whatever Irish politicians had been thinking when they waved through the 2015 Gender Recognition Act, there had not been any proper public debate to inform the new legislation. But that is not surprising; the law was changed swiftly and quietly, just the way the activists like it.

“Nobody spoke about the GRA,” says the Irish writer Stella O’Malley. It wasn’t even mentioned in the media: “We were all about the gay marriage referendum and the GRA just didn’t come up. I’ve always been interested in trans issues and I would have noticed if it had.”

This strategy is straight from an activists’ handbook, or to be precise the “Denton’s Document”. This guidance – officially titled, Only adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth – was published two years ago. Backed by an unlikely triumvirate of Dentons (the world’s largest law firm by number of lawyers), Thomson Reuters Foundation and IGLYO – the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation – it was an instruction manual for lobbying groups who wanted to extend gender recognition to young people with or without their parents’ permission.

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The tactics are detailed in full within the handbook, including the instruction to “avoid excessive press coverage and exposure.” And specific reference was made to Ireland where, “activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum.”

O’Malley was right: the events of 2015 had been carefully managed.

“In Ireland, Denmark and Norway, changes to the law on legal gender recognition were put through at the same time as other more popular reforms such as marriage equality legislation. This provided a veil of protection, particularly in Ireland, where marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for.”

It’s only now, six years on from the Irish Gender Recognition Act, that the public has been consulted. Not by the government, even now, but by The Countess, an Irish campaign to restore the privacy, dignity and safety of women and children in schools, workplaces, sport, changing rooms, toilets, hospitals, prisons and refuges. Opinion polling carried out for them by Red C – found that respondents were not impressed.

Only 17% agreed with the 2015 law that allows someone to change their birth certificate as soon as they self-identify as the opposite sex. Rather more (34%) thought it should be permitted once a trans person has partially or fully transitioned through hormone treatment and/or genital surgery. But 28% felt that individuals should not be allowed to change the sex on their birth certificates at all.

Even younger people (aged 18-34) favoured no changes to birth certificates, as opposed to the laissez-faire approach that was pushed through parliament. Overall, men were more cautious than women —  perhaps because they better understand what men can be like.

Birth certificates are the last line of defence for service providers trying to maintain single-sex provision for women. If these can be changed on demand, then the safeguards become worthless. We can probably safely assume that few men would ever seek a Gender Recognition Certificate but mixed in with those suffering from gender dysphoria — a diagnosable medical condition — would be those who women need to worry about most. There’s little point of locking a door if a potential abuser can cut his own key.

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As the polls show, while Irish politicians were captured by the transgender activist lobbying, the Irish public understands the dangers. When asked about transgender people who had not been through gender reassignment surgery, more people than not opposed their inclusion in changing rooms, sports, refuges and prisons. Clearly, the naïve government policy that led to the outrage in Limerick women’s prison is not supported by the electorate.

Laoise Uí Aodha de Brún, founder of The Countess said, “This is the first time the public has been given a say on gender self-identification. When the government passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2015 it did so with little thought of the effect it would have on the wider community, let alone consultation with groups that would be most affected, particularly women.”

This does not mean that The Countess and the Irish public are transphobic. Rather they are pro-science, and supportive of the rights of women to defend their own boundaries. As a transgender person myself, I know transphobia when I see it and this is not it. It is not hateful to make factual claims such as “transwomen are not female and therefore not women”, nor is it transphobic to apply safeguarding procedures appropriate to an individual’s biological sex. That is necessary to protect everyone’s welfare. Accusations of transphobia are thrown around far too easily and they deflect attention from genuine hate.

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Unfortunately, though, the Irish self-identification “success story” has been misrepresented and disseminated by activists who are desperate to extend it far and wide. On this side of the Irish sea, the Westminster government has, to their credit, thrown out self-identification, despite the howls of protest from some quarters — but gender recognition is a devolved matter. North of the border, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government seems determined to make the same mistakes as the Irish one, despite the furore surrounding the debate. Scotland has already cited alignment with “international best practice” as a rationale for introducing self-identification, using Ireland as an example.

All these leaders have been hoodwinked by a narrow group of self-interested activists who have seized the agenda and are loath to let go. I’m a teacher and my pupils are taught to think critically. Some of our politicians need to learn a similar lesson. Instead of following blindly, then need to start asking themselves some hard questions. I suggest they kick off with “Who told us that self-ID was international best practice and why did we believe them?” Because this polling suggests that their electorates would like some answers.

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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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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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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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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.

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.

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What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

By Debbie Hayton

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.

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What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

By Meghan Murphy

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.

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Don't you dare ask my pronouns

By Julie Bindel

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.

Following demands for compliance — including “pledge 4: Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary” — they condemned what they considered to be transphobic organisations, naming Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance and calling for transphobes to be expelled from the party.

Pledge 6 instructed the party to “Listen to trans comrades on issues of transphobia and transmisogyny, allowing trans people to lead the way on our own liberation.” I am trans and a member of the Labour Party so I got in touch — and was promptly blocked. Clearly, I am the wrong sort of trans, since I don’t believe this is about supporting trans people but about the misuse of transgender rights to impose identity politics on the Labour Party.

Yet rather than dismiss the manifesto as a fringe campaign more typical of student politics, Labour MPs queued up to sign it. Among there were Zarah Sultana, who tweeted her support with an astonishing video clip that words cannot possibly describe, although that embarrassment pales into insignificance when compared with the activities of those contesting the election for Leader and Deputy Leader of the party. Shortly after a hustings where Lisa Nandy suggested that male rapists should be housed in female prisons, Dawn Butler announced on national television that “a child is born without sex”. I can’t see how either statement supports me, but I can well imagine the likely reaction to them on the doorstep when we are trying to canvass Labour votes.

Remarkably more than 3,000 have now signed up to the LCTR. Although supposedly done in my name, I am not among them. But I did sign the Labour Women’s Declaration (LWD) because I support the rights of women to maintain their boundaries and maintain sex-based protections.

The organisers of the Women’s Declaration tell me that they were “astonished to hear both Lisa Nandy and Dawn Butler double down on previous statements concerning women’s rights and sex self-identification”. Over 4,000 people have now signed the rival petition, including three MSPs and many Labour councillors. If the trans campaigners have their way, the disciplinary hearings will be operating on an industrial scale.

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The inconvenient truth about transwomen

By Debbie Hayton

The problem is the very core of transgender ideology that has gripped not only the Labour Party but the Lib Dems (remember Jo Swinson?), Greens and SNP. On Sunday another leading Labour politician, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, tweeted out to the faithful: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people are non-binary. All gender identities are valid.”

This is a doctrine, not a matter of debate, and when Nandy and Butler were questioned, they both recited “transwomen are women”, like a statement of faith.

They’re free to hold whatever faith they choose, but unfortunately for them — and tragically for the Labour Party — it’s just not true. As soon as we attempt to define the word woman, the mantra collapses into incoherent nonsense. No wonder Nandy and Butler were left floundering when asked to actually explain themselves.

Inclusivity is a core part of this belief system, and some transgender activists and their acolytes claim that a woman includes everyone who “identifies as a woman”. Yet they never explain what that actually means beyond a right to call oneself a woman. While some may think that transwomen have some secret knowledge of womanhood that is denied to the muggles, the truth is that we don’t. Basing womanhood on feelings opens up the class to any male person who fancies himself as a woman, or desires unfettered access to women. It’s an abusers’ charter.

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

By Debbie Hayton

Others suggest that transwomen should make some sort of effort in order to become women. But how much effort should we make, and in what way is that not simply reinforcing old stereotypes? Shaving off any beards is presumably essential, but what about wearing lipstick? May we wear trousers, even men’s jeans with their decent pockets? More seriously, must all women adopt sexist stereotypes to avoid being disenfranchised from the category they thought was their own?

But putting fantasy and sexist ideas to one side, we all know the definition of woman, and we have always known it. It’s the dictionary definition. A woman is an adult human female. Females belong to the sex that produces ova, or eggs, something that is true for all mammals. But this definition — while coherent and consistent with science — necessarily excludes transwomen like me who certainly do not produce eggs. Our bodies were designed to produce sperm; mine certainly did — I fathered three children. According to biology, transwomen are not women.

Our MPs need to take note because women are becoming increasingly vocal. The founders of the Labour Women’s declaration, are confident because, in their view, “the majority of ordinary people recognise the importance of sex in law, policy and practice, and we will continue to hold the Labour leadership to account on this issue.”

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

As a transgender campaigner I also want to hold the leadership to account — but about real issues. While much noise has been generated about proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, much less has been said about the lack of access to psychotherapy, and two-year waiting lists for a first appointment at a gender identity clinic. Transgender people need actions, but instead Labour has lost itself in an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world where a word means whatever I say it means.

So when they talk about self-identification, it seems to me that the Labour Party has chosen to identify as unelectable.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

A generation later, the stakes are far higher for our kids. Today the refrain might be Called social media; have you got yourself a gender identity?

It is remarkable that, although we spend so much time talking about gender identity these days nobody can define it without recourse to either circular reasoning or sexist stereotypes — and usually both. Even legislators are guilty; the State of Massachusetts, for example, defines it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behaviour, whether or not that gender-related identity or behaviour is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth”. Which doesn’t exactly sound very progressive.

Layla Moran, the Lib Dem MP, may have told Parliament that she could see souls during a debate about trans issues, but all we can actually see are bodies and they have a sex rather than a gender. Which leads us to the deeper question: why do we need a gender identity?

For generations we have known about sex: there is female and there is male and we need one of each to produce the next generation.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Society devised different restrictions and expectations according to our sex, and while most people complied, some of us found them so excruciating that they crushed our mental health. That used to be called “gender identity disorder”, an identity problem relating to gender. When people objected to being labelled as “disordered”, the language was changed to gender dysphoria, but from the original terminology grew the notion of gender identity.

In itself, that is not a problem. As a transsexual I’m happy to say that I prefer to identify with females, and hence I may be described as having a female gender identity. But I am also a science teacher and, after fathering three children, two of them boys, the evidence that I was male and I am still male is overwhelming. The fact is that we have a sex and we cannot change it.

Yet with neither proof nor evidence, language has changed the way we think and many now assume that gender identity is some prescriptive innate quality that drives our personality. At a time when opinions and feelings are in the ascendency, evidence and facts are too easily jettisoned from the public consciousness as inconvenient truths. In many people’s minds, gender identity has replaced biological sex as a means of dividing humanity.

Of course nobody fits perfectly into the two gender roles. There are over seven billion personalities on the planet, all unique and all a curious combination of feminine and masculine. As the theory developed, non-binary identities were created and then subdivided. At one point, Facebook suggested there were 71 different gender identities to choose from. While they have now — probably wisely — allowed users to make up their own gender identities, society loves to create boxes and then force people to identify into them.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

The impact on children is massive. Have you got yourself a gender identity? The implication is that if you haven’t, then you don’t know yourself. BBC Education recently produced a film to help teachers counsel their pupils; there are “over a hundred” gender identities, the primary school children were told. When I was a boy, it was traumatic enough choosing between the 92 teams in the Football League.

But unlike choosing a football team to support, or a genre of music to enjoy, the conflation of sex and gender identity places a different sort of burden on the shoulders of children, and especially those who might previously have been described as gender non-conforming: boys who like to play with dolls, or girls with more interest in football. Are they really the opposite sex? No, of course they are not. Science is clear: our sex is determined by out chromosomes, gonads and genitals. A boy who likes to wear dresses is a boy who likes to wear dresses.

But this is not the message they are hearing from society and — especially — from social media. Maybe you are transgender? Or non-binary? Or some other recently invented gender identity? With that imposed choice comes pressure, and for children approaching puberty that pressure is unlike anything previous generations had to face. Puberty is irreversible and the clock is ticking. Children know that but they also know about puberty blockers and the possibility of delaying the onset of puberty — supposedly to buy some time.

And puberty changes the mind as well as the body. I am a teacher and I see with my own eyes the development of abstract thought that occurs in children as they go through the teenage years: delay puberty and we may be delying mental development.

Meanwhile, as their friends go through puberty, those ‘buying time’ are left behind. Nobody wants that, not least 14-year-old children seeing their friends developing into adults before their eyes.

The decision then has to be made: withdraw the puberty blockers and allow nature to take its course, or move to cross-sex hormones. At that stage, children still too young to be tattooed face sterilisation followed by a lifetime of medication. And the decision is theirs.

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No wonder politicians won't talk about gender

By James Kirkup

What are we thinking as a society? We do not allow 17-year-old boys to have vasectomies just because they want one. But we allow 13-year-old transgirls to elect to have treatment that leads to the same outcome: infertility before they have even reached the age of consent.

This is the context in which the polling conducted by UnHerd needs to be analysed. Few people know what is going on — they just want children to be happy in themselves. But at the same time, there is a mental health crisis among our young people, and no wonder, given the demands we place on them, including, now, the responsibility for making profound decisions about their bodies.

Life was simpler in the 1970s. If we got our profession wrong, we could re-train and have a second career; if they get their gender identity wrong the changes to their bodies may be permanent, and they cannot have a second body. Perhaps some of those children will need to transition eventually — as I did — but they need to make that decision as adults, and maybe after they have had had the opportunity to have children of their own.

We should not put children in the quandary of having to decide their gender identity. It is neither progressive nor kind. Rather we should allow them true freedom – the freedom to express their personality in the sexed bodies that nature gave them.