LAST week the Mail on Sunday reported that the new Minister for Women, Baroness Berridge, has confirmed that male-bodied people, even if they identify as ‘trans’, can be banned from women’s toilets and changing rooms. Presumably she would extend the same principle to women’s other single-sex spaces, services and activities.
Significantly, she states that the law is already clear on this matter. The Equalities Act does provide that transgender people can be excluded from (opposite-sex) single-sex facilities if service providers have a legitimate reason for doing so. The problem is that the trans lobby has relentlessly pressurised public entities into worrying that the necessary ‘legitimate reasons’ for exclusion do not exist. The lobby has aggressively promoted the narrative that excluding trans people from opposite-sex facilities amounts to discrimination. Our public sector has generally responded by, often enthusiastically, adopting this interpretation.
According to the Mail, Berridge is working with the Minister for Equalities and Women, Liz Truss, to push No 10 to take a stronger stance to protect women’s rights, but they are being overruled by Boris Johnson’s aide Dominic Cummings. Apparently ‘Downing Street just wants the whole subject to go away’. Never was there such a naive sentiment. The whole subject can’t go away because the trans lobby has already been so successful. Now, if Johnson, Cummings, Berridge, Truss do nothing, the damage that the trans lobby has already done will remain in place. This damage includes: risks to the safety, dignity, privacy of women; threats to our freedom of speech; corrosion of our trust in the police; the undermining of our language; the corruption of science – even as it is taught in schools – and the invasive bullying of young gays and lesbians. Most tragic of all is the harm being done to vulnerable young people who are persuaded that they were born into the wrong body and that a lifetime of cross-sex hormones, possible surgery and potential sterilisation is the right course for them.
The rest of this article documents how our public sector and public institutions are promoting trans ideology, such that there is no chance of the ‘whole subject going away’.
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It is the Conservatives who have introduced new Relationships and Sex Education regulations which require schools to teach such matters from September. The guidance for primary schools says that ‘primary schools are strongly encouraged and enabled to cover LGBT content when teaching about different types of families’.
In the resource material provided on the Department for Education website, the only LGBT resource linked to is provided by Stonewall. This, in turn, was sponsored by the Government Equalities Office.
Via the Stonewall document, primary school children learn that people may be ‘non-binary’ and may ‘prefer not to be referred to as “he” or “she”.’ The glossary says that ‘babies are given a gender when they are born, for example “male” or “female”, “boy” or “girl”.’ (My italics.) Also: ‘Everyone has a gender identity. This is the gender that someone feels they are. This might be the same as the gender they were given as a baby, but it might not. They might feel like they are a different gender, or they might not feel like a boy or a girl.’ No one in the transgender lobby has produced any science behind this. They can’t, because there isn’t any.
The BBC has produced classroom resource material which teaches children that there are 100 genders and that it is liberating to explore whether you might be a kid in the wrong body. In a clip, a boy asks: ‘What are the different gender identities?’ The adult says: ‘D’you know, that’s a really really exciting question to ask!’ Another adult says: ‘You know, there are so many gender identities. We’ve got male and female . . . but there are over 100, if not more, gender identities!’
It’s possible to hope that most sensible schools will quietly ignore all this. But others won’t. The bottom line is that the Government has given guidance that ‘strongly encourages’ them to proceed. A mother took to Twitter when her daughter came home with her head full of ‘pseudoscientific BS’. She said: ‘Absolutely fuming – my daughter v confused and upset because they were taught about ‘gender identity’, and what she got from it is that given she doesn’t always like to wear makeup and date boys, she might not be a girl.’
The RSE reforms are not the only entry point into our schools for the trans agenda. The Safe Schools Alliance is supporting a team which has filed a request for a judicial review against Oxfordshire county council on the basis that its ‘schools trans inclusion toolkit’ puts girls at risk. The ‘toolkit’ advises that parents do not need to be told if their child begins identifying as a different gender at school. It says children should use the toilets and changing rooms corresponding with their gender identity. Also to participate in PE according to their gender identity. No wonder, one of the applicants for the judicial review writes, ‘girls who feel uncomfortable with male-bodied trans girls in their private spaces where they need privacy in a girls-only environment, or where they would be at a physical disadvantage or in some cases in physical danger while playing sport, are completely dismissed in the document. Both children and staff will be forced to deny reality, that somebody is a member of the sex which they clearly are, which is especially confusing and upsetting for children’.
Perhaps secondary school will be the place for open debate? The best treatment for a bad argument is to shine the light of day and discourse upon it. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has thought of that, and it too seems to have been captured by the trans lobby. The CPS has produced guidance for schools which suggests that it is ‘transphobic’ to challenge the narrative. The CPS treats ‘gender identity’ as established fact. Working alongside the trans lobby groups Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, it has produced schools guidance which says that ‘people are assigned a sex at birth’ and that a gender-fluid person is one who ‘feels that their gender is not static and that it changes throughout their life. This could be on a daily/weekly/monthly or a longer-term basis.’ As for transphobia: a transphobic incident is ‘any incident which is perceived to be . . . transphobic by the victim or by any other person’.
Okay, so challenge the narrative and you might be accused of transphobia. The CPS takes transphobia very seriously. According to it, children should even be careful about thinking the wrong thoughts. Transphobia includes ‘personal negative thoughts about trans people’. Transphobia is a type of ‘hate’. And in the UK you can be investigated for ‘hate’.
This brings in the police. Written with the help of pro-trans lobby groups, the police ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ says officers should pursue ‘any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender’. The guidance states that a comment that is reported as hateful by a victim must be recorded ‘irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element’. (Read that last bit twice.)
If you end up in court as a result of disputing any of this, be careful what you say. The Equal Treatment Bench Book guide for UK judges tells them that ‘the term “transgender” is commonly associated with those people whose gender identity does not correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth’. It says: ‘All transgender prisoners must be supported to express the gender with which they identify whilst in court custody.’ Those are my italics. Why must they? Because whoever wrote the Bench Book has been captured too, and that, in turn, will influence the courts. In fact, according to the Law Gazette, ‘At least one victim of violence by a transgender woman has been reprimanded in court for using male pronouns while describing the attack. Finding the defendant guilty, the judge refused the victim compensation, saying that when asked to refer to the defendant as “she”, the victim had done so with “bad grace” or continued to use “he”.’
All of this is quite a victory for the trans lobby, facilitated by the public sector under a Conservative government. If you wonder whether it really matters and has any impact, look at the drastic surge in the number of adolescents presenting at clinics seeking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, risking being medicated for life, possibly sterilised. At last the government has been nudged into action on this, the end game of gender ideology. It has announced that it will hold an inquiry into the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender dysphoric’ young people, probably because of a court case brought against the same clinic by a young woman patient.
However, despite this new caution, three NHS trusts have endorsed a guide approving puberty-blockers and declaring that anatomy ‘is not always a good guide’ to determining a child’s sex. I couldn’t find the exact guide referred to in this article but I did find the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust ‘trans guidelines’ published in December 2019.
Unsurprisingly, Stonewall contributed to the development of this document. It tells us that that gender is ‘often expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity . . . is largely culturally determined and is assumed from the sex assigned at birth’. The document gives detailed guidance about pronouns. ‘You can ask: “What pronouns do you use? How would you like me to refer to you? How would you like to be addressed? Can you remind me which pronouns you like for yourself?”’ Goodbye easy human discourse. If you think you could shrug this nonsense off, bad luck: ‘Any members of staff who refuse to use the name, pronouns or gender deemed appropriate by another member of staff will be seen as acting in a harassing and/or discriminatory manner and may be subject to disciplinary procedures.’ Frankly, pronouns are the least of our concerns when we discover that the guidance also says trans people should use the wards of the gender in which they present. Sex-segregated female spaces are thus casually dismissed.
Which brings me to safety. Many people worry about women’s safety as a result of all this. Trans activists tell women they have nothing to worry about. Now newspapers report the crimes of men as those of women.
Over time it will look as if women are as dangerous as men. See, there is nothing to worry about!
Okay, but what about statistics and data? Surely we can rely on those. In probably their greatest victory of all, the trans lobby have persuaded the Conservative government to include a (voluntary) question about gender identity in the census. That’s right – take a dangerous concept with no science behind it and roll it out across the whole country – why not?
If it is in the census, it must be true. But the transgender lobby couldn’t stop with a gender identity question, which would at least have given us some information about the number of people interested in the concept. Under current plans, the census question about biological sex also allows you to answer according to how you self-identify. Concern about corruption of data integrity prompted a group of leading scientists and statisticians to write to the Times. You can see the full letter here.
Even the Ministry of Justice seems to misinterpret the law. In its prisons guidance it says: ‘The Gender Recognition Act 2004 section 9 says that when a full Gender Recognition Certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes, for all purposes, their acquired gender’. This isn’t so. As Baroness Berridge says, the Equalities Act makes clear that this isn’t so. Such has been the extraordinary success of the trans lobby. At least after the events involving Karen White, the biological and legal male who was put in a women’s prison where he sexually assaulted other inmates, the Prison Service is acting with more caution on this issue.
But how could the Karen White incident have been allowed to occur? Why does the Ministry’s guidance still say ‘all individuals in our care must be supported to express the gender with which they identify’? And ‘staff must make every effort to communicate with individuals in ways that respect their gender identity, using appropriate verbal and written communication and use of pronouns’. We do need to ask why, when we may be talking about individuals such as Karen White, that this degree of obeisance is required.
Sadly for Johnson and Cummings, doing nothing and hoping the issue will go away is not an option. Under the Conservatives, the trans narrative corrupts the hearts of our public institutions. It is rolled out by the Department of Education, the Government Equalities Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Police, the Courts, the NHS, the BBC, the Office of National Statistics, the Ministry of Justice. Where does it end? With women losing their jobs because they won’t play along. With men in women’s safe spaces. With faith in our police undermined. With science, reason, language, statistics corrupted.
I worry most about our vulnerable children and the people who love them. So I will end by repeating the words of an American mother: ‘My once beautiful daughter is now nineteen years old, homeless, bearded, in extreme poverty, sterilized, not receiving mental health services, extremely mentally ill, and planning a radial forearm phalloplasty (a surgical procedure that removes part of her arm to construct a fake penis).’ This mother is not alone in her despair. There are now many more, and numbers continue to grow.
Everyone with a head and a heart needs to join the fightback. Thousands are. But in the UK, Conservative MPs are the bottleneck. Only they can push through the reforms to our laws and public institutions that are needed to stop this dangerous narrative. It is time for them to take courage and step up.
