THE Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on the Government to make it easier for transgender people legally to change their ‘gender identity’. Along with three other Labour mayors, of Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield, Khan has written an open letter to Penny Mordaunt in her role as Minister for Women and Equality.
Currently, to gain legal recognition of their preferred gender, trans people must supply evidence of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and live in their ‘acquired gender’ for two years. Campaigners support a process whereby trans people simply apply for a legal change. This seems to be Khan’s preferred option. He writes: ‘We encourage the government to proceed with implementing the desperately needed reforms as quickly as possible’, and ‘The government has made commitments to “streamline and demedicalise” the gender recognition process . . . We hope to see this reflected in the new legislation’.
That Khan has written this letter to Mordaunt with no reference to the concerns of many people who are mothers, fathers, medical experts, mental health professionals, refuge workers, prison staff, sporting stars, older transgender people, even ‘de-transitioned’ people, is staggering.
It comes at a time when in Canada a biological man who identifies as female, and whose male genitalia are intact, is suing female beauticians on the basis that their refusal to handle and wax his penis and testicles (he wanted a ‘Brazilian’) is an act of discrimination.
In the UK, a woman giving evidence in a serious assault case against a biological male who identifies as a woman was warned by the judge to refer to her assailant as ‘she’.
A Christian doctor has been sacked from a UK Government post after saying he could not refer to a ‘6ft bearded man as madam’.
A male New Zealand weightlifter has transitioned to female and is taking sporting medals from women.
Young lesbian women are being labelled transphobic if they prefer not to have relationships with trans women with fully intact male genitals.
The British Medical Association has suggested that mothers-to-be be referred to as ‘pregnant people’.
Boys and girls who may be worried and confused about being gay, or loathing puberty, or struggling with mental health issues, are being offered the seductive suggestion that they are in the wrong body and that if they change it all will be well. They are being referred to England’s only NHS child gender clinic, the Tavistock, in record numbers, mostly girls, and many are in their early teens or even younger.
Whistle-blowers are coming out. Parents are accusing the Tavistock clinic of fast-tracking their children into life-altering ‘transition’ decisions. A damning report into the service has led a governor to resign, accusing its management of having an ‘over-valued belief’ in its expertise.
Mothers elsewhere are giving testimony. Here is one in America:
My daughter ran away to Oregon where state law allowed her – at the age of seventeen, without my knowledge or consent – to change her name and legal gender in court, and to undergo a double mastectomy and a radical hysterectomy. 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).
But Khan says: ‘Press on.’ I beg Conservative politicians to take this issue seriously.
