Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

To draw another analogy, whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether its god exists,

‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.’ This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles.

Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it.’

Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye does so very tellingly in The Politics of Reality, her collection of essays published in 1983: ‘it is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave’s hut. The slave who decides to exclude her master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave.’

Someone who truly believed that the physical differences between male and female people who declared the same gender identity were so trivial that only a bigot would notice them would logically have to support a unisex world. They would not argue that sex-separation should stand while sex became a matter of self-declaration.

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities.

And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

And they bring to mind the famous remark of the American writer Upton Sinclair, that ‘it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

She compares playing against transwomen to playing against tall women (she is shorter than the average female rugby player). ‘When I play, I look across the field to judge my opponent, go into my toolbox, and pick what I can use to win the one-on-one battle,’ she says. If any of this was an argument for allowing males to play against women, then Reddick would be able to qualify for the men’s national team, and sports would never have been sex-separated.

Some reports had claimed that she had harassed a trans colleague – though she had no trans colleagues and had not harassed anyone.

It does not enable an elder daughter to disinherit a younger brother. (It says a lot about the UK that it occurred to lawmakers to worry about women using the new law to ‘cheat’ the rules of primogeniture.)

In such cases, British anti-discrimination law mandates a kind of thought experiment, considering whether the treatment would have been different if everything apart from the protected characteristic had been the same. Green argued that the comparison should be with a (non-trans) woman; the prison governor, that it should be with a (non-trans) man. This gets to the heart of the matter. If gender identity defines whether a person is a man/male or woman/female, when you take away a transwoman’s ‘transness’ you get a (cis) woman. But if biological sex does, what you get is a (cis) man.

Henness’s method is quirky but revealing. He starts the application process for jobs in order to receive the equality-monitoring form – and then writes to the employer and tweets about what he finds. Few, it has to be said, bother to reply, so he has created a website to publicise his findings and, with luck, increase the pressure. He has semi-applied for more than 200 jobs and been asked to select his ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ from some weird and wonderful menus. The silliest was probably from Kent and Essex police: female; gender fluid; intersex; male; non-binary; prefer not to say; prefer to self-describe; transexual; transgender. If the police forces were to be sued for sex discrimination in hiring, they would not have the data to defend themselves, since this form muddles up sexes, identities and medical conditions.

Jonathan Swift’s epigram: ‘Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.’

The final indication of a crony belief is that nothing important is allowed to ride on it. To show that this is true of gender-identity ideology, I offer the following thought experiment. Picture a person who insists that transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women’s prisons; if they play sport, they belong on women’s teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from ‘cis women’ only in having been mistakenly ‘assigned male at birth’. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate?

If self-declared gender identity is recorded, and sex is not, soon what is ‘known’ about female offenders will be shaped by male-pattern offending. That would have serious consequences for crime-prevention and rehabilitation.

I doubt any mammalian species could live like this: other people’s sex is too evolutionarily salient. If you disagree, that’s fine – but you will have to argue for your unisex utopia, and wait for the rest of us to buy in. You cannot simply declare that it already exists, and that the rest of us must live in it.

As an atheist, I do not have to pay even lip service to any religion – in return for which I gladly accept the right of religious people to discuss their faith, wear its symbols, worship freely and proclaim positions I oppose, such as the immorality of same-sex marriage or the importance of wifely obedience. I demand the same freedom to reject and oppose gender-identity ideology, and in return gladly accept that others have the right to preach it and live by it.