As feminists are vilified online and politicians try and fail to describe what a woman is, the rest of us are entitled to ask how we got ourselves into this mess and how we can navigate a sensible route out of it, says Lucy Bannerman. Published in The Times.
The trans American college swimmer Lia Thomas stands on top of the podium after winning a race last month.
What is a woman? And when did that become such a tricky question? For Jan Morris, the late, great Times correspondent, the question was profoundly personal and had little to do with labels or legal status. The writer spent the first half of her extraordinary life as male, breaking the news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had conquered Everest as James, before crossing the Rubicon with her gradual transition into womanhood that culminated in 1972 with a sex change performed by a Casablanca surgeon “who asked no questions and imposed no conditions legal or moralistic”.
By that point, as Morris reported in Conundrum, her evocative memoir, only about 600 people in the United States and perhaps 150 in the UK had braved the reassignment surgery that had been developing since the 1950s. Being such a novelty perhaps, she found the British state responded to her new status “with unexpected flexibility”, reissuing a passport, driving licence and other documents to match her new identity.
Fast forward 50 years, and the confusion over issues of identity is so great that men are being asked if they are pregnant before hospital scans, an MP has declared himself to be transgender while continuing to refer to his biological sex, and the very fairness of sport is at stake, with athletes such as the cyclist Emily Bridges, who have had the physical advantages of male puberty, seeking to compete in women’s sport.
In the years after Morris’s transition, several cases went to court, demanding better legal protections for those living as the opposite sex in practical matters of employment, social security and pensions until finally, in 2004, the government answered calls for wider legislation with the Gender Recognition Act. From then on, the legal definition of “woman” referred most of the time to adult human females and very occasionally to the tiny number of transsexuals — how quaint the word seems now! — who had jumped through bureaucratic hoops to obtain the necessary certificate. From then, being seen as a woman in law required a medical diagnosis and proof of having lived as a woman for two years — but not necessarily surgery. Socially, a trans person’s status depended as ever on the courtesy, or cruelty, of those around them.
The Equality Act of 2010 offered further protection by making it illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of their gender reassignment, but crucially what none of these laws did was compel everyone else to pretend biology does not exist. The unholy mess in which we find ourselves took root in January 2016, when the women and equalities select committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Maria Miller, published a report on improving transgender equality. Among its recommendations were two words that started a culture war: “self-declaration”. Those bureaucratic hoops? Too cumbersome, said the report, which suggested abolishing the need for medical diagnosis and following countries like Ireland and Malta by allowing people to simply “declare” their preferred legal sex. Whether through naivety or deliberate deafness to the warnings from women’s groups about the implications for single-sex spaces, Miller and her committee opened a Pandora’s box of questions that still rage. Can you become a woman by simply saying you are one? Should legislation be based on facts or feelings? No matter that the government eventually ignored the suggestion (for England and Wales at least; self ID remains a real possibility in Scotland). The genie was out of the bottle.
What was once a deeply private matter has become a public “gotcha” moment. Sir Keir Starmer was merely the latest Labour politician to fall into a familiar trap this week, paralysed by platitudes the moment anyone asks if a woman can have a penis. What do they expect when for years they have been repeating that blank, infuriating mantra, “trans women are women”. You can almost hear the whirr of brain cogs in interviews as they scramble through the shrinking list of words and phrases that won’t offend. Their inability to articulate a simple answer has prompted a campaign — “Respect my sex if you want my X” — which will put candidates under scrutiny before local elections next month.
What, or who, are they so afraid of? The fear and loathing among groups that were traditional political allies suggests that all is not well under the rainbow banners of western societies. No wonder President Putin delighted in the discord driving liberals apart, gloating last week at the row between JK Rowling and the “fans of so-called gender freedoms”. So how did we get here? Several factors, doused with the accelerant of social media, have combined to make the issue of “transgender rights”, or more accurately its clash with women’s rights, a combustible faultline.
First, the context. Transgender rights have been framed as the new frontier in civil rights. There is a lot of talk among activists and transgender “allies” of being “on the right side of history”, a claim that almost always reveals the vanity of people more concerned with recasting themselves as good guys at pivotal moments in counterculture than with solving actual problems. Identity politics, after all, is a competitive field. The trouble is that transgender identity is not like the struggle for racial or sexual equality. The civil rights movement did not seek to reclassify who is black and who is white. The gay rights movement did not seek to reclassify who is gay and who is straight. In prioritising new theories of “gender identity” over the universally understood principle of biological sex, the extremists in the trans movement sought nothing less than to reclassify how humans are categorised across every part of public life, in sports, prisons and hospitals.
“Some people are gay, get over it”, was a brilliant slogan, because it was based upon a simple truth. “Some people are trans, get over it”, doesn’t work when a female swimmer has just been robbed of a college scholarship by a biological male, or a rape survivor is made to feel she’s the one with the problem when there’s someone with a penis in the women’s refuge. Feminists say that far from being progressive, the movement follows a pattern as old as the hills: women being forced to step aside to accommodate the feelings of biological males. The women who speak up to assert their boundaries are vilified as witches, troublemakers and bigots. Just ask JK Rowling.
Societies change. Language evolves. Whose rights are more important? The trans woman who fears male violence inside prison? Or the female prisoner who has no way of knowing whether the male in her prison block is genuinely transgender or a sexual predator merely claiming to be? Whose dignity comes first? The trans woman patient who wants to be treated in a female ward, or the old lady who feels embarrassed in the hospital bed beside her?
These are big questions that require delicate balancing acts. Cries of “Be kind!” or “F*** off Terf” get us nowhere. The answers demand careful consideration, sensitivity and tact. Most importantly, they cannot be resolved in secret. And it is secrecy that got us into this mess. Take Stonewall. It is no exaggeration to say that while no one was looking, a small group of activists were quietly rewriting the rules to recalibrate the human race. It’s probably fair to say that most ordinary folk, with lives to lead and jobs to do, might not have had the time or inclination to spend hours online, arguing over queer theory and heteronormative hegemony with strangers calling themselves @FunkyBoudicca and @sparklehorse41.
What we do know, however, is that while the rest of the world was getting on with real life, local police forces and NHS hospitals, universities and ambulance services, and countless other private companies and public services were happily handing over the way they ran their services to be evaluated and rewritten by Stonewall, not according to the law as it is, but according to the law as the lobby group would like it to be. There was zero consultation with “mothers” being renamed “birthing parents” or employees being urged to add their preferred pronouns to email signatures.
Behind the scenes, the language of biological sex was rinsed from strata of society at a stroke and replaced with the nebulous euphemisms of gender identity. The astonishing thing is not that a lobby group lobbied, but how readily public services rolled over, and even paid Stonewall for the privilege. The public bodies won Stonewall’s rainbow stamp of approval and, if they were lucky, got bumped up a few places on its employers’ index. In return, the public got NHS smear test campaigns targeting “anyone with a cervix”, and a healthcare culture in which men are asked if they are pregnant before having scans.
Start joining the dots and the question of how we got here begins to make sense. When the first same-sex marriages took place in March 2014, Stonewall’s biggest battle had been won. Ruth Hunt became its new chief executive a few months later, boss of an empty nest. One of her first moves to fill the void left by advances in gay equality was to expand Stonewall’s formal remit to include transgender people, adding the T to the LGB. “It’s disgusting we hadn’t done this work sooner,” she would claim as she stepped down 5 years later, having alienated many gay supporters who felt the trans wars were not their battle to fight, and who worried that Stonewall’s new, po-faced quest for corporate rainbow-ification might even undo their hard-gotten gains. As one former supporter sighed, “being a tranny used to be fun”.
With secrecy, came #nodebate. Feminists were no-platformed. Gay, liberal thinkers, such as Kathleen Stock, former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, found she could not have been less welcome on campus had she been a right-wing Brexiteer in favour of the death penalty. Women’s meetings were picketed. Scrutiny was cast as bigotry.
All this added to a sense of exceptionalism around the “trans” subject. Sometimes it felt like campaigners’ clunky neologisms — “cisgender”, “genderqueer”, “assigned male at birth” — worked like a kind of linguistic barbed wire, an effective “Get Out!” sign that kept the activists in control and fenced off the topic from casual conversation among everyone else. This is a shame for the trans lobby too, as their contradictory arguments could have benefited from a kick of the tyres in the cold light of day.
Today’s pressing question may be “what is a woman?” but it’s becoming increasingly unclear what is transgender. Jamie Wallis, the Bridgend MP who came out as trans this week, is a case in point, announcing that he has gender dysphoria but confirming that for the time being he will continue to present as biological male and use he/him pronouns.
The meaning has shifted from its clinical origins denoting someone with gender dysphoria who feels they were born in the wrong body, to a much looser, umbrella term that may refer to people who don’t suffer gender dysphoria at all. Which leads to the biggest contradiction in this entire “debate”. If adults are living proud trans lives without any medical intervention, if a man can become a woman by simply declaring it to be so, then why are the supporters of self-ID not rushing to tell this to the growing numbers of miserable youngsters queueing for drugs and surgery?
After years of telling our children, “love the skin you’re in”, charities like Mermaids see no problem in sending vulnerable young people who identify as trans on a medicalised rite of passage of experimental hormone treatments and lifelong medication. Many become convinced that full gender reassignment once they reach 18 will be the panacea to all their problems.
So much has changed since Jan Morris woke up from that surgery in Casablanca. Now that being transgender is increasingly seen as a positive identity, why the need for drugs and surgery at all?
Keira Bell, who regrets transitioning and who brought a landmark legal challenge against the NHS trust that runs the Tavistock, the country’s main gender identity clinic for children, argues that she was far too young and vulnerable at 16 to give her informed consent to the irreversible drug treatments that would led to a double mastectomy at the age of 20. She describes an online community of troubled, traumatised young women sharing TikTok videos and Instagram stories that celebrate each step of the erasure of their female bodies, from starting T (testosterone) to waking from “top surgery”, in the same way anorexics online share the milestones of reaching their target weights. These issues seem a world away from the ethical issues raised by the inclusion of male-to-female athletes, such as Lia Thomas, the US swimmer whose victory in prestigious college swimming championships had caused controversy, or Laurel Hubbard, the biologically male weightlifter from New Zealand who deprived a female rival, Kuinini Manumua, of a place at the Olympics.
So where do we go from here? Thankfully, Dr Hilary Cass, the paediatrician and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has done us a great favour by showing a way through this tricky terrain. She had been commissioned by NHS England to investigate whistleblowers’ concerns about what was really going on inside the Tavistock clinic. She found that secrecy and exceptionalism had helped no one. In fact, they had led to young people who identified as trans receiving worse care than they would have in any other part of the NHS, because the country’s leading “gender identity” service had been left to operate beyond “normal quality controls”.
Not unlike Stonewall, the Tavistock had suffered from the culture of resistance to scrutiny and intolerance of dissent that lent it an air of untouchability, a sense that trans issues were too complicated to be tackled by anyone but the self-appointed experts in its field. The Cass report — calm, considered, compassionate — recommends that such a monopoly be broken: the service should be decentralised across new regional hubs, informed by a variety of clinical opinions.
We will bring the stories of the day to life with warmth, wit and expertise. Listen for free on DAB radio, your smart speaker, online at times.radio, and via the Times Radio app
I’d suggest a Hilary Cass for every sector where there’s a conflict of rights, where expert panels representing the governing bodies for, say, prisons or sport take time to consider all the evidence and come back with solutions on how to amend the rulebook. The way forward can only be legislative, from the top down. British Cycling admitted as much this week when it announced that Emily Bridges would not be competing in her first women’s race this weekend and called upon a coalition of governing bodies to work together “to find a better answer”. The authorities are realising that they can no longer pretend the conflict does not exist.
In less than 100 days, the UK will launch its first global LGBT conference, which was intended to celebrate Britain as a beacon of progress in the advancement of LGBT rights. It is rumoured to have cost millions of pounds and yet no speakers have been announced, no sponsors confirmed. The programme remains a mystery. And no wonder. Until we can reach a consensus on what a woman is, how can our society lecture anyone about anything?