The troubling impact of gender policies can no
longer be ignored
Is it
really too much to ask those who struggle to define the word “woman” to refrain
from running for public office? Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe’s Biden’s nominee
for the Supreme Court, was asked to provide the dreaded definition during her
confirmation hearing on Tuesday. “No I can’t,” she replied. “I’m not a
biologist.”
Jackson
hadn’t been asked to explain how blood is deoxygenated, or to offer an
intricate overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is
regulated in cells. The question “what is a woman?” is hardly the riddle of the
sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate
answer.
Increasingly,
the question has become seen as a “gotcha”, but it is a useful gauge of the
extent to which figures in authority have been ideologically captured.
How can we possibly trust politicians if they cannot acknowledge the most basic
realities of human biology? While most voters have a limited understanding of
various key political issues, we can all see that a failure to define “woman”
is either delusional or dishonest, neither of which are qualities we seek in
our elected representatives.
For a
long time, most people have been unwilling to express what they know to be true
for fear of being monstered as a “transphobe” or, even more absurdly, as a
“fascist”. But we appear to have reached a turning point. Today, the term “peaked” is used to
describe the moment when an individual realises that he or she has been blindly
following the dogma of trans activism at the expense of the truth. To reach
this point is an inevitability for the intellectually curious, given that
gender identity ideology will always dissolve upon scrutiny.
This has
been most aptly demonstrated in the recent tribunal of Maya Forstater, a tax
expert who is taking legal action against the Center for Global Development
(CGD) for wrongful dismissal. Her erstwhile employer’s case rests on the view
that Forstater’s belief that sex is immutable is a sackable offence, and it has
been fascinating to read the live tweets of the tribunal in which Ben Cooper QC, counsel
for Forstater, has been able to interrogate representatives of the CGD. The
typical strategies of gender ideologues — to cry “hate” or “transphobia”, or to
proclaim that there must be “no debate” — simply cannot be deployed in the
context of a tribunal. As a result, perhaps for the first time, we are seeing
what happens when the high priests are forced to defend their creed.
So when
Luke Easley, the CGD’s Vice President of HR and Operations, claims that “identity is reality — without identity
there’s just a corpse”, the religiosity of this movement is on full display. He
is reiterating the view among gender ideologues that we each have a kind of
soul that determines our identity, what trans activist Julia Serano has
described as a “subconscious sex”. Forstater’s crime was to deny this essential
doctrine, or to refuse to pay it the necessary lip-service. Like heretics
throughout history, she was willing to exclaim that the emperor has no clothes.
Virtually
all of us support equal rights for transgender individuals, and so it is
understandable that we would sympathise with those whose happiness depends on
presenting as the opposite sex. I am convinced that in most cases the
intonation of the mantras “trans women are women” and “trans men are men” comes
from a place of empathy.
The
recent case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas, however, has prompted many to
reconsider the uttering of falsehoods even for compassionate purposes. Thomas
ranked 554th in the college league tables when competing among men, but soared
to the top of the rankings in the women’s category. The biological advantages of
being a man in a woman’s competition became obvious when a photograph was
widely circulated of the winners in the 500-yard freestyle in Atlanta: Thomas
towers over the other athletes on the podium.
Even
those who are determined to hold fast to the view that “trans women are women”
will find it difficult to look at the image of Thomas mounting the victor’s
podium without sensing a collision with the brick wall of reality. As William Hazlitt put it: “Facts, concrete existences,
are stubborn things, and are not so soon tampered with or turned about to any
point we please, as mere names and abstractions.”
Yet this
hasn’t prevented certain media outlets from disregarding the significance of
biological sex, even when reporting on male violence. Only last week, an article appeared
on the BBC website that outlined the vicious crimes of an 83-year-old woman in
New York who had dismembered another elderly woman she had met online, having
already spent 50 years in prison for murdering two female friends. Those new to
the story would be forgiven for feeling that something is amiss in the
reporting. After all, there are very few female serial killers, and even fewer
who target other women. It is only towards the end of the article that the
writer acknowledges that the killer had “recently identified as a woman”. This
detail is presented as an aside, as though it is an inconsequential aspect of
the case.
But
perhaps the revelation most likely to “peak” members of the public came last
week when Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne spoke in the House of Lords about
a woman who had allegedly been raped on a hospital ward. Apparently, when
police contacted the hospital they were told that there were no men on the
single-sex ward, and “therefore the rape could not have happened”. The
attentive reader will have already filled in the gaps.
This kind
of gaslighting is part of a policy known as “Annex B”. The NHS accommodates
patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient
complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not
true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: “Views of family members may
not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s
view takes priority”.
In the
same NHS document, it is asserted that sex is “assigned” at birth. Everyone
knows that sex is observed and recorded, often before birth, and so it is
surprising to see the holy writ of this new religion find its way into an
official report. For medical practitioners it is particularly important that
there are records of our sex, which is why we each have a unique NHS number to
store this information. Yet patients are currently able to change this number on request so that it reflects personal
identity rather than biological reality.
Even more
worryingly, a 2010 document from the NHS Information Standards Board
entitled “Mixed-Sex Accommodation Specification” explicitly states that the
public must be misled on these matters in order to avoid general confusion:
“The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex, but to ensure a better
public understanding it is referred to as Mixed-Sex Accommodation (MSA)”. In
other words, although the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had announced
that NHS wards must be segregated by sex, behind the scenes it was understood
that gender was to be the determining factor. It seems that the plebeians
cannot be trusted with the truth.
Today,
the public are seeing for themselves the impact of gender policies in the real
world: male athletes are competing in women’s sports, the media is reporting on
male serial killers but using female pronouns, and a rape victim is told that
the assault she experienced must have been a figment of her imagination.
Incidents of this kind, now occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations,
have led us into what Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, a
general loss of confidence in institutional authority.
This is
why it is crucial that we find a way to restore the primacy of truth in our
public discourse. It isn’t a “gotcha” to ask a politician to define terms such
as “man” and “woman” — it is a means by which we can assess the honesty of the
ruling class. Their white lies might be compassionate in nature, but they
clearly have damaging effects and the public is losing its patience. For all
the false accusations of “hate”, “bigotry” and “transphobia” that stifle open
conversation about these important issues, the tipping point is undoubtedly
near.
Have
we reached peak trans? - UnHerd
