Even our MPs are afraid of the transgender mob

What are MPs thinking? It’s easy to assume, in the age of Twitter, that we know more about the positions our politicians take than ever before: quite a few of them, after all, spend rather too much time online telling us what they think about stuff. That has changed political journalism, but not always to the improvement of public understanding of politics. Journalism-by-Twitter, after all, runs the risk of missing the thoughts and opinions that MPs don’t put online.

One of the issues that most MPs don’t tweet about is trangenderism and the laws and rules around gender. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I write so much about those things here. The failure of MPs to do their job and discuss gender issues properly has left a vacuum that leaves a lot of people (on all sides) feeling a bit lost and prone to stridency, fear and anger.

If you want evidence of how dangerous this vacuum of leadership, this absence of grown-up evidence-based discussion can be, consider how successfully some (note: some) trans-rights campaigners have weaponised suicide and self-harm, based on some very bad statistics.

In a proper conversation about this policy area, the reasoned analysis of experts like Oxford’s Michael Biggs or the clinicians at the NHS’s Tavistock clinic would be properly read, and policymakers would debate and investigate transgender suicide rates on the basis of facts.

Instead, lobbyists get to frame the debate with irresponsible and statistically dubious claims. Those claims are currently being used as a stick to beat journalists who try to shed light on the issue, especially Janice Turner of the Times. Having endured threats and abuse for asking for evidence-based public policy around safeguarding and children’s health, she is now being accused of causing children to kill themselves. That accusation is, of course, groundless. It’s also rather revealing: for some people in this debate, nothing is off limits when it comes to trying to silence women who say things they don’t like.