Identity issues

It was always going to be difficult for Theresa May’s government to secure a legacy beyond Brexit. With the negotiations running into difficulty, it becomes all the harder. Ministers must avoid, however, resorting to well-meant gestures which open the government to ridicule. Take, for instance, the revelation that Britain has insisted on the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights making reference to pregnant transgendered people — although it now denies that it objected to the term ‘pregnant women’. The purpose of the relevant clause is deeply serious — to dissuade malignant regimes from subjecting pregnant women to the death penalty. Britain’s approach, by contrast, has an air of frivolity which might be expected from a student union rather than Her Majesty’s government. It demanded the clause make provision for transgender people who might become pregnant while identifying as a man: something which has apparently occurred twice in Britain.

Couching a document in the latest fashionable terms of inclusivity is unlikely to impress anyone in Riyadh, Beijing, Tehran or anywhere else where the death penalty is still used with abandon but where autocratic regimes might just be nudged by a strongly worded UN covenant into behaving a little better towards their citizens. It is hard to interpret the government’s initiative in any light other than that of domestic British politics. It is an opportunistic attempt to outdo Labour and plant a flag deep in an opposition heartland — that of the LGBT lobby.

In this it fits a pattern recognisable in several recent initiatives. The Office for National Statistics has suggested that the next census, in 2021, will exclude a question on gender altogether, so as not to make transgender people feel uncomfortable. GPs have been asked to start inquiring about patients’ sexual orientation from April 2018 so that this can ‘become part of the record’ — regardless of whether the question is relevant to their health.