James Kirkup James Kirkup

Some women have penises. If you won’t sleep with them you’re transphobic

I’m bored with writing about politicians and Brexit so this is an article about genitals instead.

Feel free to make your own jokes about the sentence above, but I promise what follows is not funny. You could not, as the old phrase goes, make it up.

Most of us, I think, like to see ourselves as tolerant and open-minded. Live and let live is the prevailing social attitude of our times. For all the division and acrimony in political debate and online, British society is, by international and historical standards, strikingly liberal and tolerant.

This is a good thing. People should not face abuse or exclusion or hostility because of who or what they are; we all should be judged on what we do.

The eternal question of tolerance is how far it extends. We are all familiar with the old debates about whether toleration requires accepting acts of intolerance that you find distasteful, but that’s not what this article is about. It’s about whether toleration requires accepting genitals that you don’t fancy.

And yes, this relates to transgender people and the notion of transphobia.

A lot of institutions, companies and organisations are terrified of being seen to be transphobic. Even the allegation, however baseless, that someone discriminates against others on the grounds of their gender can cause enormous harm to a reputation.

So keen are public bodies to avoid this fate that they overstep the relevant laws. The Equality Act 2010 says you can’t discriminate against someone because of either their sex (whether they are anatomically male or female) or their ‘gender reassignment’ (such as when a person born male decides to ‘live as a woman’). But quite a lot of councils and other public bodies routinely ignore physical sex and base their work solely on questions of the social concept of ‘gender’.

That’s a problem, and not just because it ignores the law.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in