It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were born.’
This week, Bridget changed her mind. No matter what sex you are pretending to be, you should use the cubicle which matches with your biological sex, as determined at birth. That Supreme Court decision is the reason Bridget is now able to see things a little more clearly. It is almost ten months since David Lammy, the then aspirant foreign secretary, informed a startled world that men could grow a cervix if they wished. Perhaps after having purchased a kit from B&Q. I don’t know if David has subsequently resiled from this view or if he is sticking to it and has even gone so far as to buy a kit himself and water it on his windowsill every evening. I am fairly sure, however, that he doesn’t really believe any of that guff, which was rubbish back in June 2024 just as much as it is today.
What I think Bridget and David and indeed Sir Keir and the rest of them were indulging in was what we might call ‘performative lying’. They were saying something they did not entirely believe in themselves because that is what the idiotic paradigm of the day demanded. When asked if a woman could have a penis, they would furrow their brows and talk about how terribly complicated the issue was but yes, of course they could have a penis, even a really big one. And yet it is not remotely complicated in any way. It is very, very straightforward. It always was.
It is the lying which interests me and is what we must, as a society, banish for good. It is time to reclaim our collective sanity. The trans fantasists are still shrieking, and of course there are plenty of people around who are more than ready to support them simply for political reasons: this garbage has become entrenched in our institutions and may take decades to root out. It has been reported that trans women can still access every single sex space in our hospitals in London, for example – and there is not the slightest reason to suggest that this will change any time soon.
Our institutions are managed by the fungus-headed Undead, the Stonewall zombies, repeating their mantras even though they must know in their hearts that they are simply not true. But the rest of us carry on with the lie too. That Supreme Court decision makes gender recognition certificates about as legally relevant as a Blue Peter badge, but there has been no suggestion so far that they should be abolished. We will continue to lie to people on official bits of paper that they really are what they pretend to be and thus give them succour in that delusion.
More to the point, though, we continue to tell lies right here in the press. I make a point of referring to a trans woman as ‘him’ not because I am a spiteful antediluvian bigot – even though I am, of course, a spiteful antediluvian bigot – but because I object to telling a lie in print as well as objecting to the notion that someone else can decide what pronouns I use. But if I write ‘him’, it is sometimes altered to ‘her’. This is because various editors know that to do otherwise will bring a sharp rapping on the door from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which is insistent that people must be allowed to choose their own pronouns, regardless of their inaccuracy.
If we can’t be permitted to tell the truth, why should we expect NHS diversity managers to do so?
At the end of last year, Ipso upheld a complaint against The Spectator when a person called Juno Dawson was referred to as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’. And yet the statement was entirely accurate: Mr Dawson is indeed a man who claims to be a woman. A little later a chap called Conrad Roeber, who carried out management consultancy for Ipso, wrote a Spectator article saying he was unsurprised by the verdict. He had been charged with the task of auditing how newspapers covered trans-related issues and Mr Roeber said Ipso baulked at his approach, saying, as Mr Roeber put it: ‘This is a highly contentious area and the report needs to balance the two sides of the argument. It reflected the view that there are somehow two equally valid opinions in any argument about trans issues.’ Well, there are not.
The point is that if we can’t be permitted to tell the truth, why should we expect NHS diversity managers to abide by the same dictum? It may seem a small point, but it is actually the very essence of the debate. The trans nonsense is all about language – how we use it, what we are allowed to say. If, in future, we all referred to trans women as ‘he’ and ‘him’, then we would strike a blow
for honesty.
And there are direct implications: the crime stats for women are already showing the baleful influence of blokes pretending to be women. A Swedish study found that: ‘Male to female transitioners were more than six times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence.’
It goes much deeper than that, of course. How we are allowed to refer to trans women underpins the whole absurd issue. Truth has not been the only casualty in this tragic tale.
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