The lessons of the trans debate

The World Athletics Council has taken the decisive step of announcing that transgender women who underwent male puberty before their transition will henceforth be excluded from female events. The decision has been made, according to the council, to ‘protect the future of the female category’. World rugby has already made a similar ruling and other sports are expected to follow suit. It has been a long and heated debate, but a consensus is emerging on the side of common sense.

Those who overreached on this issue are counting the cost. Nicola Sturgeon’s bizarre gender self-ID law that would have granted women’s rights to anyone who wanted to claim them went on to sink her premiership. She said that opponents of her plans included homophobes and bigots – but they also included about two-thirds of the Scottish public. When a convicted rapist was sent to a women’s prison, Sturgeon was unable to say why his request to be seen as a woman should be granted. She badly misjudged the mood of her country and suffered the consequences.

Gender dysphoria affects a small number of people who deserve to be treated with compassion and respect. This is no longer a controversial assertion. Legally changing gender is a well-established procedure, requiring a medical diagnosis and that the applicant live as their preferred gender for a certain period. There were few objections when that treatment was provided on the NHS.

But this commonsense position was stretched and abused by a minority of campaigners who thought that, after racism and sexism, transphobia was the next evil to be slain. In her first year as prime minister, Theresa May suddenly announced that she wanted to update the law to allow people to change gender by self-identification without a medical diagnosis – an issue the Conservative party had hardly discussed before. One by one, schools and other institutions began to yield to the demands of trans campaigners, installing shared toilets and allowing boys to join girls’ teams and vice-versa. Teachers found themselves sanctioned for the previously unknown offence of ‘misgendering’.

Meanwhile, it emerged that the Tavistock clinic had been experimenting by giving puberty blockers to children as young as 11. The number of children and young people being referred to the clinic rose from 250 in 2011-12 to 5,000 in 2021-22. Remarkably, there had been virtually no public debate about any of this. The first time many people heard of puberty blockers was when Keira Bell, who began transitioning from female to male at the age of 16 before realising she had made a mistake, brought a High Court case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, on the basis that she didn’t believe she should have been allowed to make a decision with such far-reaching consequences while still a child.

Those who raised perfectly reasonable objections to what was going on – such as J.K. Rowling, who was concerned about biological men being able to access women-only refuge spaces – were vilified. Lesbian campaigners who asked what it meant for same-sex relationships if the notion of gender was legally erased were savagely put down by militant campaign groups. The message was: either you support the full demands of the trans lobby or you are a bigot.

Those who argue for sanity in this delicate area have been repeatedly disparaged but, in the end, their campaign prevailed. The NHS has announced it is to close the Tavistock clinic. Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch successfully argued for the vetoing of Sturgeon’s gender self-ID bill. The Labour party initially attached itself to the issue, sensing the arrival of a new bandwagon. But now Keir Starmer is rethinking his position. Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, supported the World Athletics Council’s decision this week.

The moral of this tale is that public debate is vital, and that trouble awaits any government which tries to push a liberalising agenda on social issues without convincing the electorate. Yet some trans rights campaigners deliberately tried to avoid public debate while taking their demands directly to lawmakers. As James Kirkup revealed in these pages in 2019, the trans movement was advised by a law firm not to campaign publicly but to take its ideas straight to MPs and ministers – drafting proposed laws and presenting them before the government had had the chance to draft its own. At the same time, campaigners took it upon themselves to attempt to shame opponents into silence or ‘cancel’ them when they tried to speak, often viciously, as the feminist campaigner Posie Parker details in the article.

For some time, the forces of authority have seemed aligned with this intolerance. In 2018, stickers saying ‘Women don’t have penises’ were reported as a crime by the mayor of Liverpool, who asked police to investigate. When such stickers appeared all over London the next year, Thames Valley Police said those responsible could be charged with a public order offence. The sticker campaign served to highlight the rise of a new intolerance: an attempt to win a debate by making the opposing argument illegal.

The trans debate should be a warning to all campaigners and all politicians not to assume that a future body of historians will come down on their side. And to accept that in a free society, persuasion, not demonisation, is a more successful strategy.