The real issues facing trans people aren’t pronouns

It’s a strange reflection of our times that with so much else at stake, the leaders of both main parties have been asked, at their party conferences, whether they think that only women have cervixes. Both men prevaricated. Sir Keir Starmer declared this is ‘something that shouldn’t be said’. Boris Johnson avoided the question altogether.

It is a straightforward biological fact that only women have cervixes, but simply stating it was more than the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition were prepared to do. Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, faced such a ferocious backlash after making this statement that she felt she could not safely go to the Labour party conference.

Johnson’s diplomatic non-answer — that everyone needs to be treated with respect in the debate over the rights of transgender people — sounded reasonable. It echoed the response of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, when he said Duffield should indeed be welcome at Labour conference, and that people should be able to ‘debate, discuss, have disagreement in a respectful way’.

But how much better would it have been if the Prime Minister had stood up for the obvious. ‘I utterly understand the predicament faced by those with gender dysphoria,’ he could have said. ‘We as a government are committed to helping them and we will never tolerate hate. But we can support minority groups without redefining basic words like “man” and “woman”, or hounding people who use such words.’

That Johnson was so vague on such a basic issue is indicative of a far wider problem. Already there are police officers who apparently believe it is a ‘hate incident’ (if not quite a crime) to express, for example, the view that only men have penises.