The Tories are in thrall to trans rights

On Monday, the government announced that Penny Mordaunt, the Minister for Women and Equalities as well as the Secretary of State for International Development, had appointed an advisory panel on LGBT health. Needless to say, it immediately attracted criticism on social media for being insufficiently diverse: the 12-person panel is 90 per cent white, 66 per cent male, etc.

I don’t subscribe to the dogma that the composition of official panels, boards, committees and so on should exactly mirror the UK population, but even by that logic those criticisms miss their target. The UK is 87 per cent white and BAME people are less likely to identify as LGBT, so it’s perfectly possible that around 90 per cent of the UK’s LGBT population is white. In addition, about 60 per cent of the LGBT population is male, according to the Office for National Statistics, so the over-representation of men on the panel isn’t a major scandal.

However, in one respect the critics have a point: a majority of the panellists are on the side of militant trans activists in the ongoing battle between them and gender critical feminists. For instance, the panel includes Ruth Hunt, the chief executive of Stonewall, a pro-gay rights group that has fully aligned itself with the trans lobby under Hunt’s leadership; Paul Martin, the CEO of the LGBT Foundation, which, according to the Mail on Sunday, supplies girls as young as 13 with breast–flattening devices without telling their parents; Ellen Murray, the executive director of Transgender Northern Ireland, who dismisses gender critical feminists as Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists); James Morton of the Scottish Trans Alliance, which has been accused of promoting ‘trans ideology’ in schools; and Lewis Turner, the chief executive of Lancashire LGBT and an advisor to Mermaids, the controversial charity that campaigns for children to have access to sexual reassignment surgery.