Tory men are letting down women

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that you can’t change your biological sex, and that the whole notion that some humans are born in the wrong body is not only daft, but catastrophic for our culture and our children.

It’s been a half-decade since the terf wars became a daily part of the media scene and, if I’m reading their micro–expressions right, their eye-rolls and fidgets, it’s exactly the sort of people we’ll need most in the next few years who have had enough of it all. They’ve had it with J.K. Rowling and her relentless presence on their social media feeds, perhaps particularly with the way their wives and girlfriends, increasingly radicalised, now follow J.K., flinging themselves into the path of her Twitter feed like teens in the grip of Beatlemania.

But Labour is coming. On Monday they announced that they plan to make it easier for anyone who fancies it to get a gender recognition certificate, and Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, pretty much confirmed that she’ll scrap the guidance banning children from being taught that they can change gender. Tuesday brought the exciting news that Labour will introduce a full ban on what they call ‘conversion therapy’, which sounds reasonable but is insane. A ban would mean that teachers, doctors, therapists, even parents, are at risk of legal action if they dare to suggest to a confused child that he or she is not transgender.