Gender

Target practice The government hit its target of giving a first Covid vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable people by the middle of February. Some other government targets which have been met (sort of): — 100,000 Covid tests a day by the end of April. The government did claim to have achieved this — but did so by counting testing kits which had been posted out and not necessarily returned. — There was a rise of 7,600 people applying for teacher training courses last year, which meant that the government hit its target for secondary school teachers to the tune of 106% and primary school teachers by 130%.

It’s great that Britain’s high court has ruled that children can’t give informed consent to receive puberty blockers. I only wish that we had made that sort of progress here in Australia. But we haven’t — we’ve gone the other way. Not only are we still handing out puberty blockers to children, we have also introduced ‘self-identification’ for legal sex status in multiple states. What’s more, there are serious attempts under way to introduce legislation that could be used to make it an offence to fail to affirm people’s chosen gender identities. This is happening under the banner of expanding hate speech protections and prohibiting conversion therapy. I’m not writing this

The trans debate can be a nasty one. And when women (and it usually is women) have the courage to speak out, they face being shamed and silenced. Their crime apparently is ‘transphobia’. But all too often, this word no longer means the hatred or fear of trans people like me. Instead, it refers to the simple act of disagreeing with an ideology that insists men and women are defined, not by their biology, but by feelings. Dame Jenni Murray, Professor Kathleen Stock, Joanna Cherry MP, Julie Bindel, and many other women have been hauled before a kangaroo court and been found guilty. But behind these high-profile cases, ordinary women face the same treatment. An

2020 will, of course, be remembered as the year in which Covid-19 was unleashed on the world. But it is one in which another menace – gender identity ideology – was put firmly in its place, in the UK at least.  Perhaps the tipping point was the deranged response to JK Rowling’s essay on sex and gender, which she published back in June. For taking issue with ‘language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’,’ Rowling suffered widespread and predictable condemnation. In a subsequent article, Rowling also expressed her belief that an ethical and medical scandal is brewing: ‘I believe the time is coming when those organisations and individuals who have uncritically embraced fashionable

I’m done with being white. It’s boring. From now on I choose to identify as black and I insist that you all refer to me as a black man. Please do not mis-race me. Of course I am not going to do this because it would be mad and also a tad racist. Clearly I am not black. And I expect that calling myself black would be an affront to actual black people, who would rightfully point out that I am as white as the driven snow. ‘You can’t just put on the black identity like a piece of clothing’, they’d say, and rational people everywhere would agree. So why,

The Keira Bell judgment, which said that children are unlikely to be able to give informed consent for taking puberty-blocking drugs, ‘puts trans people everywhere’ at risk. That’s the verdict of Grace Lavery, a professor of English, critical theory, and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. From the other side of the Atlantic, Lavery described the case in an article for Foreign Policy as ‘an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K.’ It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  The High Court determined that children as young as 12 were highly unlikely to be competent to understand and weigh the long-term risks of receiving such radical treatment. As such, the

I’ve always been perplexed why anyone lucky enough to be born male would want to swap sexes. But it seems completely rational to me that girls might rather be boys. The UK’s recent High Court judgment that under-16s aren’t mature enough to give informed consent to puberty blockers highlighted the extraordinary switcheroo that has recently taken place in transgender clinics. Not only have diagnoses of gender dysphoria gone through the roof, but who wants to be what has reversed. A few years ago, nearly three-quarters of patients unhappy with their sex were male; now it’s almost exactly the other way around. So in this season of goodwill, I’d like to

For the last two-and-a-half years, I have been hounded, attacked and shut down for participating in discussions about sex and transgenderism. My offence? That I believe something that was once accepted as truth: women are women and men are men. As a law professor, I have used my expertise on human rights to advocate finding a way to ensure that women’s rights and transgender rights are upheld without one or the other group losing their rights. The attacks on me have been varied, from facing a barrage of constant abuse online, being called a Nazi and a ‘TERF’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist – a slur used against women in my

As we reflect on the Keira Bell case last week, spare a thought for another young person who is challenging an authority that has been bewitched by gender identity ideology.  A 14-year-old schoolgirl, known only as Miss B, believes sex is distinct from gender identity. Many others agree with her. But unlike those who have been silenced or learned to self-censor in what is so often a malicious and nasty debate, this teenager is not prepared to stay quiet. She is taking a stand against the College of Policing’s guidance on ‘hate incidents’, because she fears that the vague definition of ‘hostility’ used on the College’s website – that even includes the perception of ‘ill will’, ‘unfriendliness’ or ‘dislike’ – could

How noble of the British Library to have apologised to the family of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes for having identified him as a beneficiary of slavery. The library’s scrupulous and deranged researchers had unearthed evidence that Hughes may have been a distant relative of a man called Nicholas Ferrar, born in 1592, and that Ferrar had some early involvement in the slave trade. Ferrar died childless so the precise link was not known, but it was enough for Liz Jolly’s maniacs to besmirch the man. Ms Jolly is chief librarian and the woman who said that racism was ‘a creation of white people’ — along with body odour,

Keira Bell has won her case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. As a transgender person, I am delighted for her but I am also relieved for the thousands of children who are chasing the impossible dream that it is possible to change sex. Bell’s victory is an important one for teenagers and pre-pubescent children who are not old enough to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. The High Court judgement made it clear that it is ‘highly unlikely’ that children aged 13 or under would be competent enough to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers. The judges went further

Taken to the Garrick Club one evening, I was surprised when a mouse ran across the carpet. I squeaked and pulled my legs up. Not a murmur from the other armchairs. My host leaned over. ‘No one minds the mice,’ he explained. ‘It’s the women they don’t want.’ It made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. I thought fondly of this story when I read in the paper that Emily Bendell, founder of the lingerie brand Bluebella, had instructed lawyers to seek an injunction preventing the Garrick from ‘continuing to operate its discriminatory policy’ of excluding women would-be members. As it happens, I don’t mind being there

It happens a lot lately. Not just in a Twitter DM or an email but in real life. Someone tells me they can’t really say what they think in their workplace any more. What awful things do they think? Mostly that the rights of vulnerable women should be protected and that children should be allowed to express their gender however they like without being whisked to a clinic. In the café the other day, a woman I vaguely knew from the playground asked me if I had received a letter she had sent to the Guardian. I hadn’t. She needed me to know that she and her friends who work

I have recently read a fascinating new paper, via a Mail on Sunday report, about the growing number of children presenting as transgender to gender clinics. It raises all sorts of questions, and deserves to be read widely and carefully. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, can be found – unlike a lot of similar work, for free – here. Among its seven authors are two staff from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, the main NHS clinic for children with gender identity issues, including the service’s head, Polly Carmichael. The other authors include clinicians in Australia and the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust carries out some of the most complex and contentious clinical work in the NHS. It deals with children and young people who are experiencing discomfort over their gender identity, but is it raising patient safety concerns? Some of the children it sees go on to change their legal gender. Some receive physical treatment in the form of puberty-blocking medications. Some go on to have further treatments including cross-sex hormones and surgery. The service, which is heavily over-subscribed, is a divisive one. A number say it offers vital, even life-changing care to children in great distress and