A gay man who acted as speech writer to a Cabinet Minister has warned the Government not to press ahead with its plans on transsexualism.
Graeme Archer observes that ‘biology cannot be subverted’ and argues that making it easier for people to ‘change sex’ will endanger young people.
Writing for Conservative Home, Archer attacked equalities minister Justine Greening for announcing that the Gender Recognition Act would be reviewed.
Self-declaration
Greening wants to make it easier for transsexual people to legally change sex.
Archer, who is also a medical statistician, warned “if you can define your own gender and insist it supersedes your biological sex, you can surely self-define all the other dimensions of your identity.
“Why not define your race – it has much less genetic basis than gender, after all? Or your IQ, your disability status, your nationality.
“If self-defining your ethnic heritage strikes you as farcical, why would gender be any different?”
‘Identity politics’
He added: “To proclaim that psychology drives biology, rather than the reverse, is to say that political will can trump scientific reality.”
Archer also cautioned that young boys in particular are endangered by the idea that gender doesn’t matter and can be “got rid of”, in a world where fathers are missing from homes and manhood is “constantly belittled”.
Accusing the Government of forming an “unholy alliance” with “identity politics merchants”, Archer concluded that ministers “cannot pretend that a desire for kindness can overturn biological fact, or that there are no negative consequences to such a desire”.
His assertion was echoed by Dr Tim Stanley in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Everyone affected
Dr Stanley argued that: “Because biology is so vital, if you try to rewrite the principles to please one tiny minority, you impact upon the lives of absolutely everybody.”
Government ministers, he added, are “meddling in affairs that are well beyond their intellectual grasp or the country’s willingness or capacity to accept change.
“Greening is asking the British public not only to accept a radical notion that most will find exotic but to rewrite the daily narrative of their own lives – and behave as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. It is, I suspect, too big an ask.”