Are the ‘gender wars’ largely over?

COMMENT

In 2002, I got a phone call from a church in south Wales. A man who was presenting as a woman had been attending the church for a year. The fact he’d been attending for a year tells you the church had been good at welcoming him. But he wanted the church to let him use the women’s toilets and attend the women’s Bible study. They said no. So he sued them.

He sued them with the help of the Equal Opportunities Commission – the statutory body responsible for sex-based rights. We helped the church win the case, but the judge used the opportunity to berate the church. Normally, when you win a case you get the costs awarded, but the judge awarded costs against the church for winning. That was when I first started to see what we now recognise as institutional capture.

That same year, the Guardian published a letter signed by eight clinicians from the Tavistock and Portman clinic, which said:

“The experience of many psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working with transsexual patients is that they are individuals who, for complex reasons, need to escape from an intolerable psychological reality into a more comfortable fantasy. By attempting to live as a member of the opposite sex, they try to avoid internal conflict, which may otherwise prove to be too distressing.

“It is a measure of the urgency and desperation of their situation that they frequently seek surgery to make their fantasy real. By carrying out a ‘sex change’ operation on their bodies, they hope to eliminate the conflict in their minds. Unfortunately, what many patients find is that they are left with a mutilated body, but the internal conflicts remain.”

So the clinicians at the Tavistock knew what they were doing.

‘Legal fiction’

A year later, in 2003, we campaigned against the Gender Recognition Bill. We worked with Baroness O’Cathain to table 30 amendments to the Bill. But when it came to the final vote we lost – 155 to 57. The Bill went through. Interestingly, John Bercow MP made a point of telling the Commons that he hadn’t had a single letter from a constituent supporting the Bill, but that he was going to support it anyway. And the Minister who led the Bill through was David Lammy, who recently said he thinks men can be given drugs to grow a cervix. The legal fiction that the Bill created was that you can change your sex.

In 2016, the British Social Attitude Survey found that 58% of people supported the idea that transgender people should be able to change their legal sex. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to just 24%.[1] It seems that the more people see of gender ideology, the less they like it. We are regaining ground. And both the previous and current Government have been forced to catch up with it to a greater or lesser extent.

The belief that there are only two sexes has gone from being mainstream to fringe to back in the mainstream again. It went fringe not just because of trans campaign groups, the BBC and ITV, but because of influential people who knew better but caved in. The recovery is partly generated by pro-trans people who have been mugged by reality – they’ve seen the detransitioners, they’ve seen what’s happening to autistic girls, they’ve seen the predators in women’s prisons, they’ve seen what’s happening in sports, and they’ve seen the cancellation. We should be thankful we’ve got people like Kemi Badenoch on the Conservative frontbench and Wes Streeting on the Labour frontbench, who get this.

So now is not the time to give up. There is a fight to be had on the Westminster Government’s plans to legislate on so-called conversion therapy, which could make it illegal not to support a child’s request for cross-sex hormones and ‘sex-change’ surgery. But the good news is that Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Western Australia and Austria have all tried and failed to come up with a workable legal definition of conversion therapy. It’s a winnable argument because it’s an unnecessary law and in fact an impossible one.

The biggest risk of losing ground on this issue is undoubtedly self-censorship. But there’s nothing more obvious than the fact that a man cannot become a woman. We need to keep on saying that. And we also can’t just treat all trans-identifying people the same. You have the sympathetic category of gender-distressed and gender-confused people. And they are not the same as narcisstic campaigners. And they are not the same as sexual predators. We have to be allowed to treat those categories differently. And of course, the dispute is not over whether we help the first category. It’s how we help them. The fact is, we’re regaining ground because reality is on our side.

This talk was given by Simon Calvert at the Battle of Ideas Festival on 19 October 2024.