OPINION: The wilful erasure of hard-fought, desperately needed sex-based rights
Professor Alan Johnson on the intense response to a rabbi being accused of transphobia over a tweet about gender-fluid comedy star Eddie Izzard
Should gender critical views be considered ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’? That was the question that sprang to mind while reading an article on the Jewish News website headlined: ‘Appalled and disgusted’: Rabbi accused of transphobia over Eddie Izzard tweet’.
I am not on Twitter and I do not comment here on the rabbi, other than note he wrote the hardly-hateful comment: ‘We have to treat transgender people with the utmost kindness and respect, and accommodate them legally, but they must not be allowed to displace women’s rights.’
Rather, I would like to suggest there is an alternative approach to gender identity ideology than instant and uncritical celebration and unthinking denunciation of anyone who dissents as ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’.
There are three fundamental reasons why gender identity ideology is not simply the latest iteration of the liberation movement – women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, disability rights – that has unfolded from the 1970s.
First, the ideology demonstrably involves the ongoing erasure of the hard-fought and desperately needed sex-based rights, protections, spaces, prisons, rape crisis centres, DV centres, sports, language, dating sites, dignity and safety of women and girls.
Sometimes rights clash. A rape crisis centre open to biological men is often a rape crisis centre that traumatised women (and many religious women) can no longer use. When women’s sporting events are opened to biological men it has proven to be the end of women’s sports, girls’ dreams, records, podium places, sponsorships and scholarships. (And sometimes of their skulls, as was the case with a woman MMA fighter who fought a transidentified biological man had hers broken.)
A prison wing in which biological men, some with histories of sexual violence or murder against women, are allowed can be a deeply traumatic and unsafe place for many women. I could go on.
Why isn’t the erasure of the single sex spaces of women and girls, with all its attendant distress, ‘shameful’?
Studies show that, as a collective, biological men who identify as women retain male-pattern rates of violent and sexual offending. That’s just a material fact, inconvenient as such things are thought to be these days.
Second, the ideology involves the intimidation and gaslighting of lesbians who are told that their sexual desire is wrong. Lesbians who refuse to have sex with people with penises because they do not desire them are called ‘sexual racists’ and ‘bigots’.
We are told that as a society we must now smash through this ‘cotton ceiling’, i.e. the bigoted-because-resisting panties of the lesbians.
Third, the ongoing medical scandal – it seems class action lawsuits loom – involving the promotion, replete with false promises, of what are still experimental treatments (blockers-hormones-surgery). The jaw-dropping Cass Review led to the closure of the Tavistock Gender Clinic as unsafe. Gender critical campaigners had said this was the case for years. And they were abused and cancelled for it, by the very people who still pose as the moral arbiters of what is ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’.
There is professional alarm-bell ringing. And there is the desperately sad phenomenon of detransitioning, with feelings of profound regret, deep loss, and, in many cases, ongoing medical and mental distress. That many of those who transition are young, autistic or gay, and disproportionately female, are facts that gender critical people have been trying, often in vain, to get society to take notice of.
Why isn’t the routine refusal to engage with the gender critical case, despite the fact that it is being made by people who literally founded Stonewall, not seen as itself a cause for shame?
There is now such a mountain of books, research reports, official reviews, women’s testimony, detransitioner testimony, court cases, and urgently expressed professional concerns, that it should be clear the gender critical position is not ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’ but valid and important. If that isn’t the case, it is because of fear, including the fear of being called ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’. After all, no one wants to be accused, as Suzanne Moore was at the Guardian, of being Goody Proctor dancing with the devil. Far safer to do the accusing.
The Jewish News article contained an appeal for ‘pastoral care’ to be prioritised. Well, indeed. But is pastoral care not extended to women and girls who are losing their rights and spaces and who, when they object, are then silenced, cancelled, shamed, gaslighted, doxxed, suspended, excluded and driven from the public square and employment?
Why isn’t the erasure of the single sex spaces of women and girls, with all its attendant distress, ‘shameful’? And why isn’t the routine refusal to engage with the gender critical case, despite the fact that it is being made by people who literally founded Stonewall in this country, not seen as itself a cause for shame?
In short, why don’t women and girls count? As She Who Shall Not Be Named, put it: ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security’ but stop pretending that sex is not real, stop pretending reality does not matter and stop erasing the sex-based rights, spaces and protections of females.
• Alan Johnson is writing in a personal capacity.
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