Telegraph - Labour's trans-rights policy is looking increasingly absurd
Labour's trans-rights policy is looking increasingly absurd
By Suzanne Moore
Finally, we are having the debate that Stonewall said we must not have. Their policy, remember, over trans/women’s rights was “no debate”. To their supporters, to debate was to essentially deny the existence of trans people. To question their dogma was transphobic and one would be shouted down, deprived of work and, if you were a woman, issued with death and rape threats. That strategy, however anti-democratic and bonkers, actually worked – entire organisations swallowed it whole.
No one denies the existence of trans people. That’s patent nonsense. No one wants to take away their existing rights or make their lives any more difficult. All of us described as “gender critical” have just wanted to maintain sex-based rights for women.
Many of those who organised themselves around this – whether at Woman’s Place meetings or the Labours’ Women Declaration or parts of the deteriorating Women’s Equality Party – were gay. Many had spent years on the left, many are trade unionists. All these women have been cast out by the very institutions they have devoted much activism to.
Does anyone care? Is anyone going to say sorry or are we going to leave them to read Kemi Badenoch’s laudable attempt to try and understand what was going on at the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS)? What a complete gift to the Tories these so-called gender wars have been.
How, I wonder, is Labour going to walk it back? Does it even understand that it needs to? The closing of GIDS, based at London’s Tavistock Clinic, because it is “unsafe” has been a long time coming and a victory for those who believe in safeguarding. We need more research into puberty blockers and a move away from gender affirmation therapy: the Stonewall/Americanised model.
This scandal, alongside the Maya Forstater and Alison Bailey judgments, means that amazingly women are allowed to think what they like and not be discriminated in the workplace for it. Add the burgeoning recognition that those born male should not be competing in women's sports (rugby is the latest sport to make this ruling) and “gender ideology” is losing its grip.
Those of us who have been vilified for questioning all this do not feel a huge victory; rather the beginning of significant change. I am not crowing. I feel for the number of children who have been harmed by therapists who foisted their medicalised ideology onto them. I also know the cost that has been paid by people like Bailey in challenging group-think has been huge.
Yet, if there are glimmers of light, someone ought to let Keir Starmer know. Half of Labour don’t know if women have a cervix or not and the other half do but are too scared to say so. Instead they email people like me with pathetic apologies. They are afraid of certain Stasi-like activists, so they intone mantras that they don’t bother to research.
It is appalling to see how many of these people who in the name of “be kind” have traduced any concept of safeguarding. Then again, I think of the reluctance of many Labour councils to investigate grooming gangs and I see that the collateral damage is always young girls. No one much cares.
A new kind of so-called “feminism” abounds in which women and girls are somehow not the point but the hurt feeling of men are. Could these people ever admit that they were not on the right side of history? Could they admit that, maybe, when there is a conflict of rights, we sit down and discuss it instead of denying it with puritanical zeal? None of this is yet happening, though organisations will have their doubts about what they are paying Stonewall for.
Some may wonder why anyone takes advice from the charity Mermaids, whose head took her trans daughter to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery on her 16th birthday (no doctor here would do that – I wonder why). Maybe there is another way to deal with effeminate boys and butch girls, which is accepting that they may be gay.
It has been the transing of children and the refusal to countenance women’s single-sex spaces that has disturbed many of us. Stonewall, with its nutzoid tweets about trans toddlers, has become ever more desperate. Many of the people it has attacked in the name of gender ideology have been women of colour: Sonia Appleby, Keira Bell, Allison Bailey, Lucy Masoud, Raquel Rosario Sánchez. It has monopolised the “diversity” market as a charity and a lobbying organisation. Its reign is surely over.
Trans people deserve better. They have been caught in the middle of this hugely polarised debate in ways many of them never asked to be.
Labour is still refusing to let the LGB Alliance, the Labour Women’s Declaration and FiLia, a huge grassroots feminist charity promoting women’s rights, have stands at its conference.
What are they so afraid of? Many of us knew the emperor was naked and now more people are able to say so. You can dress all this up in any drag you like, it’s too late.
If you want women on board then at least respect that we might know who we are and what we are talking about. We don’t want garage flowers apologies. We want the left to stand up for our rights. Apparently that is still too much to ask.
Comments
Post a Comment