JANICE TURNER

I’ll use whatever pronouns I think courteous

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Women battling the group-think of Stonewall have become as militant about language and it does their cause no good

Friday February 09 2024, 9.00pm GMT, The Times

Whether Brianna Ghey’s mother, Esther, was in the Commons gallery for prime minister’s questions is irrelevant. Even if her poor vulnerable child had not been murdered, this was no way for Rishi Sunak to speak. Navigating a political course between trans and women’s rights is delicate and serious, not the source of cheap zingers when you’re desperate for a win.

Did Sir Keir Starmer make political capital too by using Esther Ghey’s grief to parry Sunak’s dig about him being unable to define a woman? Maybe. But he at least reminded us what is increasingly lost in this toxic debate: it concerns real lives.

Perhaps the PM thought he could reprise his “a man is a man, a woman is a woman” line that won wild Tory conference applause. His interest in equality issues is puddle-deep. He is leading a party that has circled the wagons, all ammo spent, and the best it can manage before inevitable annihilation is a few culture war potshots. How easy it is to be careless and cruel, to dehumanise your political opponents, to get a serotonin buzz from a cheap clap-line or a vicious tweet.

• Trans comment will haunt Rishi Sunak for his remaining time in office

I saw it last weekend in the response to my interview with Debbie Hayton, the trans woman whose book reveals how she was driven to transition by her autogynephilia. Admitting to this sexual compulsion is breaking a mammoth LGBT taboo. Hayton is under no illusions that she is female and has long allied with feminists fighting the notion that gender identity should overwrite sex.

And yet the abuse Hayton, a physics teacher, received this week was from extremists on the “gender critical” side, who bombarded her head teacher with messages that she is a pervert, a danger to children, and takes her “fetish to work”. (Ironically, Hayton was similarly targeted before, by trans activists trying to get her sacked for holding sex-realist views.)

I wonder what these women would like Hayton to do? Just disappear? They already believe the Gender Recognition Act — which allows trans people to change their birth certificates in limited circumstances involving a medical diagnosis — should be abolished for perpetuating a lie. Now it seems that they want to scrap employment protections for those who have undergone “gender reassignment” under the Equality Act too.

Every movement eventually splits, and the coalition that united to oppose the cavalier attempts of the former Tory culture secretary Maria Miller to introduce self-ID was politically broad. It united women who agreed on little else. And now that threat has abated, these differences are starkly exposed. Every movement, too, has its self-regarding shysters, grifters and demagogues who care less about a cause than their own profile and bank balance. This is the case here. And the fissure has appeared in the very place where the gender wars began: pronouns.

Long ago, most people on meeting a trans woman like Jan Morris or April Ashley would call them “she”. Not because we believed some gene-changing alchemy had occurred in a Casablanca clinic, but out of common courtesy.

Then a new aggressive modern trans movement seized on pronouns, as the author Helen Joyce notes, because “there isn’t a way in which a man can become a woman, except linguistically”. So the enforcement of pronouns wasn’t a sideshow but a key ideological tool.

We weren’t only compelled to call a male person “she” if they demanded it — and be punished for the heinous crime of misgendering if we didn’t — but in doing so we were acknowledging that this person had now become biologically female.

Groups such as Stonewall hard-baked “preferred pronouns” into every public institution. Newspapers must use them even when reporting sexual crimes, leading to the travesty of “her penis”; the bench book, which concerns conduct in court, until recently revised, stated that rape victims may be reprimanded if they call a trans rapist “he”. The injustice of the gigantic male swimmer Lia Thomas winning female races is muted when we must call them “she”.

Pronouns became a quasi-religious test. Those who refused to believe in this gender transubstantiation were heretics whose careers were torched. After years of fighting this compelled speech, which helped to facilitate she/her rapists being housed in women’s prisons, many women became battle-hardened.

No more politesse or pretence. Screw pronoun badges. Women seized the right to call a man a man. Now pronouns became a different line in the sand: to call a trans woman “she” was to be a liar, a science-denier, an enemy of women.

I’m reminded of the New Atheists, who moved from merely not believing in God to aggressively denouncing anyone who did. I interviewed Christopher Hitchens about his unreadable harangue God Is Not Great, in which he called religion “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry”. I have no faith either and I’m a passionate secularist, but I’ve never seen the point in railing at an old lady lighting a church candle with “hey, loser, God doesn’t exist”!

Likewise, I will use female pronouns for some trans women. My rules are personal. I will call no male who commits a sexual or violent offence “she”. But those who respect women, like Debbie Hayton, or those I meet in real life, I will respect. This will win me abuse on both sides: Stonewall would say the choice should not be mine; gender-critical ultras will cry traitor. But I reject all compelled speech.

Using pronouns doesn’t mean I no longer believe sex is real. I use them, in their original sense, as a courtesy. You can hold concerns about youth transition without screaming at a bereaved mother that her child was a boy.

Truth and compassion are not incompatible, whatever your views, and even if you’re PM.

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