Why the trans debacle matters

I first stuck my neck out on ‘trans’ nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having kept my own counsel in print for three years thereafter, but this radical fad emerged inexplicably in tandem with the stern message that a single discouraging word would end your career. I delayed writing about the topic because I was cowardly and, regarding my self-interest, smart.

This entire fiasco is based on lies, and a society that embraces bald falsehoods is eating itself hollow

Yet even in 2016 we’d not yet pulled back the curtains on the Overton window. I was still taking my career in my hands with an essay contesting that what I called the ‘very self’ – what the religious call a soul – has a sex. As I did not feel specifically female on my lonesome, I was baffled by a certain contingent’s claim that they ‘feel like women’, when I didn’t ‘feel like’ a woman and I was one. I objected that transgenderism’s conceptions of male and female rely on crude sexual stereotypes. Miraculously, I got away with that essay. Seems trans activists don’t read Prospect.

Since then, I’ve kept a sporadic hand in this matter, more than once terrifying my Spectator editor, though credit where due: my ever more incredulous pushbacks against the trans contagion were never spiked. So as I join the celebration of last month’s UK Supreme Court decision that sex in law means biological sex, you’ll forgive a fortnightly columnist for being late to the party. This is a subject about which I feel proprietary.