Women are being silenced from speaking about transgender rights

I have written several times here about the fear that some women have about expressing their opinions and concerns about the trans-rights agenda. I know of women in many walks of life, some of them prominent public figures, who think that current and potential policies intended to make life easier for trans women (that is, people born male who know identify themselves as women) will have the effect of diminishing women’s safety, dignity and legal standing.

Among their concerns are the gradual erosion of laws that allow companies and organisations to restrict access to particular services and spaces according to sex (which is a biological fact). They fear that ‘gender’ (which is a social concept) is overtaking sex in common legal use, perhaps because a lot of people – including, shamefully, many public servants – either do not understand the difference or do not care. Some women see organisations such as Stonewall openly lobbying politicians to remove sex-based exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act that allow, say, a domestic violence refuge to deny service to a person of the male sex, and they wonder: why is so much effort and money being thrown at eroding the laws that underpin women-only services in Britain today?  Do the people behind these efforts not fear that scrapping those laws might make it easier for abusive men to claim to be trans women and gain access to spaces now reserved for women?

Yet many women who hold such concerns and fears do not express them publicly or openly. And,