Gender

There are some things that pretty much everyone in politics and public life agrees on. Ask any politician about any contentious, heated debate and they’ll immediately talk about the need for respectful debate, for all views to be heard calmly and in a civilised manner. They’ll say that there is no place for harassment and abuse and bullying and threats, because this is Britain, a mature democracy where everyone gets to express their views about things like politics and the law without fear. Except that’s not entirely true. There are some people who aren’t allowed to speak freely, who cannot express their views about things like politics and the law without

Here we go again. Perhaps there should be a template for journalists writing about transgender issues and the treatment of women with the “wrong” opinions. The template would look something like this: A small group of noisy, angry people, many of them male, have demanded that [Insert woman’s name] not be allowed to speak/ appear/ have a job/ do anything because [woman] once said things the small group of people didn’t like or agree with. Really, we could use it for so many cases and so many women: Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Janice Turner, Posy Parker, Linda Bellos… Quite a diverse list that: makes you wonder what it is they have

This week on the Spectator USA Life & Arts podcast, I’m casting the pod with Heather Mac Donald. A scholar at the Manhattan Institute, Heather is the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, a scathing and accurate critique of just about everything that’s gone wrong with American higher education. In her previous book, The War on Cops, Heather tried, she says, “to give voice to the millions of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law enforcement protection.” When she was invited to speak at Claremont McKenna College in California, student

When equalities minister Penny Mordaunt launched the consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act she declared that “trans women are women”. Whether anyone really believes this remains to be seen. Yet our political leaders are willing to endorse this Orwellian thinking, and when it comes to the transgender debate, objective truth plays second fiddle to political expediency. For me, the discussion about gender identification is personal. Not only as someone who firmly believes in the concept of birth-sex as a fact of nature (as a science teacher, I have no choice there) but as a transsexual myself, having undergone a meaningful gender transition supported by medical interventions. Despite what some might think,

James Kirkup’s article (‘The march of trans rights’) discussed many of the complexities created by the issue, and rightly so. It also briefly mentioned the ‘bathroom battles’ in the United States. Such episodes illustrate the practical problems with legislating against such societal developments — new laws often do not solve but escalate the issue. In North Carolina in 2016, legislation was introduced to prevent transgender individuals from using particular bathrooms. The policing of this law presented practical issues. It would be impossible to guard every gender-specific public bathroom in the state. Either it would require a significant increase in police numbers, or be up to the business to enact the

Karen White is a rapist and child abuser who has committed several acts of sexual violence against vulnerable people. One of the women Karen White raped was pregnant. Karen White is now going to spend a long time in jail. Next week, a Government consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004 will end. That’s the law that allows someone, for example, born male to be legally recognised as female, under certain conditions: you have to show you’ve lived in your new gender for two years, and a doctor has to certify that you have gender dysphoria or another condition that underpins your transition. Some people think those conditions should be

Once the house move was completed, Catriona’s oldest and best Scottish friends, two of them, came to stay for a week. Now that Catriona lives in France they see each other but infrequently. A seven-day female catch-up feast did not appeal to me. Neither would a shadowy male presence about the house appeal much to them, I imagined. An unenlightened point of view, perhaps. But gender is more sharply defined in Scotland than south of the border. The lassies are proud of their lads’ outrageous, even ludicrous, masculinity, but they sympathise with each other more. Scottish gender begs to differ. So I planned to bugger off back to England the

What harm can it do saying that women don’t have penises? Quite a lot, actually, if my experience is anything to go on. After sharing a statement with that message on Twitter, along with a screenshot from a Spectator article, the backlash was swift. Less than a month after sending that tweet, I had lost my position as president-elect of Humanist Students as well as my role as assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society’s undergraduate journal, Critique. I was also given the boot as co-editor-in-chief of Durham University’s online student magazine, the Bubble. All for saying something that many people would surely agree with. The reaction against me was extreme,

There are a couple of things I just don’t get. Maybe someone of liberal mind can explain them. Didn’t equalities minister Penny Mordaunt back in July throw her weight behind Theresa May’s promise to make it much easier to reassign your own gender? Of the current process (which requires you, for example, to provide medical evidence before being allowed to redefine yourself as a woman) she said: ‘It is overly bureaucratic and it’s highly medicalised with people making decisions about you who have never met you.’ In other words, it’s your life and your decision as to which gender you wish to identify with – the state should keep its nose

If you were deciding where to house a convicted sex offender accused of repeatedly raping a woman, where’s the last place on earth you would put that person? How about a building full of vulnerable women, many of whom had previously suffered sexual assault and abuse? A building locked and secured so that those women could not get out and could not get away from that convicted sex offender? This is not a thought experiment. This is not a clever debating point. This is a simple factual description of something that happened in England in the last year. This is the case of Karen White, a multiple rapist who was

Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly. Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are women

In late 1973 the graduate admissions department at UC Berkeley discovered that for the forthcoming year it had awarded places to 44 per cent of male applicants and only 35 per cent of women. Concerned about possible lawsuits or bad publicity, they approached Peter Bickel, a professor of statistics, to analyse the data in more detail. Looking for patterns of prejudice, Bickel broke down the data by university department. He was suddenly presented with a contradictory picture. Department data suggested Berkeley was mostly even-handed in admissions. Stranger still — though a minority of departments exhibited some gender bias, it was more likely to be a preference towards female candidates than

‘Acceptance without exception’ is the aspirational slogan emblazoned across the website, merchandise and literature of Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity.  The problem is that there are exceptions. Those who are not accepted include those who refuse to believe that a person can change their sex simply by saying: ‘I identify as.’ The fractious nature of the LGBT alliance – and Stonewall’s intolerance for dissenting voices within the community – is becoming increasingly clear. At this year’s London Pride, a group of protestors from ‘Get the ‘L’ Out’ made their feelings known by marching to the front of the parade with banners, including one reading ‘Transactivism Erases Lesbians.’ The actions of