Mick Hartley

Maya Forstater provides an overview of the gender wars so far, and the progress that's been made this year. But the battle is by no means over:

The dark heart of what we are being pressured not to talk about, is how gender ideology dismantles safeguarding norms, the systems set up to stop organisations from becoming enablers of child abuse. Don’t keep secrets with children, respect boundaries, allow people to speak up, don’t punish whistleblowers. Recognise the risk that men pose to women and children: 98 per cent of convictions for sexual assault are against men. Gender ideology overturns all this and forces people to pretend that sex doesn’t matter, and must be overruled by self-identified gender. Even in spaces where women and girls are undressing, even in sporting competitions where we know that males have an unassailable advantage, even in contact sports where it is not only fairness but safety that is at stake. Even when it comes to recording the sex of a rapist, or deciding whether he can be put in a woman’s prison. Even when it comes to whether women who have been raped or subject to years of domestic violence can be allowed to recover in a female-only space.

Gender ideology corrupts all of these systems and makes them seem more complex than they are, by making the simple words man/woman, male/female, he/she fraught and apparently difficult to define. How much fairness and safety for women, children and vulnerable people should be traded off to meet the deeply-felt desire of some men to be treated as if they were female?

How about — none.

And there's a new threat, in the form of the proposed Gender Recognition Act, which would make it a crime to try and persuade a confused young person – who's been soaked in social media pressure to believe that the answer to all their problems is transitioning and irreversible medical intervention – to think again:

The elevation of “misgendering” to a secular sin for which you might get a criminal conviction (Kate Scottow), a visit from the police (Harry Miller), lose your job and career (me), be thrown off social media, or at the very least be frowned upon in polite society, has rested in large part on a false parallel between race and racism, and sex and transphobia.

I had a long and decent discussion with one of the architects of the Gender Recognition Act last month. He said to me, “I recognise the free speech issues in your case, but don’t you see that calling a transwoman ‘male’ or ‘he’ is as offensive as calling a black person a nigger?”

No, I said, it is not.

The parallel between race and sex is bogus. Sex is two billion years old, predating human beings and shaping our evolution in profound ways. Race is only skin deep, tens of thousands of years old at most. Calling a man who wants to be treated as a woman “male” (a father, he, him, a man) might not be kind, but it is not inherently insulting, and it is often necessary — when safety and fairness, and other people’s privacy and dignity matter. Excluding “transwomen” from women’s spaces like any other male is not like Jim Crow laws, because men who identify as transwomen are not a subset of women, but a subset of men.

If you want to reach for a race analogy, think of Rachel Dolezal. Her feeling of being black may have been subjectively heartfelt and authentic to her, but to everyone else it was offensive appropriation.

It's a ridiculous comparison. Sex is a fundamental of human biology: race is not.

The push to recognise it as a right when an adult desires to be treated as the opposite sex, creates a demand for a “born this way” narrative in which there exist transgender children who know their gender identity infallibly from an early age. These children, it is argued, should be raised as the opposite sex, given drugs to prevent puberty and then operated on to achieve a passing appearance.

A growing number of detransitioners, left with trauma and damaged bodies, argue that what was done to them was child abuse, or medical negligence in ignoring the wider reasons for their unhappiness.

What we know is that most gender non-conforming children would grow up to be gay if their gender issues were left to resolve naturally. The modern experiment in transitioning children before they’ve grown up is a brutal new form of conversion therapy.

Amnesty International, Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and Chair of the College of Policing Nick Herbert — the same organisations that tried to make it dangerous to say men are not women — now want to criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who tell children they are not “born in the wrong body”.

This is almost a carbon copy of the move to equate disagreement with gender ideology with racist hate speech. Except this time the bait-and-switch move is with sexual orientation.

“Conversion therapy” (or “practices”) is proposed to be a perception-based crime, with a self-appointed victim. It will put “gender identity” (that concept Kathleen Stock called “ill-conceived as a potential object of law or policy”) into law and criminalise adults who try to steer children away from being sterilised and medicalised for life because of teenage unhappiness.

The government is trying to rush through this legislation in time for a razzmatazz LGBT Summit next summer.

Don’t worry, say the government and the organisations that have been promoting the persecution of people like Harry Miller, Alison Bailey, Kathleen Stock, myself and so many others for speaking up. There will be safeguards, guidance and training (by Stonewall!). Only the guilty need be fearful of having their livelihoods destroyed, losing their home or having their children taken away. Trust us!

For UK readers, if you are making a new year’s resolution this year, make it this: email your MP on 1 January and ask for an appointment. Call their office on 4 January. Turn up at their surgery. Speak to them face-to-face. Tell them why they shouldn’t accept this proposed new law as simply a good thing.

And make sure to fill in the consultation before 4 February.