Mick Hartley

An excellent article by Kathleen Stock in today's Sunday Times. 

What makes you the same person as 20 years ago? Philosophers have offered different answers. Some think maybe if you had a brain transplant, or a different set of memories, you’d be a different person. The General Medical Council (GMC), we found out this week, has another answer./comment/columnists/article/gender-cannot-be-a-get-out-of-jail-card-for-violent-men-zcnntrw2f">Kathleen Stock in today's Sunday Times. 

When a doctor announces to colleagues that he wishes henceforth to be known as the opposite sex, it seems he is offered a new GMC number to go with the new name and pronouns, wiping out his past. Wes Streeting has raised concerns that this could be hiding the adverse findings of any previous disciplinaries from the public, supposed to be traceable via the same number./comment/columnists/article/gender-cannot-be-a-get-out-of-jail-card-for-violent-men-zcnntrw2f">Kathleen Stock in today's Sunday Times. 

The health secretary’s point about safeguarding is so blindingly obvious you’d think it might have been raised when number switching was first mooted among GMC bigwigs — except, of course, that we are talking about an ineffable but highly potent substance, gender identity, known to paralyse even high-functioning minds upon first contact. The same magical stuff led managers at NHS Fife to accede to the requests of a male doctor to use the women’s staff changing room, thereby exposing themselves to a highly embarrassing tribunal from a nurse, Sandie Peggie, that went part-heard last week. And it has also led NHS England managers to embrace the genius idea of issuing a new NHS number to anyone who “changes gender”, meaning any man who phones up his GP and says he is now a woman, and vice versa. The need to transfer old information into a new record creates, at best, a lot of pointless hassle for a cash-strapped service, and, at worst, disastrous errors, as crucial medical information pertinent to biological sex fails to be switched over.

There's clearly something in the western psyche that gets seduced by the idea of a redemptive life change: something going back to the old religious conversion – "was blind, but now can see" – and transmogrified in our post-religious age into the therapeutic mindset, whereby a true deep understanding of oneself, through psychoanalysis or whatever, leads to enlightenment. Now – hallelujah! – it's about finding your real inner gender identity. 

A belief in miraculous transformations also continues to bewitch the brains of some at the BBC hell-bent on using the preferred “she/her” pronouns of violent males no matter how lurid or criminal their back story. Last week on the corporation’s news website, the newly arrested leader of an allegedly murderous “vegan cult” in the US, Jack LaSota, was referred to as “she” throughout, despite the fact he is listed as male in the local sheriff’s database. Meanwhile, the school drama Waterloo Road recently featured a hospital scene with a grandmother with dementia and at death’s door, while her trans-identified grandchild sat beside her getting upset at being “deadnamed” by the confused woman. Viewer sympathies were clearly anticipated to be with the misgendered teenager rather than the dying pensioner.

It has long been obvious that a declaration of a sex-mismatched gender identity will make trusting souls act as if a whole new person has suddenly been born — even better for public rehabilitation than being ritually humiliated in a jungle. Under normal circumstances it would be quite unusual for a woman who was also a former Ukip candidate, had admitted to strangling her wife and said publicly that Camden had “too many gays” to get onto Woman’s Hour or Celebrity MasterChef, but exceptions were happily made for the boxing promoter turned LGBT ambassador Kellie Maloney after transition. And if you ever find yourself killing your partner, then trying to rape a shop assistant only days after prison release, you could always draw upon the inspirational example of Karen Jones, who did the same: say you’re a woman now, rebrand your crimes as a “cry for help” and after prison become a motivational speaker. In Jones’s case, the outcome was an invitation to address the House of Lords in 2018.

We are not as naive as we once were, and the taste for Hollywood-style redemption arcs about finding your inner womanhood somewhere between arrest and the prison cell is dissipating. The public doesn’t seem as misty-eyed as back when a man putting on a dress was generally treated as a kind of secular canonisation. Awareness has been helped by greater statistical clarity about reality: for instance, that, according to recent figures, 70 per cent of trans-identified prisoners are incarcerated for sexual assault or violent crime, compared with about 19 per cent of the male prison population generally.

Still, there remains a general reluctance in polite society to spell out a point that grows more obvious with every news story about a “woman” arrested for paedophilia, voyeurism or sex attacks. So I’ll say it. We need to responsibly face the fact that certain men are attracted to identifying as women because they are already psychologically unstable; and the stories about how any subsequent predatory behaviour or aggression comes only from “societal transphobia” or “repressing who I really was” is a load of, well, balls.

There are many different reasons for people to transition, and it serves nobody to treat all cases as alike. “Some men” does not mean “all men”, obviously. But it is not random that certain narcissistic men with borderline personality disorder start announcing they are female, for the two things can be manifestations of the same set of underlying psychological issues. And this fact has obvious consequences, not just for changing room allocation but also for being able to keep track of professionals who work with vulnerable people, however many changes in identity they profess to have. Let’s all stop pretending we have had a collective brain transplant and forgotten very basic safeguarding rules that, deep down, we really know.

A "narcissistic man with borderline personality disorder" would be a fair description of Trump. Ironic then that he would be the one to call a halt to the gender rampage through American institutions. But then history has never been straightforward – and he could hardly miss the open goal left by the gender-obsessed Democrats.