Tom Harris – Mea culpa: my part in the rise of the trans cult:
When, in February 2004, the Commons came to vote on the Second Reading of the Gender Recognition Act, I was conflicted.
The previous weekend I had driven down to London and in the car had listened to an interview with Lord (formerly Norman) Tebbit, who was talking about his objections to the Bill. I confess that I had given the subject almost no consideration at that point. Nevertheless, I took notice of what the former Tory chairman and Thatcher ally was saying because it struck me as true. Parliament was about to legislate, for the first time in its history, to allow people to lie.
People who had been born either male or female but who had subsequently decided they were, in fact, the opposite gender – “born in the wrong body” – would be able to amend their birth certificates in a dishonest way so that, after they transitioned, the incorrect sex at birth could be displayed. The same would happen with those individuals’ passports.
Even then, I had no particularly strong feelings about the subject, mainly because I did not possess a time machine and was therefore unable to foresee the chaos and damage – particularly to women’s rights – that the genderists would inflict in the next 20 years or so. I happened to have dinner with the government chief whip at the time, Hilary (now Baroness) Armstrong, on the evening before the vote and raised the issues addressed by Lord Tebbit, informing her of my reservations about the legislation. Her only advice was not to endanger a future ministerial career by voting against the government on such a trivial subject.
And so the bill passed. "A trivial subject", to make life easier for a tiny few who wanted to be able to change sex in law, despite it being impossible in reality. It was, as Lord Tebbit presciently noted, allowing people to lie – but it was being kind. It was being nice.
The GRC process is deemed too intrusive for our current generation of trans allies; if anyone, including a child, wants to identify as the opposite from their birth sex, who is the state to interfere with that? Its only job – and it is a responsibility that the allies chose to impose on the rest of us too – is to affirm the individual’s new gender, refer to him or her by their preferred pronouns and – crucially – accept their right to have exactly the same access to women’s spaces (in the case of male-to-female transition). That means not only toilets but changing rooms, prisons, sports, women’s refuges, all-women shortlists – you name it.
None of this was even mentioned or alluded to during the Second Reading debate in 2004. To be fair to supporters of the Bill, this was not because they were anxious to hide the long-term impacts of the legislation, but rather because no one at the time imagined that the country would go quite that fucking insane in such a relatively short period of time. Had some of today’s demands made by trans people and their allies been transmitted backwards in time to February 2004, they would not have been taken remotely seriously, because at that time politics was mostly dominated by adults (of human male and female variety).
Once the demand for self-ID took off across social media round about the middle of the last decade, a number of leading politicians who should have known better jumped aboard the bandwagon. Some senior politicians who didn’t know better, like Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, followed suit. But others with less of an excuse for holding insane opinions took the same line, on the basis that (a) trans people are a minority, (b) fighting for minority rights is A Good Thing; and therefore (c) if you demand minority rights you are On The Right Side Of History.
So here we are. The genie released from the bottle in 2004 has grown to an extent that was unimaginable at the time.
And it all started in February 2004, with a well-meaning but naive government, and a host of well-meaning, naive and ambitious MPs who probably should have known better.
Mea culpa.
Mick Hartley 