By Jonathan Van Maren, European Conservative.
Trans activists were not misunderstood. We understood them, loud and clear. Their current invitation to discussion is convenient, insincere, and entirely strategic.
ransgender activist Freddie McConnell issued a plea to UK politicians in the Guardian on July 31, calling on them to step in and block the ongoing backlash to the transgender agenda. Characteristically, the title reeks of emotional blackmail couched in a disingenuous call for debate: “The fight for trans safety is a fight for everyone’s safety—MPs must have the chance to debate it.”
McConnell, you may recall, rose to fame as the first “transgender man” to give birth. After transitioning in 2011 and publicly “presenting” as a slender male with a bushy mustache, McConnell—who is, obviously, female—documented her pregnancy and birth in the 2019 documentary Seahorse, which premiered to groveling elite acclaim at the Tribeca Film Festival.
We haven’t heard as much about the phenomenon of “pregnant men” in the last while. But for a few years, propaganda pieces about trans-identifying women giving birth as ‘men’ were all the rage in the mainstream press in an attempt to normalize the fiction that men could give birth. This, I suspect, was one of those things that turned the public against gender ideology—the demand that we abandon fundamental biological truths and outsource our brains to obviously unstable ideologues.
The transgender wars are by no means over, but LGBT activists have suffered a series of serious setbacks that have triggered panic throughout their movement. That panic is clear in McConnell’s editorial:
The Supreme Court judgment on the application of the 2010 Equality Act has rendered the UK’s system of legal gender recognition entirely hollow. It has ruled that men like me who have gender recognition certificates are defined as women in equality law, which applies to organisations ranging from workplaces to public services and sporting bodies. Vice versa for trans women.