by Malcolm Clark, spiked
The courts should not validate the fantasies of sexual fetishists.
It’s tempting to laugh whenever ‘nonbinary’ people hit the headlines. It’s hardly our fault. Singer Sam Smith declared himself nonbinary in 2019 and promptly began squeezing himself into fishnet tights.
Yet tempting as it is to dismiss the nonbinary movement as merely the latest social-justice fad, it’s worth taking the phenomenon seriously. For beneath the narcissism and eye-rolling illogicality, there is something distinctly pathological.
Take the ludicrous campaign of American activist Ryan Castellucci. Ever since he arrived in the UK in 2019, this cyber-security expert has been determined to win the same kind of legal recognition he and his non-binary ilk enjoy in his native California. There, the state allows him to record his ‘gender identity’ as neither male nor female on his passport, birth certificate and driving licence. Instead of ‘M’ or ‘F’, it is listed as ‘X’.
Much to Castellucci’s chagrin, English courts have given him whatever the legal equivalent is of a bum’s rush. Judge after judge has rebuffed him. They have said that until and unless the UK parliament recognises ‘nonbinary’ as a sex, the only gender-recognition certificate he can obtain – if he finds his status as a male unsatisfactory – is one saying he is female.
Castellucci eventually appealed to the UK’s Supreme Court, which last month refused to hear his case on the basis it ‘does not raise an arguable point of law’. In other words, it would be pointless wasting time on a case so obviously lacking in legal merit. His lawyers have now announced they are preparing a case they hope the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg will hear.