Trans extremists are putting equality at risk
by Trevor Phillips, The Times:
At most weddings, there’s a certain wry amusement to be had from watching the father of the bride on the dance floor getting down with the kids, determined to show that he hasn’t lost his moves. But when a flailing limb catches a fellow dancer unawares it stops being funny.
So it is with politicians and identity politics. For four decades western leaders were so determined to prove their anti-racist credentials that they ignored the signs of growing public unease about our multi-ethnic societies. The outcome: Trump, Brexit and the steady advance of truly racist and anti-immigrant movements.
The disaster of the public consultation process on gender recognition has revealed a government so terrified of being labelled transphobic that it is ready to destroy half a century of painstakingly assembled anti-discrimination legislation to the detriment of every woman, person of colour and disabled individual in Britain. Under the current law, a change of gender requires a two-year period of reflection, medical checks and possible physical alterations. It is a gruelling process and proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act rightly aim to make the process less bureaucratic.
However, agitation by a guilt-tripping band of “trans” activists has corralled MPs into contemplating a wholly unnecessary and dangerous further step. It is seriously being suggested that we should do away with any objective test of gender, and leave the decision as to whether an individual should be treated as male or female entirely in the hands of the person themselves. In short, a man would be able to declare himself a woman, and immediately have every right to enter spaces reserved for women — changing rooms, lavatories, prisons.
[…] The problem is this: if self-declaration becomes established as a principle for one protected characteristic — gender — why should it not apply to all of the other eight, including disability or race? It is hard to see how the law could resist the claims of a man who, despite all medical advice to the contrary, decides that he is mentally disabled, and therefore should be eligible for disability benefits and time off work. The human and financial costs would be horrendous.
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