Transgender

Parents! How do you support LGBT+ kids? As a parent, a teacher and as a trans person, I think the answer is simple: treat them just like any other child. They need space to explore what it means to be human, activities to learn about the world, and boundaries to keep them safe. When BBC Bitesize explored this question, they talked to drag artist Divina De Campo. Behind the flamboyant exterior – ‘camp as a row of tents,’ according to De Campo – there is a former teacher making some sensible points. ‘Everything is there forever,’ De Campo says of social media posts, ‘it doesn’t disappear because somebody’s screenshotted it.’ But unfortunately Bitesize wasn’t content with just offering plain, helpful advice.

It seems odd to be writing about the transgender debate amid the coronavirus crisis, but in some ways, it’s important that normal life, where possible, goes on amid that crisis. That is one good reason for parliament returning to business this week. That business includes Commons select committee hearings on things other than coronavirus. Today, Liz Truss was at the Women and Equalities Select Committee in her role as minister for equalities, overseeing the Government Equalities Office. That brief includes the trans issue and the – postponed, possibly forever – reform of the Gender Recognition Act. Truss’s opening remarks to the committee were interesting and worthy of attention because she chose to enter the most contentious aspect of this debate: children.

I have been trying to write about a great unpleasantness for some time: the trans debate that we don’t really have. Men go to Woman’s Place meetings. So do trans women, it’s not a separatist organisation. But for some godforsaken reason the Labour leadership hopefuls thought they might endear themselves to their lost ‘red wall’ voters by signing pledges calling Woman’s Place and LGB Alliance ‘trans-exclusionist hate groups’. I was appalled to see that the signatories included Lisa Nandy, who is bright, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, who isn’t. Anyway, having been asked not to write about this subject for months (I still have the police reports from the threats I received last time), I insisted.

There is an old Westminster joke that says if you want to keep something secret, say it on the floor of the House of Commons. Day-to-day parliamentary business doesn’t often get the attention of national media outlets and thus the wider country. This is understandable but also a pity because we often end up missing our elected representatives doing the things we expect of them: debating important things, discussing subjects that concern voters, even sometimes showing thoughtful leadership. I’ve spent most of my career around MPs. Maybe I’ve been captured, but I often think they deserve a bit more respect than they get. Most work very hard (and much harder than when I started my first job in the Commons in 1994) and take their jobs very seriously.

This was the year that the word ‘non-binary’ went mainstream. It has now officially entered the dictionary — lexicographers at Collins have defined the term as ‘a gender or sexual identity that does not belong to the binary categories of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual’. Non-binary also entered the Liberal Democrat manifesto, though Jo Swinson may now be regretting this decision. Non-binary is easy to announce; it’s rather more challenging to explain to the electorate — or to journalists. In a series of difficult interviews this week, she even denied the fact that every human being is either male or female. I’m a science teacher; if she had been one of my pupils, I think I would have despaired.

Jo Swinson won’t be our next prime minister but her election campaign has achieved one significant thing already: she’s helped the BBC to start doing the job of journalism on trans rights issues. The Lib Dems have taken a conscious decision to go into the election campaign as the party of trans rights and inclusion. They think that embracing the transgender issue plays well with the degree-educated, socially liberal voters in university towns. I can’t judge how well the Lib Dem trans strategy is playing out with those key voters. I can simply assess the public results of that decision, which has been a string of frankly horrible broadcast interviews by Swinson and other Lib Dem candidates.

Women, eh? Never happy. The feminists are up in arms again, this time over sanitary towels. Still, not to worry – great strides are being made to just erase women altogether, so that in the future, no one will even know what the word 'woman' means. So bravo to sanitary towel brand Always for leading the way by announcing their decision to remove the female Venus symbol from their packaging after complaints that the imagery is not inclusive to transgender or non-binary people. It shouldn’t really matter, should it? It’s just a symbol on a wrapper. But it does. Because when you start to deny women’s biology, you begin to deny they exist at all.

Oxford is suffering a crime wave. Police are investigating numerous serious offences over more than six months. Thames Valley Police has issued this sweeping statement about unacceptable acts in the city: “Thames Valley Police is appealing for witnesses following a number of public offences in Oxford. Officers are investigating a large number of offensive stickers that have been placed across Oxford city centre containing transphobic comments. It is believed they started appearing in March 2019 within the High Street, Catte Street and Parks Road area. Investigating officer PC Rebecca Nightingale based at St Aldates police station said: “Behaviour like this is not acceptable and we take incidents of this nature very seriously.

Why are increasing numbers of children designated as transgender? Are the resulting medical interventions safe and justified and in the best long-term interests of those children? These are questions of public interest. Some of the answers being offered are troubling, to say the least. One such answer came this week, and deserves attention from politicians and journalists. It’s an open letter from Dr Kirsty Entwistle, formerly a clinical psychologist at the Gender Identity Development Service, the main NHS service for children who might be transgender. It’s a long piece and should be read in full.

I have written several times here about the fear that some women have about expressing their opinions and concerns about the trans-rights agenda. I know of women in many walks of life, some of them prominent public figures, who think that current and potential policies intended to make life easier for trans women (that is, people born male who know identify themselves as women) will have the effect of diminishing women’s safety, dignity and legal standing. Among their concerns are the gradual erosion of laws that allow companies and organisations to restrict access to particular services and spaces according to sex (which is a biological fact).

The Times today reports serious concerns about the functioning of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Lucy Bannerman, the Times reporter, writes: “The Times has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting as transgender. “They believe that some gay children struggling with their sexuality are being wrongly diagnosed as “transgender” by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic.” “All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development.

A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express, a steam train, on 30 March, the day after Brexit. The train will traverse Wales and England, starting at Swansea and ending in Sunderland. In an unspoken rebuke to the metropolis, it will not travel via London. The train will, says the invitation, commemorate ‘the UK’s exit (or non-exit) from the European Union’. This is the opposite, I suppose, of the European train which people like the late Sir Geoffrey Howe constantly exhorted us to climb aboard. What to do? The most likely situation on the day is that we still will not know our country’s fate.

Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a village in Suffolk. On Monday morning she was woken by a telephone call. It was an officer from Suffolk police. The officer wanted to speak to Mrs Nelson about her Twitter account and her blog. Mrs Nelson, a former humanist celebrant and one-time local newspaper journalist, enjoys tweeting and writing about a number of issues, including the legal and social distinctions between sex and gender. Among the statements she made on Twitter last month and which apparently concerned that police officer: 'Gender is BS. Pass it on'. Another: 'Gender's fashionable nonsense. Sex is real. I've no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth.

I recently returned from several months in Los Angeles working on one of the most popular US TV shows. American Horror Story is a mysteriously scary but fascinating series of interconnecting stories created, produced and written by Hollywood’s latest wunderkind Ryan Murphy. In the past decade, he was the brilliance behind such hits as Nip/Tuck, Glee and my particular favourite, Feud, a fascinating study of the enmity between two great legends of the silver screen, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. More recently his output has trebled with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a nine-part series about the tragic events involving the fabled Italian designer, and the mesmerising trial of O.J. Simpson in The People vs O.J. Simpson.