Transgender

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

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

When equalities minister Penny Mordaunt launched the consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act she declared that “trans women are women”. Whether anyone really believes this remains to be seen. Yet our political leaders are willing to endorse this Orwellian thinking, and when it comes to the transgender debate, objective truth plays second fiddle to political expediency. For me, the discussion about gender identification is personal. Not only as someone who firmly believes in the concept of birth-sex as a fact of nature (as a science teacher, I have no choice there) but as a transsexual myself, having undergone a meaningful gender transition supported by medical interventions. Despite what some might think,

If you were deciding where to house a convicted sex offender accused of repeatedly raping a woman, where’s the last place on earth you would put that person? How about a building full of vulnerable women, many of whom had previously suffered sexual assault and abuse? A building locked and secured so that those women could not get out and could not get away from that convicted sex offender? This is not a thought experiment. This is not a clever debating point. This is a simple factual description of something that happened in England in the last year. This is the case of Karen White, a multiple rapist who was

Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly. Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are women

Last night, some women got together in a room to talk about law and politics and sex and gender. The meeting, in Hastings, was organised by a group called A Woman’s Place UK, which is concerned about the way politics and public debate is developing with regard to the legal rights of transgender people and women. This stuff is complicated and, to many people, obscure. I’ve written about these issues quite a bit here, and while quite a lot of people seem keen to read about the transgender debate, I’m under no illusions that this has broken through into wider public consciousness. Most people, I suspect, haven’t really engaged with

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through. Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are

Enrolling at Parsons College in New York the other day, a friend was asked to state her name, subject and PGPs. Her what? Her preferred gender pronouns. In other words, did she want to be referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’, or ‘he’ and ‘him’, or ‘it’, or ‘they’, or none of the above, and was she a Mr, Miss, or Mx? If she wasn’t sure, a support group was on hand to help, called the LGBTQIAGNC. There was no need — she said her name was Clare and ‘she’ would do fine. And the rest of the class? ‘No one stated a PGP other than the obvious,’ she reports,

There were no women athletes in the first modern Olympic games. The next time around, in the 1900 Paris games, out of 997 athletes there were 22 women, who competed in just five acceptably ladylike sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf. Over a century later, the introduction of women’s boxing meant that the 2012 Olympics were the first to feature women competing in all sports. But that moment of parity has been followed almost immediately by a drastic challenge to the very definition of women’s sport, as the International Olympic Committee brought out new rules last November on the inclusion of trans athletes. The change of rules has been