Debbie Hayton

The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee launched yet another inquiry into Gender Recognition Act reform last week. Either they are gluttons for punishment, or this really matters to someone. This is the third time since 2015 that Westminster has asked the public what they think about gender recognition. When you add this to the two separate Scottish consultations, it becomes apparent that transgender inquiries are now an annual event. For those new to all this, the Women and Equalities Committee opened the recognition debate in 2015. Their subsequent report – informed by only 208 responses – called for the checks and balances to be removed from the gender recognition process, effectively making legal sex a tick-box exercise. But that was not all.

Stonewall UK was established in 1989 in response to the now infamous Section 28, which prohibited councils from intentionally promoting homosexuality or teaching about the acceptability of homosexuality in schools. In the years since its founding, Section 28 has been repealed, the age of consent has been levelled, and equal marriage was secured in 2013. In other words, the key political goals of lesbians, gay and bisexual people have been secured in the UK. This lack of a serious and meaningful campaign goal perhaps explains why Stonewall’s behaviour has been far less edifying in recent years. In 2015 Stonewall extended their remit to campaign for trans equality, and in doing so thrust trans people like me into the centre of a toxic and divisive political dispute.

The Tories may have taken self-identification of legal gender off the table, but the transgender thought police have certainly not gone away. Their latest victim is Kevin Price who, until last Thursday, was a Labour member of Cambridge City council, in a seat he had held for ten years. While residents were probably more concerned with the impact of Covid-19 on their city, their councillors were busy discussing something else: 'Trans Rights are Human Rights'. Few people, surely, would disagree with that statement. But the actual motion debated by councillors last week was somewhat more problematic.

Freshers across the country are being subjected to a psychological experiment that would never have been imagined, let alone sanctioned, before Covid-19 plunged the world into restrictive measures. Whether they will do any more than flatten curves or delay peaks is still not known but, either way, we are risking a mental health catastrophe among our young people. The impact is bad enough in the school where I work – where teachers and pupils keep their distance from each other in well-ventilated classrooms that are rapidly becoming well-chilled. But at least we share the same space as each other. The lurch to online teaching in universities, in contrast, has confined freshers in their rooms spending hours every day staring into their laptops.

Friday's announcement that biological males should not play women’s rugby may be sound like common sense, but it has already provoked a furore. The new guidelines published by World Rugby, organisers of the Rugby World Cup, apply to the elite and international levels of the game. In their statement they explained, ‘As with many other sports, the physiological differences between males and females necessitate dedicated men’s and women’s contact rugby categories for safety and performance reasons. Given the best available evidence for the effects of testosterone reduction on these physical attributes for transgender women, it was concluded that safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against trans women in contact rugby.

The world was a different place when Graham Linehan’s IT Crowd, which turned to IT support for comedy inspiration, was first broadcast by Channel 4. But last week, Channel 4 told Linehan they would be turning off one of his episodes and not turning it back on again. The Speech, originally shown in December 2008, which features the well-known ‘internet in a box' plot, also includes a transwoman and – worse – makes light of the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg In brief, sex-crazed Douglas Reynholm falls for April Shepherd, a journalist who is writing a feature about him. When she tells him ‘she used to be a man’, Reynholm thinks she ‘used to be from Iran’.

If Liz Truss made waves in the transgender debate when she said no to 'self-ID', then guidance emerging from the Department for Education (DfE) is likely to cause even bigger ructions. An explosive paragraph buried towards the end of the document shows why: 'We are aware that topics involving gender and biological sex can be complex and sensitive matters to navigate. You should not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear. Resources used in teaching about this topic must always be age-appropriate and evidence based.

The government's decision to reject 'self-ID' is a victory for this transgender woman. When I transitioned eight years ago, I had two ambitions: to keep my job and to stay out of the press. I achieved the first, but failed the second. However, this week's announcement vindicates my decision to speak out. Back in 2016, MPs debated a motion that called on the Government to: change the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) in line with the principles of gender self-declaration open up the Equality Act to create a new protected characteristic of gender identity. It sounded as though we were rushing into a world where facts would be replaced by feelings. It might have taken four years but, finally, common sense has prevailed.

'My water bottle has leaked in my bag!' The 11-year-old girl was distraught. It was her first week at secondary school. Her neatly titled exercise books – hitherto in pristine condition - were dripping wet; was she in trouble? What would become of her? That happened in my wife’s class. She is also a teacher and has seen most things in her career. Flooded bags are a regular mishap. Usually, upset children are easily calmed when their teacher takes charge to put things right. But September 2020 has been a very different experience in schools. Socially distanced from the class, Stephanie was unable to offer any more than verbal instructions to her young pupil. Twenty minutes later the poor girl was still wiping out her bag.

The British Medical Association is the latest organisation to fall victim to gender identity ideology. At the BMA's annual representative meeting, medics called on the government to let anyone change their legal sex on the basis of a 'witnessed, sworn statement'. But in the midst of a pandemic, is this really a matter worthy of being listed as a prioritised motion on the agenda? It's hard to see how it is. Yet perhaps a more worrying aspect of this motion is what isn't included: the word 'sex'. Even amongst doctors, it seems that the word 'gender' has supplanted biological sex. This shouldn't come as a surprise.

Even a hermit in total and complete lockdown will have been aware of the bullying suffered by J.K. Rowling this summer when she had the audacity to stand up for women’s rights. Thankfully she stood firm – sadly, the same cannot be said for the Co-op, who this week wobbled in an apparent fit of alarming cowardice.  The story started last Saturday when Stop Funding Hate, a bunch of self-righteous zealots attempted to shame the Co-op for advertising in The Spectator, a magazine they described as ‘notorious for transphobia’. Of course, no evidence was supplied to back up this scurrilous claim. But we saw the sorry saga play out on Twitter – where the discourse was more reminiscent of the school playgrounds of my childhood.

The latest U-turn – this time on face masks in schools – comes less than a week before hundreds of thousands of teachers, including myself, return to the classroom. But is the announcement that secondary school pupils may have to wear masks as they make their way around schools really a smart idea? I’m not convinced. The English edict on masks in schools follows previous woolly guidance from Boris Johnson’s government. In place of decisive leadership, we are told that head teachers will have the ‘flexibility’ to introduce masks in their schools. Yet surely either masks work – in which case all schools should use them – or they cause bigger problems than they mitigate – in which case why has the government U-turned?

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.

You may not have heard of Graham Linehan but you will be familiar with his work. Linehan is the creator of Father Ted and the IT Crowd, among other comedy shows. And in the wake of the attacks against JK Rowling, he is the latest high-profile person to have been targeted by the mob for speaking out on the issue of transgenderism. Over the weekend, Linehan was booted off Twitter. His apparent crime? To tweet the words: 'men aren’t women tho'. His post, in response to a message from the Women’s Institute wishing their transgender members a happy Pride, was too much for Twitter. Now Linehan has been permanently suspended, it would seem, for saying among other things words that the majority of people would surely agree with.

For nearly a week now, the mob has had JK Rowling in its sights. Her crimes against trans ideology seemed relatively minor but like some authoritarian quasi-religious cult, trans rights activism demands total compliance to its dogma.  Following a series of courageous tweets last Saturday in which the children’s author defended biology and reclaimed the word 'woman' to describe those now seemingly called 'people who menstruate', her critics went berserk.  To readers about to switch off from yet another dose of transgender nonsense comes a warning. Coffee House readers may pride themselves in knowing that biological sex is real and, no, we can’t change it. But too many people have stayed silent for too long. This is more than a Twitter storm.

Transphobia is a word thrown around far too easily. But Hungary's move to end legal recognition of trans people really is something to worry about. While Britain has been embroiled in a heated debate over proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which allows people to change their legal gender on the production of medical reports and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government has swept such rights away.  On 19 May, the Hungarian National Assembly voted 133 to 37 to ban transgender people from changing the gender on their identity documents.

George Orwell popularised the word 'thoughtcrime', but he also wrote extensively about the destruction of language. This week, the United Nations has been playing that worrying game, of meddling with what people say.  'What you say matters', the UN wrote in a tweet. 'Help create a more equal world by using gender-neutral language if you're unsure about someone's gender or are referring to a group,' its Twitter account urged, telling people to substitute words like 'mankind' for 'humankind', 'maiden name' for 'family name' and 'businessman' for 'representative'.  There is nothing bad, of course, about trying not to offend people. But there is something deeply troubling about adapting language in a way that dilutes meaning.