Debbie Hayton

Coronavirus has closed schools, grounded planes and even delayed the start of the cricket county championship, but it has not shut down the transgender debate. This often toxic and divisive issue has proved to be one of the hardiest items in the news agenda in recent years. And even a pandemic has done little to limit the exposure. Birth certificates are the latest topic to provoke fury. But now there is a difference. While the discussion up to now has broadly surrounded the documents of transgender people, the Court of Appeal has just upheld a ruling about the documents of their children. The case had been brought by Freddy McConnell, a transgender man, who wanted to change the way that he was described on his son’s birth certificate: a child he gave birth to in 2018.

As the United Kingdom plunges into an unprecedented crisis, the time has surely come to halt the reforms to self-identification of gender. Schools are closing; London could be locked down; even The Archers has an uncertain future – this really is a crisis. At such times, we can no longer afford the luxury of devoting time and resources to the foolish idea that biology matters less than feelings, when we divide humanity into male and female. Self-identification has already been paused in Westminster with Boris Johnson’s government content to say as little as possible on the subject, while the opposition parties tear themselves apart.

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.

They gathered at a secret location under the cover of darkness. Total confidentiality had been maintained, even between friends who embraced each other as they arrived to discuss gay rights. But this was not some socially conservative society under the thumb of a repressive regime. Nor was it a secret society in Victorian London. It was London in 2019. Discretion had been essential because when homosexual people declare themselves to be attracted to the same sex, as opposed to the same gender, they risk being attacked and shamed as transphobic bigots. The caution was wise; the fall-out following the inaugural meeting of the LGB Alliance last week has been unforgiving. Social commentators and policy advisers were outraged. Even the name was condemned.

The bizarre stories of censorship and bullying by trans activists frequently made baffling reading. But the spectacle of Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, ending up in the dock for apparent ‘transphobia’ (all at the behest of a non-trans person) really takes the biscuit. An author would struggle to pitch such an incredible scenario at a publisher but, to quote Mark Twain, truth is stranger than fiction. Our post-truth world is off the scale. The story started with a social media spat between Yardley and a campaigner called Helen Islan. Yardley is a transsexual with a strong view on gender politics: namely that male people cannot become female people just because they want to.

While Westminster understandably has its mind on other things, the transgender debate – which you might have expected to calm down after last year’s consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) – rumbles on with its trademark ferocity. And as two stories have this week have shown, its proponents continue to take no prisoners. It started with a motion at Gateshead Council, put forward by Leigh Kirton – a Labour councillor – stating that ‘marginalised groups’ should be ‘fully protected in ways which ensure freedom of self-expression and protection from harassment’.

On Wednesday night, Channel 4 broadcast a much-debated documentary examining the staggering rise in children being referred for consultation on gender re-assignment. In the last nine years, referrals for children to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service have risen some 2500 per cent. The presenter of the film, psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, recalled her childhood struggle with gender dysphoria. She had been a girl who wanted to be a boy, and remembers feeling distressed at this. Eventually, these feelings subsided and Stella felt comfortable with her sex and went on to be a mother.

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.