Debbie Hayton

Sajid Javid spoke some sense earlier this week when he said that the word ‘woman’ should not be removed from NHS ovarian cancer guidance. The Health Secretary was responding to the revelations that the NHS website had been stripping the word ‘woman’ from its advice pages. But fine words are only a start. The Health Secretary needs to get a grip on an NHS website that seems in thrall to magical thinking on sex and gender. The problem is wider than he might realise. Quite apart from the row over the advice to women seeking advice on cervical cancer and ovarian cancer, the NHS is currently hosting a page entitled, ‘Think your child might be trans or non-binary?

Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges doesn’t 'want special treatment from anyone'. In an ITV interview, Bridges said:  ‘I just want the same opportunities as my fellow female athletes’. As someone who transitioned a few years before Emily, I’d say Bridges is right: transgender people should not need special treatment. We are human beings, just like everyone else. In the UK, at least, trans people have specific and additional protections against discrimination and harassment. But these only become relevant if someone treats us less favourably because we are transgender. That has happened to me very rarely. So who is to blame for this unfortunate situation?

For saying that teachers shouldn't pander to trans pupils, Suella Braverman has found herself in hot water. The Attorney General suggested in an interview with the Times that male pupils should not be able to use girls’ toilets, and that single-sex schools can indeed restrict admission to children of just one sex. These are hardly revolutionary ideas, but they appear to have upset the National Education Union. Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the NEU, took just a few hours to respond to Braverman: 'Discrimination against transgender pupils is illegal under 2010 Equalities Act,' she warned, adding that: 'Schools should ignore the misleading advice from the Attorney General and continue to treat their trans pupils with the dignity and respect they are entitled to.

The ugly nature of the transgender debate – and the viciousness of those who seek to silence others who disagree with them – has arrived in the playground. At a private girls' school, a sixth form student was surrounded by a mob of dozens of fellow pupils who spat and screamed at her. Her 'crime'? Questioning a visiting politician's views about trans rights during a debate and making the point that 'sex exists'. That girl has now left school and is studying at home. Schools should be places where children can develop their own ideas and debate them. So what has gone so badly wrong? Only a few years ago, there was an A-Level, which I used to teach, in critical thinking.

A minister in the Scottish government has likened people who share my opinions to racists or anti-Semites. Apparently my views on how best to support and include transgender people in society place me on the same footing as those who condemn and exclude others based on their race. This latest outrage comes from Lorna Slater, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens – Nicola Sturgeon’s junior partners in government. While complaining that the BBC should not give ‘anti-trans’ people a platform, Slater has claimed that: ‘We wouldn’t put balance on the question of racism or anti-Semitism, but we allow this fictional notion of balance when it comes to anti-trans [views]. The whole thing is disgusting.

Westminster has its first openly transgender Member of Parliament. In the early hours of this morning, Jamie Wallis, Conservative MP for Bridgend, announced: 'I’m trans. Or to be more accurate, I want to be.' 'I’ve been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and I’ve felt this way since I was a very young child,' Wallis added. 'I had no intention of ever sharing this with you. I always imagined I would leave politics well before I ever said this out loud.' The statement this morning alone might have filled the News of the World for weeks Wallis’s statement this morning was remarkable. In an earlier era, it might have filled the News of the World for weeks.

As a paid-up member of the Labour party, it's rare that I agree wholeheartedly with a Conservative politician. But Boris Johnson has spoken some much-needed common sense in the gender debate. 'When it comes to distinguishing between a man and a woman,' the PM told MPs yesterday, 'the basic facts of biology remain overwhelmingly important.' Boris is right: biology does matter. I’d actually go further and say that the basic facts of biology are all that matters. Like other sexually dimorphic species we are male or female, and that alone distinguishes men from women.

If you needed any sign that the Labour party is still deeply confused about gender identity and sex, look no further than the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s comments this week. Asked by the Times to define a woman, Starmer replied that: A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom. If Keir Starmer thinks that I am a woman, I am delighted to tell him the truth. Transwomen (like me) are male, while women (like my wife) are female.

For transsexuals like me, the Scottish Government's bill to reform the Gender Recognition Act is a disaster. If passed unamended, the bill would introduce 'self-identification', sweeping aside the checks and balances that make the process of changing ones's gender credible in the minds of the public.  This is not some minor administrative detail: allowing any man to effectively say he is a woman just because he wants to is an affront to women's safety and dignity. Women would have no choice but to introduce measures of their own if they want to protect their spaces, groups and associations. Meanwhile the lives of transsexuals like me would become much harder.

Transgender people need to be treated with dignity and respect at work. But our rights should not be allowed to ride roughshod over the rights of others. Yet it's an unfortunate reality that, in the quest for inclusion, some workplace policies do just that – even in the heart of Whitehall. The Cabinet Office's 'Toolkit' to support transitioning at work is astonishingly forthright when it addresses the issue of staff toilets: 'It is assumed that the transitioning employee knows which facilities are the best match for their gender identity. Therefore, the employee should use the facilities closest aligned to their affirmed gender from their first day presenting in it.' Everyone else, it seems, is expected to like it, lump it, or go somewhere else.