The rise and fall of the trans movement

1/ Hubris

Photo by Aiden Craver on Unsplash(

(This is the first of a two-part series. The second, out in a few days, will look at what compromises are possible)

---

No campaign has risen so fast and fallen so far as the LGBT+ movement. Only two years ago HR departments across the private and public sector, the current government of Scotland, the then government of the United States, international sporting bodies, arts administrators, charities, and Harry Potter film stars endorsed an ultra-subjective ideology that denied the material reality of biological sex.

If a man said that he was a woman, then he was a she and she was a woman. Anyone who doubted it was a modern heretic to be shunned, denounced and, on occasion forced out of their jobs.

Today the story of the trans campaign has become a warning to progressives; a modern morality tale on the dangers of putting ends before means.

It’s losing everywhere. The UK Supreme Court ruled in April that sex means biological sex, not acquired sex. As far as the law is concerned a trans woman is a man, and has no right to access women’s refuges, prisons, hospital wards, sports teams, changing facilities, and other single-sex spaces.

The justices said that whatever other rights and protections trans people possessed: “Read fairly and in context, [the UK’s equality law’s] provisions relating to single-sex services can only be interpreted by reference to biological sex.”

In April 2024 Dr Hilary Cass’s review of gender identity services in the UK led to the government banning the use of puberty blockers on children. The prohibition challenged the central tenet of the new ideology that your biological sex was a social construction assigned at birth by an oppressive society. The National Health Service would no longer seek to stop puberty. The dangers of putting gay and lesbian children on a course that might end in their sterilisation were too great. Last week, the US Supreme Court said much the same.

Even if you believe that the trans movement is right in every particular, you should still deplore the mob tactics used on its behalf, and see how intolerance can lead to defeat.

When activists say that the ends justify the means, they run the risk that society will judge them for their authoritarian means rather than their progressive ends.

Authoritarianism can work – just ask the Russian opposition – but it brings huge risks in a democracy.

At the Guardian, in the universities, and in publishing and the public sector trans activists and their supporters drove feminists from their job for holding lawful opinions. I have spent most of my working life in the liberal media and I have never seen anything like it.

If leftwingers had been the victims rather than the persecutors, they would have had no hesitation in describing the ideological policing as “McCarthyism.”

The comedian Jo Brand explained on Have I Got News For You why even the UK’s leading satirical programme was too scared to do its job.

“I think this is a thing that a lot of people wouldn’t want to say anything [about] because it’s a very venomous situation, and a lot of people are genuinely a bit frightened. No one really wants to get a death threat.”

Cancel culture is a double-edged sword. Any movement that can get governments and corporate hierarchies to do its bidding has won a victory, of course. But it can come at a price of isolating itself from reality. Activists who forbid argument don’t learn where their weak points are, and don’t see their critics coming for them until it is too late.

An open campaign for trans rights would have never allowed itself to get into the position where it had to defend the Scottish prison service sending male rapists into women’s prisons just because they said their sex had changed, or the participation of biological men in women’s sports. Above all, it would have been alert to the risks of a medical scandal.

But because it punished critics, it could not see the need for compromise until it was too late.

Leaving everything else aside, heresy hunts and groupthink produce dumb politics. From Donald Trump to Kemi Badenoch, the right could not believe its luck.

After her colleagues drove her out of the Guardian for stating gender-critical views that are now endorsed by the National Health Service and the UK’s Labour government, Suzanne Moore made a wise observation.

The left can shut down debates on trans rights, radical Islam, antisemitism and other difficult issues so thoroughly that you will never hear a word of dissent, if you move in its circles.

But when the left refuses to confront hard issues, they don’t go away. The right takes them over and welcomes disillusioned leftists who are appalled by the behaviour of their former friends.

To see why many might be appalled I recommend reading a report on the tyrannous atmosphere in literary London, which was released by the campaign group Sex Matters this week. It describes the demands for censorship in the publishing industry – a business, I should add, that seems to have forgotten that it depends on freedom of speech.

“Abuse of those with gender-critical views in publishing has been relentless. People – usually women – have received death and rape threats.

Others in the industry have threatened them with reputational damage and loss of work, have used slurs and insults against them, and conflated their views with transphobia, homophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry.