The rise and fall of the trans movement

Part 2/ Nemesis

Photo by Norbu GYACHUNG on Unsplash

(This is the second of a two-part series. The first on how authoritarianism has undermined the trans cause is available here.)

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Visitors to this summer’s Edinburgh International Book Festival could be forgiven for thinking that they had entered a dictatorship. For in a genteel and discreet manner – this is Edinburgh, after all – the festival organisers imposed the controls of a one-party state.

As Alex Massie of the Times said, they are fine progressive people who are “forever deploring the culture wars while actively participating in them”.

The festival organisers invited trans activists and their allies to speak – as they were perfectly entitled to do. But then they banned gender-critical feminists.

Scottish women brought the case to the UK Supreme Court, which resulted in the unanimous ruling that the legal definition of a woman only covers biological women.

J.K. Rowling, who has had a few words to say on this subject, lives in Edinburgh. But the festival did not give the world’s most acclaimed author a slot, even though she’s only round the corner. Meanwhile, Scottish writers, most notably Jenny Lindsay, have been at the forefront of documenting how dissenting gender-critical voices have been crushed. As if to prove her point, the festival did not invite Lindsay or her friends to speak either.

Instead of allowing free debate, one of the world’s leading literary festivals welcomed an arts bureaucrat, who warned bookshops not to stock Lindsay’s work.

If you are shocked to find a literary festival promoting censors, or surprised that it picks a side, which in Massie’s words, “misrepresents the law, believes in literally impossible things, and is overly fond of wishing lurid acts of sexual violence upon those women who dare to point out legal and biological truths,” then you have not been paying attention.

Activists once made the protection of people with genuine gender dysphoria their primary concern. In Transgender Rights vs Women’s Rights, just out from Polity Books, Robert Wintemute, Professor of Human Rights at Kings College, London, argues for a return to this narrowly focused aim.

The law should be concerned with defending trans people as trans people, he says. Not least because there is a long and honourable legal tradition of doing just that.

In 2002 the European Court of Justice ruled that a Cornish employee who was dismissed after undergoing gender reassignment surgery should be reinstated. The judges produced the first caselaw anywhere in the world that prevented discrimination in employment or vocational education because someone is transsexual.

Twenty years on, you don’t need to be a cultural bureaucrat to understand why Prof Wintemute has as much chance of being invited to the Edinburgh Festival as Jo Rowling. The very title of his book announces his heretical belief that there is a conflict between trans and women’s rights, when every right-thinking, left-leaning person knows that such a conflict is meant to be impossible.

Since the early 2000s the LGBT+ movement has moved far beyond campaigning for the tiny numbers of people with actual gender dysphoria.

It has developed imperial ambitions. Its new ideology allows anyone to be trans. You don’t need to take gender-affirming hormone therapy that will allow biological men to grow breasts and women to grow beards. You do not need to ask surgeons to sterilise you.

A man can be a woman simply by saying so. That’s all there is to it. No one can determine a person’s gender identity except that person – it is an entirely subjective process.

Before going on to show why the new ideology is now failing, I should accept that as a Richard Dawkins meme it was brilliantly adapted to survive and replicate in modern culture. Anyone could be trans now. Tens of millions of people were potentially part of the trans constituency. For all the progressive gloss given to trans ideology by Judith Butler and the post-modern left, we were witnessing the triumph of a free-market ideology. The customer was always right. He/she could choose what sex he/she wanted to be and cancel those who objected.

You might be in a standard gay or indeed straight relationship, and you could still call yourself trans or non-binary. You might be 100 percent male and still compete in women’s sports and demand access to women-only spaces.

There could be no conflict between trans rights and women’s rights because trans women were women and so no conflict was possible.

Liberated from the possibility of legal restraint, the movement could demand an “end to the registration of the sex and gender of the person in identity documents such as birth certificates, identification cards, passports and driver licences, and as part of their legal personality”.

In other words, the movement was so self-confident it could demand the reconfiguration of society to suit its demands. A clearer example of liberal overreach you could not hope to find.

And as so often before, progressive excess is provoking a backlash.

The extraordinary levels of censorship and intimidation, which I discussed in the first piece in this series, helped prevent LGBT+ groups facing up to two hard truths: