I am a human rights lawyer and professor at King’s College London. Until 2018, I supported all the demands of the transgender-rights movement. But since then, I have changed my mind.
I assumed that whatever the transgender community demanded must be reasonable.
They knew what they needed. It did not occur to me, as a man, to put myself in the shoes of a woman, encountering a “legal woman” with male genitals in a women-only space.
As such, when I joined a group of experts in Indonesia to draft the 2007 Yogyakarta Principles, widely cited as “best practice” on sexual orientation and gender identity, I did not question the proposals of the transgender experts.
Everything changed in 2018. My lightbulb moment came at a university summer school. I was asked to explain the “spousal veto” under UK law: a wife must consent, if her husband wishes to change his legal sex to female and in turn make their opposite-sex marriage into a same-sex marriage. I said that the husband’s human right to change his legal sex could be limited to respect “the rights of others” (the wife’s right not to be in a same-sex marriage against her will).
A transgender student could not understand how I could compare the husband’s “fundamental human right” with the wife’s right under “a contract” (their marriage). Feeling frustrated, I said: “Trans rights don’t trump everything else!”
The transgender student became angry and stormed out of the classroom. Finally, it dawned on me that some members of the transgender-rights movement did not seem to understand that women have human rights too.
In 2021, I publicly changed my position. On April 1 of that year, in an interview published in The Critic, I criticised Principle 31 and suggested for the first time that allowing change of legal sex might not be necessary to protect the rights of transgender people.
Fifteen days later, citing the interview, an LGBT organisation terminated its relationship with me, after more than twenty years.
These were ideas I carried forwards to a staff research seminar at King’s in November of 2021 – albeit not without controversy. The Dean of the School of Law rejected calls to cancel the event and showed his support for freedom of expression by attending. Three security guards were posted outside the room (a first in my thirty years at the university), but no protesters appeared.
Two years later, in January 2023, I was scheduled to give the same talk at Montréal’s McGill University Faculty of Law (where I had studied).
But this time I faced a hostile mob of between 100-200 students.
Countries that have yet to follow suit (nearly 60 per cent of the 193 United Nations member states) are right to hold out.
There is no human right to documents that are biologically false. An individual’s birth sex never changes, regardless of any medical treatment they receive.
Taking a stand has not been without cost. Since I “came out” as “gender-critical” four years ago, a number of friends have stopped speaking to me, and this year I was dropped from a university’s summer programme.
But I am proud to have made this journey, and of finally speaking out for the rights of women.
Source: I changed my mind on trans rights – and lost multiple friends
Good on you! Yogyakarta Principles and SOGI, that flows from it, have been detrimental to same-sex attracted men and women. I would argue that they harm lesbians most of all. Pernicious and misogynistic.