It’s finally ok to say that gender extremism wears no clothes.
Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.
[A]s the Cass review stresses, so much is still unknown about gender dysphoric young people: there may be many reasons for their distress, ranging from sexual abuse to internalised homophobia. These young people need to explore their feelings with a professional, not be rushed into medical treatments that can have deeply damaging long-term effects. That is not an endorsement of conversion therapy, but of good therapeutic practice. After all, in what other scenario are distressed young people encouraged to diagnose and treat themselves?
Then, yesterday, the Prime Minister felt sufficiently emboldened to say what the Labour leader still cannot, and what so many women — from Kathleen Stock to Maya Forstater — had been sacked for expressing in the past: gender ideology, in its extreme form, doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t work. “I don’t think it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick-competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have,” he said. He added that “biological males” and should not be competing in women’s sports, and that private spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms should be single sex, thereby echoing the EHRC, which this week said that transgender people can be excluded from single-sex services for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma and to ensure health and safety.
In the end, it wasn’t one person who pointed out that gender extremism wears no clothes. There were so many: therapists, academics, parents, authors, athletes, politicians, barristers, journalists, scientists, feminists, gay activists, all shouting over the years that this ideology would hurt women, children, gay people and trans people. And this was the week the spell began to break.