“I knew by the time I was eight that I didn’t want to be a boy,” says Melissa. “But I didn’t know what I wanted to be.” Born in a provincial English town in the early 1970s and brought up by evangelical Christians, the boy had never heard of a transsexual (a term that was widely used in the decades before “transgender” entered common usage in the 1990s). As for gay men, “they were all going to hell.” As soon as he could, he moved to London and “experimented,” presenting himself as a man at work and a woman in the evenings. In the early 2000s, his gender dysphoria—the distress caused by the feeling that your body is the wrong sex—came to a head. “The thought of being buried as an old man became simply unbearable.”
But even as Melissa came to that bleak realization, a new future for her was opening up. Britain, like many other countries, was planning to grant gender-dysphoric people a route to legal recognition as members of the opposite sex. Under the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) of 2004, after a psychological evaluation and two years presenting themselves in their preferred sex role, they could change the sex on their birth certificates. Melissa, who takes female hormones and has undergone surgery to refashion her genitals into a female form, is now legally a woman. “People take me for what they see,” she says. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
The motive for such laws was largely compassion. Gender dysphoria was viewed as a rare and distressing condition that could be alleviated by accommodating sufferers as legal exceptions to the rules of biology. But a decade and a half later, a more radical notion is sweeping across the Western world, with English-speaking countries in the vanguard. The brainchild of a few sexologists, trans-activists and academics, it has spread via lobby groups and the internet, and on liberal campuses. It is now becoming consolidated in practice and codified into law, with profound consequences—not just for people who wish they had been born the opposite sex, but for everyone.
That notion is the deceptively simple, quasi-mystical idea that everyone is born with a “gender identity”—an innate sense of being a man or woman that usually, but not always, aligns with biological sex. If the two are in conflict, the person is “transgender” and it is their gender identity, not their biological sex, that indicates who they truly are. The theory has been expanded to include people who regard themselves non-binary, “agender,” gender-fluid or a host of other terms, meaning that they belong to neither sex or feel located at some indeterminate (and possibly shifting) point between the two. According to this theory, no one can determine a person’s gender identity except that person, and no one else can challenge it. As with religious belief, it is entirely subjective. A simple declaration—“gender self-identification”—is all it takes to override biology.
One consequence is a huge increase in the number of people who say they do not identify with their natal sex. In Britain, for example, since the GRA came into force, just 5,000 people have used its provisions. Now the government reckons that approximately 1% of the population is transgender—around 650,000 people.
