https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/revolutionary-transgenderism-march/
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/revolutionary-transgenderism-march/
Kathy Gyngell is co-editor of the Conservative Woman website (www.conservativewoman.co.uk ).
Gender has nothing to with biology, don’t you know — and should you beg to differ, if you cling to the view of there being only two sexes, brace for the sanctions various legislatures around the world are keen to impose on those who persist in thinking unacceptable thoughts.
Revolutionary transgenderism is on the march in Britain, with the blessing of a Conservative Prime Minister. The delayed consultations on proposed changes to the government’s new Gender Recognition Act that Theresa May promises are to go ahead. It is likely that, though opposed by traditional feminists as well as social conservatives, the Gender Recognition Act, backed by Labour, will pass through the Commons and into law.
Last October, in a speech to Pink News, an LGBT website, Mrs May reiterated her previous commitment to improving “trans” rights and to changing the current gender recognition law to make “self-identification” easier, something that had never featured in a Conservative election manifesto. (By contrast Labour’s manifesto had included specific commitments to tackling bullying of LGBT young people and to ensuring that the new guidance for relationships and sex education is LGBT inclusive. It also promised to bring the law on LGBT hate crimes into line with hate crimes based on race and faith, and most importantly to reform the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act 2010 to ensure they protect transgender people by changing the protected characteristic of “gender assignment” to “gender identity” and remove other supposedly outdated language such as “transsexual”.)
Mrs May explained to her hosts: “We’ve set out plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, streamlining and de-medicalising the process for changing gender, because being trans is not an illness and it shouldn’t be treated as such.” Sex change would, she promised, become a matter of choice, rather than of diagnosis.
Earlier in the summer, Justine Greening (the Minister for Women and Equalities and Secretary of State for Education) had announced that gender could be legally changed without any medical diagnosis, and promised publication of a consultation on a new Gender Recognition Act. Medics have described her zeal in applying this thinking to policy as unscientific, dangerous and part of a wider social strategy. The implications of establishing such a “right” of self-identification in the law are profound. Yet there has been next to no debate on them in the Party.
In a stroke “gender” and “sex” would be treated as being the same, though in reality “sex” is what we are biologically born with as dictated by either XX or XY chromosomes, yet gender as a social construct simply reflects the roles we take on as a result of the sex we are born into (which themselves are increasingly subject to debate).