Virginia Blackburn
THE world of gender politics is a bewildering one. When I came into the world, it was pretty much accepted you were a girl or a boy, with an infinitesimally small number of people whose position was less clear. In recent years we’ve all got used to the idea that some men and women really do not identify with the gender they were born with. Most people are broadly sympathetic in our very tolerant land. But now the Government appears to be going a step further. People will be able decide on their gender without any recourse to a doctor, according to Education Secretary Justine Greening, allowing them to put what they want on their passport and change their birth certificate at will.
As a matter of fact both those options are already open to transgender people but only after seeking medical advice and living in their new gender for two years.
So why the change? Is the Tory Party so intoxicated by the fact that it was the one to bring in gay marriage that they want to clean up on the votes of the LGBT brigade?
That’s the only possible explanation for this because it makes no sense at all in any other way. Consider this. A dirty old man wants to hang out in women’s loos. At the moment this would be extremely difficult but if all he needs to do is change his status, at will, on his passport, voilà. What about changing rooms? What about someone who commits a sexual assault and then claims that because he’s a woman it couldn’t possibly have been him?
Common sense left the building a long time ago on this one and it is now considered hopelessly old fashioned, to say nothing of possibly transphobic, to say that there is a