I’d face arrest for the right to say a trans woman is still male

IT’S a relief the police in scotland are not treating JK Rowling’s tweets calling trans women men as criminal. Like her, I am not afraid to be classed as gender critical. I have no fear of using the correct term for a male who likes to think he’s a woman. He’s a biological man. He may wear frocks and make-up, he may have had surgery on his genitals and taken hormones to grow breasts, but as far as I’m concerned, he cannot change his biological sex.

But if saying that out loud were to break the scottish government’s new hate crimes law, then I and many others like me would be content to say: ‘Arrest us!’ Fill up the scottish prisons with a bevy of very angry women. (Just don’t house us with male sex offenders pretending to be women.)

I first encountered the zealotry of the trans lobby when I interviewed India Willoughby — Britain’s first transgender newsreader and JK Rowling’s key opponent — on Woman’s Hour at the end of 2016.

My conversation with the trans activist prompted me to question what was going on.

I discovered the movement was gaining power thanks to the stonewall organisation. It seemed to me that, having succeeded in its admirable work on behalf of gay men and women, stonewall had needed a new campaign to keep the money rolling in. the trans lobby more than filled the empty space.

COMPANIES and government departments, even the NHs, paid for advice in order to be seen to have opened their arms to the trans community. Breast- feeding should now be ‘chest-feeding’. Mother and father should be replaced by parent and those in labour must be called ‘birthing people’.

It was this insane and insulting destruction of the English language that angered me more than anything. I was a woman who had given birth to a child and become a mother who had breast-fed. I would not use ridiculous terms that refused to acknowledge the reality of who I was.

How, I wondered, could such things be taken seriously? How could someone who had enjoyed all the privilege of growing up as a boy describe themselves as a real woman? As far as I’m concerned, his male sex would always run through every part of his body, no matter how much he wanted to be female.

three months after my interview with India, I wrote an article sharing my views. I was careful to be sympathetic to those who had made the sometimes painful choice to change gender.

I was less patient with nonsensical claims that children who did not conform to rigid gender stereotypes had been ‘born into the wrong body’ — claims that would see children at the tavistock gender identity clinic demand puberty blockers and ‘sex change’ hormones. Only now are we beginning to understand how much damage has been done to children given such treatment.

Earlier this month, leaked messages from the World Professional Association for transgender Health (WPAtH) showed that, privately, professionals were aware patients were sometimes too young or mentally ill to fully understand the consequences of their treatment — that the drugs they took could rob them of their fertility — and so could not give fully informed consent.

some of the messages from WPAtH members, who include surgeons and therapists, show a worryingly cavalier attitude towards patients’ safety. And yet such a high-profile organisation has helped shape NHs policies. In my article, I begged the trans community to understand how hard women had fought for a semblance of equality. I asked them to learn about feminism and sexual politics. I told them not to call themselves women, but to make it clear they were trans women.

My pleas were ignored, not just by trans women, but by institutions including the police, who started skewing crime figures by referring to violent crimes as being committed by women. No! they were committed by trans women, in other words, by biological men.

In the wake of my article, India Willoughby tried to get me cancelled, just as India has since tried to do to JK Rowling, begging the BBC to sack me.

I wasn’t sacked, but it was the BBC’s lily-livered response to a Woman’s Hour presenter speaking up on an issue so important to women that led me to decide I couldn’t continue to work there.

It became clear I would not be allowed to discuss the trans question. staff were asked to put pronouns on emails; stonewall was paid for advice. I was criticised for failing to be impartial, while the whole organisation had fallen under the spell of the trans lobby. I quit.

so to the scottish police, I say this: it is hateful when aggressive crowds block the entrance to women’s meetings. It is hateful when an outspoken woman is threatened with violence. I’ve had a lot of that. It is not hateful when a woman tells the truth about biological sex and calls a trans woman a biological man.

It’s time police recognise what is fair comment. And concentrate their efforts on solving burglaries, car theft and that other common, but overlooked, crime — violence against women.