I’ve long banged the drum for equality. But this plan to let us pick our own gender deeply worries me

SOMETIMES you have to cry: ‘Whoa! Steady!’ and jerk at the reins of the runaway horse of liberal idealism. Sometimes you narrow your eyes and look askance at politicians who are anxious to seem modern and benevolent without it costing them anything.

It is hard to have much respect for sweeping declarations such as Cabinet minister Justine Greening’s statement that changing sex is not a problem, but just ‘a choice that people are making’.

This was her comment when she announced the UK Government’s plans to permit everyone to ‘self-identify’ as whichever gender they want to be, and change their birth certificate and gender status without involving doctors or showing earnest conviction.

I have to say that my reaction was woefully cynical: hmmm, here’s a beleaguered Tory Party with no majority, reaching for a fashionable measure which both costs the Treasury nothing (hurrah!) and bravely shows doubters that the Tories are not, after all, in the grip of the homophobic old Ulsterfolk of the DUP.

Painful

Actually, criticising this policy is rather painful for people like me, who for decades have been banging the drum for gay equality, equal marriage and the decent recognition that gender change can be necessary and right.

Some people — a small minority — are indeed born ‘in the wrong body’ and long to be helped to change, both chemically and surgically.

That is more serious than something you can lightly dismiss, the way the minister did, as ‘a choice people are making’. It’s not like changing your hairdo or moving house. It is, for trans people, huge.

A 1974 memoir, Conundrum by Jan Morris, explains it clearly. As James Morris she was the reporter who broke the news of the Everest ascent in 1953, but from her earliest years knew the change must come for the sake of sanity itself.

There are other accounts by bold spirits like April Ashley, who got the MBE for her service to equality. Travelling in the other direction, Cher’s child Chaz Bono (formerly Chastity) made an honest and intelligent film about changing.

There are many — normal, decent, fun and clever people — who have simply understood their own condition and dealt with it. Real trans people know what they are doing, and deserve respect and help. They can legally become the gender they need to be, have a birth certificate changed, and relax into full recognition. Fine.

There is a requirement to see a doctor first and be diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’. Some resent that word, feeling their very identity is being treated as an illness. That phrasing could do with a change, and some of the questions and tests do, we are told, feel unduly distressing. That can soften.

The other rule is that for full recognition in Britain, people must have lived for at least two years in the desired gender. It’s a safeguard against impulsive decisions — which may be taken in times of mental stress and confusion — which could turn out to be fleeting.

But there is something new in the air: a restless 21stcentury idea that gender is infinitely fluid, so anyone, from their earliest years, should be able to declare that their anatomy is irrelevant because they are ‘really’ a girl or a boy.

I might have been thrilled about that as a child, since I had three brothers whose schools and pastimes seemed a lot more fun than mine (they went gliding!). And also because back in the Sixties we females still had to fight for equal life chances.

But I knew I was a girl really. Puberty pretty much settled it, and like everyone I had to settle for it. It has had compensations, not least motherhood.

In the same way, there were little boys who vainly yearned for the flamboyance and comfort of girly clothes and ‘feminine’ tastes and games, and who suffered mockery from peers and anxious disapproval from macho dads.

But it is oddly baffling today that mere social envy — as suffered by me and those little boys — should afflict anyone.

Not only can you marry anyone who’ll have you, irrespective of genitalia, but we have women leading at Westminster and Holyrood, in the Supreme Court, and serving as military officers, often in actual trousers.

Meanwhile, the celebrated artist Grayson Perry dresses as Little Bo Peep and receives his CBE from Prince Charles in a mother-of-the-bride ensemble rather smarter than his wife’s. Truly, in today’s Britain we let it all hang out.

Good for us. We’ve accepted — well, most of us — that it’s the person inside who counts.

But with that freedom, you’d think, we could now ease up on the nonsense of accepting an ‘I am because I say so’ attitude which ignores basic anatomical facts.

Alarm

We could murmur that ‘selfidentification’ has its limits, and also its dangers.

Girlguiding, for instance, has said that boys from the age of five to 14 who ‘self-identify’ as girls, whatever their biology, may be a Brownie, Rainbow or Guide. Fine.

But this also applies to leaders: Brown Owl can have been born a bloke and, crucially, have seen no doctor. And, irritatingly, we are told that parents and children need not be informed that this is so, lest it cause ‘alarm over sharing facilities during trips away’.

Well, I am not one of those delicate shrinking violets who bursts into tears and blushes at the sight of a strange man. But how sensible is it to expect parents to entrust their shy little girls — without being informed — to a camping trip led by a muscular figure called Maureen, who still shaves every day, and has not been through any medical screening, but merely ‘self-identified’?

Justine Greening’s statement was also met with alarm by campaigners for women who feel that insouciant self-identification makes it easy for a man with dark intentions to say he’s a woman and saunter into changing rooms, toilets, refuges and rape crisis centres.

From the U.S., there are stories of women and girls humiliated by such invasions.

Ludicrous

Closer to home, take the ludicrous matter of the Barbican lavatories at the London arts centre. We arty types don’t mind unisex toilets at all, provided they have been designed that way with good privacy.

But in a daft move, without changing anything but the signage, the Barbican just labelled the gents ‘Gender Neutral With Urinals’ and the ladies ‘Gender Neutral With Cubicles’.

The result was, of course, that women shied away from the urinal ones (look, they smell!). Blokes, meanwhile, stumped into the former Ladies, causing queues and annoyance.

The Barbican bleated caringly of its ‘commitment to welcoming all and creating a supportive and tolerant space’. Women were furious, even the most tolerant Guardianistas and Samira Ahmed of the BBC, presenter of Radio 4’s Front Row.

And at least one male theatre critic (anonymously) admits flinching in terror at the prospect of a random female passing while he was at the urinal. She might — gulp! — glance at him.

There’s a big irony here. On the one hand, gender is seen as so vital to a person’s wellbeing that we carefully protect the dignity and rights of those who need to change physically.

On the other, we are cavalier about discarding and disrespecting the privacy of women and girls — and indeed men — who in the most intimate physical situations really don’t want to be overlooked by the other lot.

We can’t have it both ways.