Don’t turn lie about women and gender into the law

WRESTLING with your gender identity? Me neither. But those who are unhappy either with the gender they were born into, or with t he whole malefemale divide, are very much centre stage right now. Just last week I was filling in an online form from Mind, the mental health charity, which is working with my 11-year-old daughter’s school on its policies for parents, staff and pupils. Question 3, are you Male or Female, is followed by a third option – Another: please specify.

I was tempted to identify as Mermaid, on the basis that this is non-binary, but thought better of it. The fourth question asked: Have you ever identified as transgender, now or in the past? I’ve gone to confession a l l my life but have never faced anything as intrusive as this.

That’s the thing, though. Questions that never actually occurred to us are now presented as routine.

Left to ourselves, without any prompting from activists or officialdom, how many of us, let alone our children, would actually see our gender as an issue? My own guess is, vanishingly few.

But that didn’t stop the Government – which obviously hasn’t enough to do right now – from launching a grand consultation about whether the law on gender recognition should be liberalised.

Now the golden rule in politics is: never consult on anything to which you don’t know the outcome before you start. So, I guess that means the Government has already made its mind up to pass the Gender Recognition Bill into law, which would allow anyone to identify as a different gender without so much as a doctor’s certificate, let alone surgery. That’s right: you simply declare that your sex at birth is different from the one you feel, and your passport and birth and marriage certificates can be amended accordingly.

It’s not just the Tories who are tying themselves in knots here. This paper reports today on an ugly spat in the Labour Party between a transgender activist born as male and a party official, and another trans mem- ber, about the wisdom of passing the Gender Recognition Bill. The activist tweeted an extremely offensive remark to the member during the row and a complaint was made to Labour HQ about it.

The member was concerned about an issue raised by a Girl Guide leader recently, about how a change in the law might affect the safety of young guides.

For instance, if a biological man identifying as a woman becomes a Guide leader with responsibility for young girls on expeditions, what might happen? Good question, to which the response of the Guides was to sack the woman who raised the issue. Labour, for its part, appears to be backing its activist,

Can we get one thing clear? There’s nothing to stop any of us from identifying as whatever we like.

I used to know a former admiral who passed as a woman without the benefit of the law. I have a transvestite friend in Ireland who identifies as Annabelle on his trips to Dublin, and dresses accordingly.

Any of us can identify as man, woman or unicorn, and live our lives accordingly without asking the law to be complicit in a fraud.

It’s not just that we’re being asked to collude in a legal fiction. It’s that making gender identity an issue in the first place creates confusion, self-doubt and worry in young people – the ones whose mental health we’re so worried about.

And, as feminist groups point out, allowing trans people with penises – otherwise known as men – into women-only spaces compromises women’s safety in prisons or refuges.

The Government’s official consultation closed on Friday. But it has to decide now whether to act on the findings.

So, let’s tell our local MPs what we think. And what I think is that we’re being asked to accept a lie, that gender is all in the mind. People can do what they like. But changing the law to go along with the pretence, that’s another thing altogether.