The Tories’ latest betrayal shows why the party is facing extinction

Extremist trans ideology doesn’t care for minority rights: it’s about curtailing parental freedom

For a moment this week, I forgot my first rule of British politics: never underestimate the Tory party’s ability to turn every victory into a full-blown rout. Rishi Sunak’s decision to veto Nicola Sturgeon’s appalling gender self-id legislation was a heroic move, or so it seemed, at once a sweeping counter-offensive in the culture wars and the first sign of a popular, muscular Unionism aligned with Scottish opinion.

Sturgeon wants 16-year-olds to be able to change the sex on their birth certificate without a medical diagnosis, an absurd idea most Scottish voters rightly oppose. It would reinforce the denial of biological reality, undermine single-sex schools, make it even harder to protect women-only spaces (such as hospital wards, changing rooms and lavatories), inflict unbearable pressure on impressionable children, jeopardise women’s and girls’ rights, and impinge on England. Good on Rishi for blocking it, I thought, hoping the courts would uphold the legality of his veto under the devolution arrangements.

Yet no good policies go unpunished in the Tory party, especially one as inconsistent, as cowardly, as ideologically rudderless and in thrall to fashionable orthodoxies as Sunak’s. I should have guessed that something was afoot when the justification given for slapping down Holyrood was a technocratic appeal to the Equality Act, legislation sensible Tories are usually desperate to reform.

A few hours later, the Government dropped its bombshell: the UK ban on conversion therapy would also apply to transgender people, presumably as a quid pro quo for its Scottish veto to appease its own woke activists. Such an expansive ban had previously been blocked by Boris Johnson because of fears of “unintended consequences” – namely, the criminalisation of parents, teachers and therapists for seeking to have sensible conversations with children about a life-changing decision.

Does anybody really believe that a law, however clumsily caveated, wouldn’t be over-interpreted by judicial activists, just as the Modern Slavery Act, the Human Rights Act and every other piece of similar legislation keeps being misused? Far from fighting the extremists, the Tories have surrendered; the Scottish veto was a mere diversionary tactic.

This is a difficult, nuanced debate, and it is important not to be bamboozled by screaming activists. It is crucial to support the small minority of people who suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition defined by the NHS as “unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity”.

As a matter of basic individual liberty, adults who suffer from this should be able, after going through a regulated medical and legal process, to undergo hormone treatment or surgery, to fully transition and be recognised as having done so. Individuals must be free to pursue happiness, and live their lives.

Trans people, including those with non-binary identities, should be treated with respect, and not be subjected to discrimination, mocking, bullying or hate. Trans rights, defined in this way, are similar to other minority rights, including gay rights, and should be supported by all right-thinking folk.

By contrast, it is vital to combat the extremist, totalitarian woke ideologues who have hijacked trans issues to assault the family, to cancel women, girls, gay people, tomboys and anybody who doesn’t conform to stereotypes, to force everybody to state their pronouns and to engage in the monstrous manipulation of defenceless children.

These extremists aren’t really interested in protecting the trans community: they want to harm and demonise and remove the rights of the majority, as part of a greater assault on all of the West’s ideals and institutions. They are successfully changing the language, ensuring that it is “people”, not women, who have babies and breastfeed, and that girls’ schools refer to their pupils as “students”. They threaten to ruin women’s sports, and have sought to destroy JK Rowling for stating the truth.

Through their propaganda, these extremists have helped fuel massive self-harm. Puberty is a time of selfdoubt and questioning, a period of maximum vulnerability, especially among adolescent girls. Far too many children have been encouraged into seeking medical treatment prematurely for gender issues, including puberty blockers and surgery. Many will bitterly regret it; in time, the acts of some medical institutions and activists will be remembered as a scandal, a shocking instance of 21st-century barbarism.

A misunderstanding of the human story and an abject lack of timeless principles lie at the heart of the Tories’ pathetic defeatism. Many privately believe that the battle is already lost, that the woke radicals are on the “right side of history”, that the young have different values, that “demographics are destiny”, and that opponents are mere “reactionaries”.

This attitude isn’t new: the Tory mainstream, which has no ideas of its own, has for years assumed that whatever their enemies believe must be the “progressive” cause that will eventually prevail. They used to think that, like it or not, membership of the EU, adoption of the euro and ultimately the creation of a single superstate was the obvious end point of British history.

In the 1950s, many supposed central planning and communism were bound to prevail (“so much more rational”), and the aim was merely to prolong the role of the old establishment for as long as possible. In the 1970s, they assumed that post-democratic corporatism was the future, and that social democracy, pure “comprehensive” education, the toleration of crime against private property, high inflation and union power were here to stay. In the 2000s, they accepted Blairism; today, they assume that the woke revolution, the trans extremists and the purveyors of critical race theory will triumph.

The truth is that some social changes, such as the decline of racial prejudice, are great, and others, such as the weakening of the family, are bad. We must choose which trends to support, and which to fight. Nothing is set in stone. It is time for another, urgent Tory about-turn.

After that, Sunak needs to look to America. Ron Desantis has built a coalition of anti-woke working-class, middle-class and ethnic-minority parents, defeating the Democrats. Sunak will probably lose whatever he does, but sucking up to his woke wing is a recipe for complete annihilation.

Too many children have been encouraged into seeking medical treatment prematurely for gender issues