BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Transgender Rights
"‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How bewilderingly old fashioned, perhaps worse that sounds. That a time when a BBC schools video tells nine year olds, that it's really, really exciting. There are 100 genders, if not more now. Gender is the new social battlefield, where minorities who see themselves with some justification as having been marginalized and discriminated against, are not only fighting the normative majority, but increasingly with each other.
Two of the three Labour leadership candidates have waded into this increasingly venomous cultural Civil War. They've pledged themselves to a transgender manifesto that labels named women's and gay rights organizations, trans exclusionary hate groups. The manifesto insists that trans women are women and trans men are men. The refusal to accept this fundamental aspect of their perceived identity, or even attempts to discuss it are now explicitly or implicitly regarded as hateful bigotry. In this case meriting expulsion from the party.
The main women's group involved says it's only concerned with protecting hard won women's rights, particularly female changing rooms, refuges, prisons, which could and in many cases already are open to male bodied people. Some even with records of sexual offenses...
Can biology be a matter of opinion? Is it morally right or even scientifically tenable to make an absolute distinction between sex and gender? The one objective assigned at birth the other subjective and a matter entirely of feelings and individual self perception. Where does masculinity end and femininity begin? What constitutes transphobia? Most worrying for many, what’s behind the huge increase in sometimes very young children, mostly girls, mostly identifying as gay boys who say they want to change gender, and how should they be treated?'...
‘Do you see no dangers in this? I mean do you not think that, for example, bad men might be inclined to define themselves as women in the way that in the past teaching and the priesthood have attracted paedophiles?’
‘I think firstly, it's, I think it's deeply prejudicial to compare trans people to pedophiles’
‘No no, I wasn't, I wasn't. I was saying that bad people. Under your proposal, people can define their gender without any policing whatsoever, I've just asked you to consider the practical consequences of that. Could that attract bad people that define themselves as women? Remember that you're not policing it in any way’
‘I think you have in the spaces in which this is talked about, you already have protocols in place to deal with these things... furthermore, if a man seeks to do harm to women, they probably would do so without bothering to go through the process of the transition.’...
‘The real question here is do trans women's rights conflict with cis women's rights and I think that there's no basis for that.’
‘But you see that a lot of people disagree with you, including some groups of Women's Alliance and other groups where you've been very vocal against them and and refer to them as, as hate groups. Now, they do disagree with you. They are thought, they have a thought through position, you have your thought through position. Why go into this stance of flinging about accusations of hate or hatred, of transphobia. Not simply saying you don’t understand me and I want you to listen to me and change your mind. Why go into this quite extreme position?’
‘I think it's right to describe any organization which was founded for the purpose of and exists for the purpose of limiting the rights of a marginalized group as, as a bigoted one’
‘But it is the rights of an existing group who also feel themselves to be marginalized. That is the clash.’
‘But that assumes that that these groups actually do represent cis women. And I don't think that's actually the case. To be honest, I think these are these are quite small groups, which don't represent the majority of people's opinion. And ultimately it would be quite absurd if it did, because trans people are very significant.’
‘Well, lots of trans people have different views to you, as well’…
‘Once you've got so sectarian you end up in a position where you have an argument with some radical feminists, with liberals, with centralists. So you start out as a broad and progressive coalition. Do you not worry that it narrows in which becomes a bit of a sort of sectarian identity politics argument?’...
‘Women have the right to have sex, single sex exemptions, where they can be just women on their own. And we think that the way to deal with the threats to other groups is to make sure that those groups have space so they feel safe in’...
‘If let's just say there are two rooms, one for men, one for women, whether it's a toilet, whatever, and there are trans men and trans women, where would they belong?’...
‘What they have said is there was a dark joke going around, going on around the Tavistock. That soon there would be no gay people left. Now that's a very serious thing and what confuses me about this issue is... I do wonder why this isn't seen as as more vital and more important to discussion than it is… One of my main problems with this whole discussion is that the word transgender has replaced the word transsexual. And I think people think when they defend trans rights, they think they're defending transsexual rights, but of course they're not.
They're defending a whole range of things that falls under Stonewall’s umbrella, which includes cross dressers. So when people say that trans women are women, they are saying that, you know, a cross dresser like Pippa Bunce who dresses as a woman two days out of the week, is the same sex as my wife and daughter… One of the ironies of my situation is that I'm friends with many trans people now… they are all of the opinion that they are male. And they're of the opinion that they have dysphoria. And they want to try and live in a way that, where they can present in a feminine way without disturbing or getting in the way of women’s rights. What I find poisonous is this argument that women have to move over and make room for really what is a male problem, you know.’"
It is curious that trans activists accuse those who say that the system can be abused by criminals pretending to be trans of claiming that trans people are criminals. Criminally bad misunderstanding is a great way to stoke faux outrage
Of course there's also pretending that there're no abuses of the system today, and that no one will seek to abuse it
Trans activists claim trans people are unsafe in 'their own' toilets and other spaces too, so a third space for trans people would be best for everyone