Author: sarah

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has issued a report which says it has found evidence of “disgraceful” bullying, misogyny, discrimination and sexual harassment in some ranks of the Met.

It has made 15 recommendations following “underlying cultural issues”, including officers joking about rape. The inquiry was launched in March 2018 into nine linked independent investigations concerning serving police officers from the Met.

The inquiry found evidence of messages exchanged between officers that were often highly sexualised, violent and discriminatory, and which were defended as “banter” by police officers

To those of us who have researched male attitudes to women in the workplace (Womens’s Work Men’s Cultures 2011) for quite a few years the findings of the IOPC report today are not in any way surprising.

There is a lot of talk now about police culture and how it needs to change.  Our understanding of culture often leads us to look to the top of an organisation ( e.g. all the current debate about Downing Street culture under the current PM) and yes, leadership sets the tone and has a huge influence on any organisation’s culture. But the makeup of the workforce, indeed the very work they do will also determine it too.

Male dominated organisations very often develop a ‘blokeish’ – for want of a better word –  culture. ‘It was only banter’ is frequently held up as an excuse for sexist language and humour.  Devaluing women is one way in which men bond, and sexual banter can alleviate stress if the work is dangerous, stressful or even boring. It can also act as a boundary, making it known to female colleagues that they are not wanted there. Sexual banter shores up a certain type of masculinity, often fragile and threatened. ( See In the Company of Men: Male dominance and sexual harassment  by James Gruber and Phoebe Morgan (2004)

None of this happens in a vacuum. Workers of all organisations walk into the workplace carrying a set of values picked up from wider society and these continue to influence behaviour. If a society and culture devalues women then it is not a surprise that a great many men (and women) will do so also.  Fortunately many organisations do expect better behaviour at work than may occur outside.   Organisations often want to introduce programmes to change their employee’s values but this is extremely hard to do. Ensuring they are employing those with the values they want  is the best way to create the desired culture.

Banter isn’t confined to a workplace, just walk into a crowded pub after a local football match and the language and humour will be the same.   Some might argue that we no longer have a society that devalues women, perhaps some may say we never had one. If that were true we would have had no need of a feminist movement which fought to get women the vote, equal rights and equal pay.  Whilst huge progress has been made in the levels of women in employment and particularly in managerial and professional positions over the past thirty years, there has been a backlash in other areas of women’s lives.

I would argue that the increasing sexualisation of women and girls is part of this backlash. Seeing women as sexual objects contributes to and maintains their lower status, dehumanising them and  making female authority and leadership hard to establish. There are unacceptably high levels of rape and sexual violence, and domestic abuse towards women in society. We also have a culture saturated with pornography. Pornography does not sit in a box away from the rest of culture, waiting for a few to peer at it when they feel the need and then move away. It is pervasive in its influence on sexual behaviour and attitudes, fashion, film and beauty standards.   It is the world’s biggest industry and thanks to the internet is readily available to anyone including children, who are increasingly getting their sex education from it.  Furthermore, a great deal of this easy to access, mainstream pornography depicts (to varying levels) sexual violence and female degradation. It has been claimed that porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.  In fact, 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet is porn. So the ubiquity of pornography cannot but contribute to the overall cultural depiction of women.  It cannot be separated from prevailing male attitudes to women.

In February 2020, the Government Equalities Office published a report, a literature review, titled “The relationship between pornography use and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours”. It aims to inform the Government in taking an evidence-based approach to dealing with the potential harms caused by pornography, following a recommendation from the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) inquiry into the sexual harassment of women and girls in public places.

Four key themes emerged:

1. Viewing women as sex objects
2. Shaping men’s sexual expectations of women
3. Acceptance of sexual aggression towards women
4. Perpetration of sexual aggression

The review found evidence of an influential relationship between use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women. If perhaps rightly, given their role in protecting us,  we want to hold our police force to higher standards than others, we should spell this out.  The misogyny and sexism found in this report and no doubt to be found  in the ongoing review of culture and standards within the Met Police  currently being carried out by Baroness Louise Casey, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58833349  is not confined to the police force. We need to address the wider problem of misogyny endemic in our society (and this is not solved by making it a hate crime).

I haven’t been feeling particularly spiritual recently.  Certainly not Churchy spiritual.  During lockdown Zoom was a necessary stop gap and a bit of a novelty i.e.we didn’t have to get up and get out of the house but the impact of it on me was pretty muted. The closure of churches at a time of national crisis was I believe a massive failure of Church leadership.

 When I first became a Christian in my early thirties one of the phrases I often heard when weighing up what to do in any situation was ‘what would Jesus do?’  Well what would Jesus have done in 2020/21? Not served up Holy Communion from his kitchen, of that I am pretty sure. Jesus walked among lepers and the diseased of the mind and of the body and of the spirit. He had no fear. Yet our Church enjoined our government and preached fear into its body’s heart.

I have been one of those fairly vocal lockdown sceptics since May 2020, when I felt the logic for them fell apart.  I and many others forecast the massive human cost that locking people down in such an authoritarian way would entail. Apart from a sacred bond of democracy being broken, economic disaster, lost businesses, loneliness, depression, undiagnosed cancers, suicides, substance abuse and domestic abuse, child abuse were all collateral damage – it didn’t take much imagination to see this downside.  I felt the essence of the Christian faith, which is unworldly had got buried beneath layers of earthly rules and guidance. There was no space for debate, no place even  for a more spiritual take on the crisis, no challenge to the government on the impact of their policies. Clergy like Giles Fraser who have written critically of the Church’s over-compliance with government guidelines,  have kept my faith in the Church going… it’s not just me that sees an increasingly  watered down and secular Christianity ..

Eighteen months on from the initial lockdown I went to a concert held in our local church on Saturday night. This was during our ‘no restrictions’ period and there were three hundred people there, mostly unmasked. The following morning was Harvest festival and I attended the same church only to have to follow signs, wear a mask, sanitiser my hands and write down my name and phone number. There were no government decreed restrictions yet this church imposed its own. There were 26 people in church that morning, social distanced and masked. We were back to church in person yes but like this? Not for me. I hate masks. I find them dehumanising and psychologically distancing which makes real connection with people and therefore empathy pretty much impossible. Constant mask wearing is akin to treating each person as if they are diseased. If we are all hugger mugger on a train fair enough but twenty six people in a very large airy freezing cold church… come on!

The following month our Remembrance Sunday service was shortened to fifteen minutes and moved outside for our ‘safety’. At the end the vicar told us we had been invited to go for coffee and biscuits at the British Legion Club across the road which is probably one tenth of the size of the church so it was very crowded and we all mixed happily without masks.

 It kind of summed up the Church of England for me and had I not been a Christian nothing of the Church’s response during the pandemic would have converted me to being one.

However as Christians know, God works in mysterious ways. Having rather abandoned church going for the time being, I did go a couple of weeks ago to my husband’s goddaughter’s confirmation. I had low expectations until I realised who was taking the service-a  local bishop for whom I had a lot of time.  We were wearing masks, but even the local vicar moaned about it. This time we were in Plan B. This Bishop always spoke well… his sermons are like shared faith boosting confessions and personal stories which he relates to the teaching.  The service was moving in itself, seven wonderful girls, aged between 12 and 15, had each committed to following a life in Christ. They had studied their classes using what sounds like an amazing course based on film and their proud friends and godparents could see that their commitment was heartfelt.

In an increasingly secular culture this really was cause for celebration and the wonderful bishop made sure it was. He made what can sometimes be a conventional run of the mill ritual into an amazing event. These girls were going on the greatest adventure of their life, and he reminded us that it was our adventure as well. We too were called by God. We were caught up in his enthusiasm and the service and the hour and a half shot by. This was the living water we thirst for that Jesus promises the woman at the well. The Bishop reread one of Bible passages of the service and told us how it was particularly special to him as it was this verse that made him turn to Christianity when he was a troubled  sixteen year old.

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
² When you pass through the waters,
    I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
    they will not sweep over you.” Isaiah 43 1-2

It was a reminder no, more like a homecoming.

My husband waited in the car and I returned to the church to speak to the Bishop as he left, outside so no masks.  “Thank you”, I said, I really needed that.” He looked straight at me and smiled. “And so did I”.

Many years ago I attended an organisation’s internal diversity workshop as part of a research project. The whole day was part of a long running programme and on this occasion the assembled group were shown the film Blue Eyes Brown Eyes followed by a discussion on the irrationality and cruelty of  prejudice and harmful stereotyping.

This film was made in 1967 by Jane Elliot, a primary school teacher as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King. She wanted to show young children how discrimination felt.   It is very dated and I doubt whether such an experiment involving children would be allowed today. That is probably why it is still used in training as nothing as powerful has ever replaced it. Many of you who work in diversity, equality and inclusion will be very familiar with it.

Jane Elliot divided up her class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes… she then started listing all the negative characteristics that people with brown eyes had. At first there is incredulity but after a while some kids got the gist of it and started turning away from children with brown eyes even if they were close friends. Such an arbitrary division, yet it took only fifteen minutes for the bullying, name calling and playground fights to start.

I searched it out again recently and watched it through a slightly different lens. Yes, it is dated and yes, it deals specifically with race but I think that the underlining message of it is pertinent to all kinds of situations where we choose to emphasise difference rather than our common humanity and how that can lead to discrimination. Any study of war shows that in order to fight the enemy, first you need to ‘other’ them, even to dehumanise them, even if they are in most ways exactly like you.

 Blue Eyes Brown Eyes takes us down this road of difference and shows how dangerous it can be it imbue characteristics into a person because of a physical difference, or accident of birth, or let’s extend that to something closer to home here today… someone who has ideas that may be contrary to what we are told are acceptable.

I use the phrase ‘being told’ because for arbitrary discrimination to be effective it needs to be legitimised by those in power. In the film it is the class teacher, in societies it is more likely to be governments. There is usually an element of fear behind it. Authoritarianism  introduces and can exaggerate  fear and it is this that pushes a group to turn on another regardless of whether that fear is justified. There may be sanctions for the ‘out’ group which the ‘in’ group do not want so they emphasise their difference to the ‘out’ group even more.  

Psychologists call this ‘othering’ projection… we project all the bad bits into someone else, or another group. This is a useful shoring up our own sense of being ok, being right, perhaps even safe from being picked on by authorities.  We are not the ‘other’ – phew!

Returning to Blue Eyes Brown Eyes,  the speed with which these children ‘other’ their own classroom neighbours and friends on the spurious basis of eye colour is frightening.

 I would suggest that something like this is going on with the way the country is being divided over Covid vaccination status.

However much some people may not understand the reasons why someone in a high risk category would choose this, we must resist demonising them. But this is what is happening… blame and fear of illness stirred up by authority has been projected onto a minority. Someone to blame. There is not much evidence that unvaccinated people are likely to transmit illness more than vaccinated yet countries including ours have introduced vaccine passports. Now there is clear evidence that transmission is not be confined to the unvaccinated, they are instead being accused of taking up too many hospital beds. We have never done this with smokers or obese people even though those groups alone consume a vast percentage of the total health budget.  It is their health which may suffer not anyone else’s. And as a society we have chosen not to discriminate by health in this way.

 Statistics show that those in socially deprived areas, young people, black and ethnic minorities are more likely to choose not be vaccinated.  They will have their reasons. There is enough division and inequality in society – we should be very cautious about embedding  it further.  As we can see it happens very quickly and the end result is always ugly. 

Last Monday evening I attended a small dinner in London for a group of people with strong connections to Afghanistan to discuss the current situation. The plight of the whole country is dire, a humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes. Also of huge concern is the refusal of the Taliban to accept the full human rights of women and girls meaning that female students who saw a bright fulfilling future ahead of them have had that cruelly taken away from them. Independent women are perhaps the greatest threat to a patriarchal regime and I don’t think we can be in any doubt that the Taliban is an extreme example of that.  As a woman I feel a mixture of sadness and anger. Sadness for those women and girls who may now face a life of virtual imprisonment, and anger at the way it always seems to be women who are the first victims of so many extreme religions and ideologies.

Later in the week  here in the UK a media storm brews up around an article, “We’re being pressured into having sex by some transwomen” published by the BBC. The piece was written by  Caroline Lowbridge who immediately  had to close her twitter account. Challenging the orthodoxy of the gender identity movement comes at a cost… personal, financial, professional.

Lowbridge’s crime was to draw attention to the fact that some transwomen  put pressure on lesbians  to sleep with them even though this attraction is not reciprocated. I have been aware of this phenomenon for a few years. If you believe that gender identity – an inner feeling that cannot be observed – has priority over biological sex, then a transwoman who has retained her attraction to women wants to be recognised as a lesbian. This is one of the absurd consequences that taking the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ to its conclusion brings. As lesbians are same sex attracted they are not attracted to male bodies, even modified ones.  This reasonable fact has not prevented activist groups shouting in the media and accusing these lesbians of being transphobic!

The BBC article even contained a statement from Nancy Kelley, the CEO of LGBT lobby group Stonewall, in which Ms Kelley likened not wanting to date trans people to not wanting to date people of colour, fat people, or disabled people,”  telling us that “there is no ‘right’ way to be a lesbian.” She talks as if attraction to transwomen was something we could all perhaps learn in a Stonewall training seminar:

“But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”

So there you have it. An organisation that was started many years ago to promote and protect the rights of lesbians and gay men is now telling those lesbians that they are prejudiced if they don’t want to sleep with biological males. You couldn’t make it up.

It is almost always feminist women who are the target of this narcissistic rage and it is unsurprising that many are lesbians.  These women are the most likely to challenge patriarchal restrictions and as lesbians they have absolutely no need of men, even men in dresses.

 I began this post writing about an evening discussing the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, particularly the concern for women and girls. If that seems a long way off from the arguably more trivial concerns of who should sleep with who, yes it is. But it served to remind me that feminism as a global movement feminism is still so needed and should be wrested from the linguistic mind games that postmodernism has cast it in. The end of the week’s debacle here was not a disaster of any magnitude but nevertheless a reminder that women’s rights, even here in the UK are never as secure as we think they are. When it comes to oppression men know exactly who women are.

Helen Joyce who is an executive editor at the Economist makes it clear from the start that

 “This book is not a book about trans people. It is, rather a book about transactivism. It is a story of policy and institutional capture, of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change”.   

I found this book a joy to read.  It is all here, the history, the main players, the consequences all written in bite size chapters in a very readable prose.  It lacks the references some would like but this is not aimed at academics. It is for anyone who wants to understand what all the furore and headlines about trans rights are really about. Can it  be true that well known committed feminists and social activists, like  JK Rowling, Jenni Murray, Julie Bindel and Martina Navratilova  have it in for trans people? Of course not but then why would theirs and other women’s concerns about women’s rights  attract such vitriol. Women have lost work, jobs and been removed from social media for stating that biological sex is real and important. This book helps explain why.

The main goal of transactivism is to establish the ideology of gender identity both in everyday life and importantly legally. This dictates that gender identity, an inner feeling takes priority over biological sex. The quest to establish self- identification, which is happening de facto, in law would succeed in doing this. ‘the ultimate endpoint of gender-identity ideology is the abolition of sex as a concept in law’ quotes Joyce.

Helen Joyce,  an executive editor at the Economist takes the reader meticulously through the background to the current situation and analyses the consequences of adopting this ideology of self-identification on us a society, particularly on  women and importantly on children.  Her journalistic skills mean that huge amounts of information are written in a very readable and digestable way.

She starts with a brief history of transsexualism, which because of the very small number of sufferers remained a niche topic for a handful of psychiatrists and sexologists. It was always considered a medico/psychological problem.  Joyce then devotes a chapter to some theories of why some men want to be women and why some people don’t want you to know. Autogynephilia, a paraphilic disorder  in middle aged men and extremely effeminate gay  were identified as two categories of transsexuals by Ray Blanchard in 1989. No one in the wider world took much notice until another sexologist Michael Bailey, and wrote about it in 2003 with disturbing consequences. By then a growing global trans lobby had been busy doing some redefinitions of their own, trying to mainstream transsexualism into more of social identity, Bailey was subjected to a vile hateful campaign by activists. He and his family were harassed, threatened and they tried to destroy his career. Bioethicist and medical historian Alice Dreger met with Bailey and believed him and not the appalling accusations being thrown at him. In an essay in 2008 which later  grew into a book Galileo’s Middle Finger she debunked all the accusations and concluded that Bailey had been targeted for publicising ideas transactivists want buried.  But the censorship of any suggestion that there is a sexual element to being transwoman persists to this day. Referring to autogynephephilia provokes greater rage than any other sin against ‘wokeness’ because as Blanchard says it makes the task of ‘selling’ transness harder.

Joyce notes that that the combination of the refusal to consider complex psychological or sexual reasons for transsexualism  together with the rise of left wing entity politics meant that a more  ‘nuanced picture of transsexualism was simplified and erased.’ And in its place…

Gender identity. The rest of the book explores how this nebulous concept has taken root, been promoted and infiltrated into key institutions. From the rarified hallows of academia it has now spread to the boardrooms of large corporates as well as the classroom in a way that has surprised many of us.

What is it?  “gender identity  is an inner essence given public form by self declaration” is one definition given but there are many.  There is nothing physical or visible or objective in it. Your biological sex was, according to this ideology ‘assigned’ to you at birth rather than observed and your inner feelings are what make you male or female. These inner identities are manifested or expressed, says  Joyce, through  stereotypes of masculinity and femininity  and she  questions the wisdom of  seeing exaggerated notions of gendered stereotypes as evidence of someone’s sex? After all feminists have challenged gender stereotypes from the start as restricting the lives and outcomes particularly of women but also of men.

As we read on Joyce shows us that this is not about the rights of a small marginalised group of trans people to live a life free from discrimination and prejudice but a movement which is attempting to not just disrupt but re- categorise the sexes according to gender identity and not biological sex.

For this to be embedded it has to start with children and this explains why targeting schools has been a priority of lobbyists.  If gender identity is an inner reality it must be there from the start, you are born with it.  Joyce says that the adoption of an adult ideology to interpret gender dysphoric youngsters is a catastrophe. She recounts the massive increase in children with gender dysphoria and referrals to gender identity clinics and the enormous pressure on professionals to accept children’s belief that they are the wrong sex without exploring other possible issues that may be contributing to or even the main cause of the distress. The concern over the medicalisation of gender dysphoric  children has led to a recent spate of publicity and law cases which was for many the first time they had read anything about the issue.

The goal of replacing sex with gender identity, says Joyce is becoming more and more apparent as exemplified by large scale well-funded  research projects such as ‘The Future of Legal Gender’, the replacement of the word sex with gender identity in surveys and the current lobbying for passports to erase the category of sex in them. Why does any of this really matter?

Women share a universal identity through their biology.  If men can say they are women and think they are equally entitled to women’s rights then women as a universalist ahistorical category breaks down taking the meaning of feminism with it.  

It is also women who suffer most from the removal of sex segregated spaces. Joyce devotes a couple of chapters to the consequences of allowing biological males who say they are women into female prisons, hospital wards changing rooms, toilets and of course topically to compete in women’s sports. Women were granted these spaces for good reason and there is nothing that has changed to alter this.

For me the chapter entitled ‘She who must not be named’ is arguably the most important. Women must retain the ability to define ourselves. The chapter charts the gradual erasure of the word woman in public discourse. In a bid to be inclusive of trans men the word women and mother are increasingly replaced by names of body parts… people with a cervix, menstruaters, chest feeding instead of breast feeding.  It is as if acknowledging the very existence of biological women is now taboo.  Yet as Joyce points out this doesn’t happen nearly so much the other way round. We do not read about campaigns aimed at prostate owners or testicle havers even though that of course would include trans women.  You don’t have to be a feminist to realise that something misogynistic is going on.

 Joyce outlines in brief the origins of the concepts and language that are now in ordinary public discourse and explores just how far institutional capture has gone. This has been achieved not incidentally or by absorbing social and cultural norms but by deliberate and sophisticated lobbying on a global scale. We may see photos of strangely dressed young activists shouting in the street outside women’s meetings but it isn’t them who have changed country’s laws. It is the power, money and influence  of  three US billionaires among others, whose funding of trans rights groups and human rights groups as well as medical faculties which in turn promote the ideology of gender identity has been instrumental.

“They have shaped the global agenda by funding briefing documents, campaign groups, research and legal actions; endowing university chairs; and influencing health-care protocols”

And it must also be the collusion of a male dominated establishment that has facilitated their aims. Framing self ID within the context of human rights discourse rather than through equality has made any opposition very difficult because the objectors are positioned as ‘against human rights’. But is it a right to demand to be treated in exactly the same way as a woman when you have the body of a man?  Joyce answers  “This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single- sex spaces, services and activities.”

She also notes the speed at which it has all happened, how a direct line to global human rights bodies has enabled bypassing of  public national debates. She believes this stealthy approach has been central to transactivism. Masen Davis, former director of the American Transgender Law Center, said “ we have largely achieved our successes by flying under radar…. We do a lot really quietly ….because we want to make sure we have the win more than we want to have the publicity”.

Sales of ‘Trans’ have been incredibly strong, despite the inevitable accusations of transphobia on social media. There is clearly a hunger to understand the issues even while there is still  fear in asking questions publicly let alone voice any contrary view. This book will give readers all the facts they need to break their silence.  

Trans is published by Oneworld Publications £16.99

Male violence towards women fits uneasily in the diversity and inclusion discourse. Yet as these past weeks alone have highlighted there isn’t a woman in the world who will not at some stage in her life be aware of it. Most likely the way we move in public and negotiate space and avoid confrontations is determined by the threat of it, the fear of it. There are many men who fail to understand how these basic safety mechanisms are hard wired into our brains from a young age – we are taught it so well so young that it becomes second nature. We know what can happen when we are off guard, and often even on guard. A man walking too close to you and voicing sexual suggestions is an assault of a kind, an intrusion into our space and well-being. We don’t report these incidents because quite honestly they are just too frequent and the man has moved on. To remonstrate would be to risk a more violent response so we just quickly walk on by.  And we know too well from media reports what horrors may befall women who are physically attacked by strangers, however infrequently that happens.  Women have no way of distinguishing between a good or a bad man. All men need to take that on board.

As a sociologist I have long argued that organisations are part of a social system and as such what happens outside its doors impacts what happens inside. The wider social status of women is the context in which organisations are implementing their individual D & I gender equality policies. Violence, both the threat and the actual faced by your female employees every day needs to be acknowledged.

What can organisations do beyond acknowledging this and engaging in talking about it? That is a good start and has still to my knowledge not been done by many.

Available support, both internal and external to the organisation, tends to focus on domestic abuse, which whilst impacts both men and women is far more commonly directed towards women. On January 14^th 2021 the business minister Paul Scully MP wrote to organisations setting out how employers can help workers find the right support for domestic abuse.

In the letter the Minister said, “ A new report published by my department today has found that few employers are aware of the signs of domestic abuse, and an even smaller number have a clear policy in place to support survivors. For too long, a lack of awareness of and stigma around speaking about domestic abuse has stopped workplaces from putting in place the kind of help that survivors so desperately need. It was once taboo to talk about mental health, but now most workplaces have well-established policies in place. We want to see the same happen for domestic abuse, but more quickly and more effectively.”

White Ribbon UK is a leading charity engaging with men and boys to end violence against women. White Ribbon’s accreditation programme is one such step that organisations may think about.

Employers Initiative on Domestic Abuse is a newish initiative and a very welcome one that provides resources for organisations which want to offer support for those suffering from domestic violence

In terms of ensuring that female staff feel safe at work, if working at night or late evening, providing adequate lighting and the positioning of car parks are also some tangible things that all organisations can do. Raising awareness of what life is like for women and enabling discussion between men and women, be a should be something included in all diversity and inclusion programmes. The problem is so endemic it should not be taboo.

The big shift that needs to happen for change to take place is to take the focus away from women having to keep themselves safe towards all men trying to create the conditions in which women can move about in freedom.  

Equality between men and women will remain a far off dream until the issue of male violence is resolved. All organisations can play their part.

I supported Fair Play For Women’s campaign to challenge the ONS guidance on responding to the Census question What is your sex? and am delighted that the High Court found in their favour and that the ONS agreed yesterday to change their guidance. Legal sex now means what it always has meant… the sex on your birth certificate. Not on a passport which does not require any legal process to change. Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women, said after the verdict,

“Being male or female is a biological reality that affects all our lives. That’s why it’s important to collect accurate data on sex in the Census. Sex data gets corrupted if the ONS conflates sex with the idea of a feeling, called gender identity, under the question ‘What is your sex?’.”

 I was alarmed when I read nearly three years ago now that the ONS was considering permitting the response to the question of sex to be made on the basis of gender identity. Yes this had been allowed in 2011 when the guidance was online only and the census was mostly filled in on paper. Importantly then there was no separate question on gender identity in the Census and the numbers were considered few enough that permitting trans people to answer according to their identity not their birth sex would not corrupt the data. This should have been regarded as a one off.

The numbers of people coming under the trans definition have grown hugely over the past ten years. It used to mean transsexuals of which there were an estimated five thousand but today it now includes cross dressers and all variety of people who wish to describe themselves in other ways, rather than men or women and runs into the hundreds of thousands.

There is in the 2021 Census for the first time a separate question on gender identity. This is to be welcomed. Retaining the guidance on sex would result in gender identity being asked twice. As a social scientist and researcher this looked to me and plenty of others like a disaster for statistical reliability.  We would have ended up without the robust data on the trans population that supporters so rightly wanted and is sorely needed and we would have had the statistics on sex, particularly in certain age groups, skewed.  The Census is used for social and health policy development and referred to constantly by thousands of researchers and social historians. The careful wording of questions (and guidance) is fundamental to any well-designed survey and the ONS is generally regarded as the gold standard.

This fact has already led to other organisations, like the NHS and the GEO  following suit and conflating sex with gender identity in their own surveys and it has seeped into public policy.  I am not sure what happened round at the ONS but it looks increasingly as if it was influenced not by statistical authority but by political ideology and lobbying. This really isn’t good enough. The ONS has egg on their faces and it looks like they won’t be the only ones. Gender identity is not the same as legal sex.

As Chair of the EHRC for four years and a former Chair of Stonewall for nine years  one might have thought that David Isaac, partner at law firm Pinsent Masons had the experience and position to influence or even set the tone of the discussions around the proposed reforms of the GRA 2004, which were rejected by Liz Truss in September. Or at least to engage with some of the points which were causing conflict. Because after all sometimes equality strands are in tension. He chose instead to say nothing. Until the time of his departure in August.

In his outgoing interview he suggests that  “We need to move beyond that toxic debate so talking to each other, engaging in respectful listening even if you disagree, that’s the way forward.”  As if the EHRC was an impartial bystander instead of the government body on all equality issues, with the power to intervene at any stage over the past four years.  He also says that the EHRC supports the reform of the GRA which has been pretty obvious for these past four years and the reason perhaps why he and they chose to say nothing until now.  Indeed the EHRC under his leadership is in part responsible for causing confusion by issuing guidance which was not in fact legal and had to be corrected in 2018.  But it had been in existence for ten  years!  

It has also promoted the concept of gender identity (not a protected characteristic over sex). EHRC advice on trans rights from their website was  “We suggest employers and service providers consider the recommendations in this (Women and Equalities Committee 2016 report) when setting their trans policies.” These recommendations which include the legalisation of Self Identity have not been approved and are not law. However thousands of organisations are now under the illusion that they are.

Hardly had the door shut after his departure than the EHRC was presented with a legal challenge over its guidance to organisations on trans matters.

In his newpaper  interview the outgoing EHRC Chair acknowledged some tensions exist between the demands for reform to the GRA 2004 and as he put it ‘some feminist groups’. This is disingenuous. The proposed reforms would have meant allowing male bodied people to self-identify as women for legal purposes. Even if there were provisos to protect women’s spaces in certain circumstances what it means to be a woman would have undergone a fundamental change without any discussion with women. Trans women would have been able to enjoy the protections and spaces reserved for the female sex, merely on their say so. That is the bottom line and if put that simply the tension between the two protected characteristics is obvious. It isn’t just ‘some feminist groups’. It is the feminist groups protesting on behalf of all women.  Because of the strength of the lobby and the promotion of incorrect advice from the EHRC and the  EO we already have men self -identifying as women going into women’s single sex spaces e.g. hospital wards, refuges, changing rooms, prisons, short lists, and importantly sport.

So when Mr Isaac says the debate has been toxic … he really needs to go back and look at the reaction the trans lobby – and yes there is one and it is very powerful – had to some of the concerns that women have been voicing over the past three years. He needs to acknowledge that it is women who have been blackballed, cancelled, de platformed, driven off Twitter and lost their jobs for the crime of asking for women’s rights to be protected.  Brands have been targeted by trans activists to keep in line with their demands and ideology. It is women who receive the most intolerable misogynistic violent and sexual verbal abuse on social media. It is not feminists who do this to trans activists. Feminists’ great crime is to want the reality of biological sex acknowledged and in certain situations to be given priority over a subjective and therefore unverifiable internal feeling of gender identity. Yet these perfectly reasonable concerns are still met with cries of transphobia and wanting to erase trans people. Yet by their silence  the EHCR along with other ‘responsible’ organisations have given credibility and legitimacy to this behaviour which has further encouraged it. And  it has enabled a culture of fear to develop around saying anything which may result in a reaction/ accusation of transphobia. Isaac knows full well that misogyny is not a hate crime and that transphobia is. However it needs to be carefully defined and given context. The EHRC could have done this. It could have set an example and it could have spoken up for women and girls’ rights. After all it is the Equality and Human Rights Commission.  Instead  it turned a blind eye and Isaac as Chair must take responsibility for the mess he has left behind.

Introduction

Liz Truss’s inbox must be overflowing. Leaks to the press that the reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) might not include a lowering of age for legal transition nor enable legal transition on the basis of self-declaration has galvanised the trans activist lobby into action. It has some might behind it, including Google which promoted a ready to send letter to Liz Truss, demanding the right to Self ID. On the other side thousands of women, unfunded or self funded, have written to her to say please, no to self ID and yes, please protect children. The announcement is expected next week.

In another recent development, it would be hard to have missed the furore surrounding JK Rowling’s posting of her essay and the online abuse she received from so many for it and the column inches this has caused. In it she quite reasonably explained why she believed some of the demands of trans activists impinged on the sex based rights of women and girls. But it seems that making a biological distinction between men and women is now synonymous with hate. And it is not just trans activists that feel this way. This has become the ‘only’ view to take if you are progressive and liberal as witnessed daily on social media and by letters and actions of ‘trans’ allies.

As with many ideologies there is a required mantra and this one goes ‘transwomen are women’ and repeated in response to any requests for explanation. Our eyes do not lie so that this only makes sense if something other than biology determines your sex. And believers think there is something else and it is called gender identity. To give this indefinable concept permanent legitimacy would require enshrining it in UK law and perhaps this is what the fight for the repeal of the GRA is really about.

A long term campaign to legitimise gender identity and prioritise it over biological sex

A campaign to legitimise gender identity and prioritise it over biological sex has been going on for many years, mostly under the radar – until the announcement about the proposed GRA reform in 2018 made by Conservative MP Maria Miller woke some people up. But gender identity had made its entrance onto the global stage more than fifteen years before via the human rights movement and influenced by a powerful global lobby. This is just the final push here in the UK. Adoption of it into individual countries’ legal systems and the approach taken has always been one of stealth, as advised in a report “Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth”, which was sponsored by global law firm Dentons and Reuters Thompson

To better understand this ‘under the radar’ campaign’ I returned both to the 2003 Hansard debates on the original GRA bill and then to a 2007 paper which discusses the consequences of the said GRA. The paper,”Sex Changes’? Paradigm Shifts in ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’ Following the Gender Recognition Act?’ was jointly written by veteran trans activist and now retired academic, Professor Stephen Whittle * and Dr Lewis Turner, academic and recently appointed Chair of Press for Change, a UK trans lobby group.

The original Hansard debates plus this extraordinary article gives us an insight into how interconnected academic theory, trans activism, law and policy really are. The trans lobby influenced politicians which resulted in the confusing use of the words sex and gender both in the debates of the GRA and the Act itself as well as the decision not to make medical transitioning a compulsory condition.

This confusion was then taken by the authors of the article as signalling a major change in thinking about biological sex and gender identity and they extrapolated consequences which were warned about during the debate but dismissed by the majority. That is that gender identity has priority over biological sex.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004

In a case brought by UK resident Christine Goodwin in 2002 the European Court of Human Rights  found that the UK had breached the Convention rights of Goodwin, a transsexual born a man, under Articles 8 (the right to respect for private life) and 12 (the right to marry). That ruling said that transsexuals were entitled to full legal recognition in their adopted sex, including the right to marry. This case was the culmination of a long battle by transsexuals and they welcomed the ruling.

The UK was then obliged to pass legislation that complied with this European judgement. It did so with the passing of Gender Recognition Act 2004 which enabled transsexuals to get a Gender Recognition Certificate and then a birth certificate in their newly acquired sex, if certain conditions were met. Transsexuals would be treated for all purposes as if they had been born with their acquired sex – including the right to marry and the age they qualify to draw a state pension. In short they created a legal fiction, a phrase actually used during the debate. There were four exemptions to this. At the time it received little media criticism as it didn’t seem to be momentous apart from changing the lives of perhaps 5000 estimated transsexuals. However this Act has already contributed to far-reaching social consequences way beyond its intended remit. The perhaps naïve assumptions by politicians led to careless wording, which I suggest was both encouraged by and then seized upon by activists.

The debate on the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords 2003

“So far as I know, there is no law nor any known medical procedure that can change the sex of a human being. The Bill purports to do so. It is therefore an objectionable farce.” (Lord Tebbit, Gender Recognition Bill, House of Lords Second Reading, 18/12/03, Hansard: Column 1304).

The case for the Bill was argued on humane grounds that human beings had a right to marry (Article 8 and 12 of the Human Rights Act) and at that time same sex marriage was illegal. However the arguments were tortuous, much of it focusing on supporting the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and not wanting to sanction same sex marriage in any way.

Despite the small number to whom this Act would apply there were two serious consequences of it, both of which were foreseen by some of the members of the committee. And both of which combined resulted in a victory for trans lobby.

First consequence: Sex and gender used interchangeably, without definitions, leading to assertions that gender (then gender identity) precedes sex.

In some ways some members of the House of Lords Committee on the GRA, like Lord Tebbitt had a greater understanding of the consequences of confusing the words sex and gender than many people have today.

Birth certificates use the word sex. The population category in question was described as transsexual and their transition was described as sex change. This was the language at the time. But the Act itself also refers to gender, a word that was familiar and being used to mean men and women in common discourse. (They had to make a leap from gender to changing sex because sex is on birth certificates so that changing gender becomes synonymous with changing sex) During the readings there was much debate about the use of the words gender and sex with some in the House of Lords wanting sex to be used throughout. But they used both and the result is a linguistic mess.

 Lord Tebbitt summed up what he thought the dilemma was, when he tried to put down some amendments:

“The great mass of the amendments are very similar in that they replace the word “gender” with the word “sex”. That is because, apart from anything else, my concern is to smoke out in some way the Government’s view of the distinction between those words or to ascertain whether they believe that there is a distinction between them.

I notice that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sex” is defined as either of the two divisions of organic beings distinguished as male and female respectively or the distinction between male and female in general. It states that the sum of those differences is in the structure and function of the reproductive organs on the grounds of which beings are distinguished as male and female and the other physiological differences consequent on those.​

Turning to the issue of gender, we find a slightly different story. “Gender” is defined as:

“In modern (esp. feminist) use a euphemism for the sex of a human being often intended to emphasise the social and cultural as opposed to the biological distinctions between the sexes”.

It seems to me that, even from reading those definitions, the issue arises of whether the Government believe that the Bill is about social matters or about the biological matter of the distinction between males and females. I believe that upon that rests, to a great extent, how the rest of the Bill will be dealt with. I shall say no more about those amendments because they are tabled merely for the sake of tidiness, listing many, as opposed to just one, of the places where the word would be replaced.“

His amendments were that:

“They would leave out the words, “in the acquired gender” and insert,”as a person of the other sex”.”

That, he said ” makes it much clearer what the Bill is about and does not hide behind the euphemism of gender when it is really talking about sex.”

However his concerns were overruled.  Lord Filkin later on in the debate states that, ‘the Bill is about legal recognition and it will define a person’s sex in law. We consider the arguments about the meaning of the words sex and gender to be beside the point. There is no stark dichotomy between the meaning of the words. Language, as I said, is fluid. Our sense of the words sex and gender has changed over time and no doubt will do so in the future. While the meaning of the word sex is not the same as that of gender, the word sex is increasingly in use in ways that go beyond a narrow biological definition (House of Lords Report Stage, Hansard 29-01-04, col. 366).’

Basically we don’t want to get into the semantics of what it all means!!Lord Filkin would surely not have known that his reluctance to grapple with the meanings enabled his wording to be quoted by academics as legitimating the demotion of biological sex as a category.

In their 2007 article Professor Whittle and his colleague Dr Turner reflect not on the practical outcomes for trans people following the Act but on the consequences of the wording of the Act. This itself illustrates how important changing language has been to trans activists, particularly language used in the law. The struggle between many feminists and trans activists is in some ways about language… who has the right to name and define sex, gender, woman and man, male and female? Because if the meaning of woman is changed to include some men where on earth does that leave feminism and sex based rights which are founded on the universal category of woman.

“Sex then is beyond a biological definition as held by the ECtHR and the ECJ and Lord Filkin appears to echo Hausman’s 1995 claim that gender has come to mean sex” ( Whittle and Turner 2007)

Lord Tebbitt’s concerns were well founded. Inserting gender in this Act at times as being synonymous with sex, was a victory for trans activists as it paved the way for a looser way of ‘being’ either a man or a ‘woman’ and relied less on biology or (as we shall see below) the need for any surgical or medical transitioning and more on the cultural and social manifestions of sex. From there it has been a short step to legitimate gender identity, a wholly subjective and unverifiable concept. And this is exactly what the activists did as explained by Whittle and Turner:

“ “The sex/gender distinction,(where sex normatively refers to the sexed body, and gender, to social identity) is demobilised both literally and legally. Firstly, in the terminology of the Gender Recognition Act, gender identity becomes and defines legal sex: if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman [S. 9 (1)]. Gender then, now determines sex.”  ( Whittle and Turner 2007)

The confused wording of the Act here is taken by Whittle and Lewis to be not only evidence that gender and sex are interchangeable, but that gender is prioritised over sex, replacing it as the legal signifier of men and women. Although they go further and suggest it is gender identity not gender. The very confusion of language Lord Tebbitt had warned against enabled this radical interpretation: 

 “Firstly, the sex/gender distinction is demobilised with both terms in the wording of the act. Indeed, in the sex/gender distinction, female usually refers to sex, the sexed body, and woman usually refers to gender; the cultural meaning of female sex. In the terms of the Act the referents change round; gender refers to female and sex refers to woman. This suggests that the terms are interchangeable. Secondly, in the wording of the Act, gender precedes sex. Normatively in the sex gender distinction sex precedes gender; gender is culture written onto the sexed body. In the terms of the Gender Recognition Act, one’s gender precedes one’s sex.

“As the Gender Recognition Act states that one’s acquired gender becomes one’s legal sex then there is little difference between sex and gender. Indeed sex is preceded and exceeded by gender by the terms of the Gender Recognition Act. Sex in this sense is determined by gender identity, the social role that one chooses to take.

The concept of ‘gender identity’ was scarcely used in the debate neither does it feature in the GRA itself. However Whittle and Turner use the terms gender and gender identity interchangeably here.

Gender identity did not become part of the public discourse overnight. Originally it was used very specifically in relation to transsexuals as a way of making their condition more psychological – the mismatch between their body and the opposite sex that they really felt they were (Money 1975). Whittle and Turner describe it above “ the social role that one chooses to take.’  Today it is described by Stonewall as “a person’s deeply held internal sense of their own gender”, a very different concept.

It is only in recent years, we are told that, that everyone has an innate feeling as to whether they are male and female, it is just that most people are lucky and theirs matches with their biological sex. The only way that trans people are different is that theirs does not.  Recently we have seen a much more concerted effort for gender identity to be recognised as a category in public discourse and to actually be more important in the categorisation of people than biological sex. Stonewall, the prominent LGBT lobby group, which has been focusing on trans in its LGBT campaigning since 2015, has stated that it wants gender identity to replace gender reassignment as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010 as well as wanting to get rid of sex protected spaces. There is plenty of evidence that it is already using the term, not sex when it refers to equality characteristics and other organisations advised by Stonewall are following suit.

Second consequence:  Biology demoted as no medical transition required

Even today most people regard transitioning as involving some kind of medical change to the anatomy in order for the person to take on the appearance of the opposite sex. This comes in the form of hormones (lifelong) and/or surgery. Many trans people have hormones, and the removal of breasts or construction of breast and face feminization, but the vast majority of trans people do not have genital surgery. There was considerable debate in the Committee about what conditions should be met in order for a person to be granted a GRC and thereby legally change their sex.

The assumption made by the Select Committee was that transsexuals would indeed transition medically but they decided (or were persuaded) that it should not be a pre-condition of getting a Gender Recognition Certificate as this was too harsh, potentially excluding some people for whom full medical transition would be detrimental to their health.

“(a) the applicant has undergone or is undergoing treatment for the purpose of modifying sexual characteristics, or

(b) treatment for that purpose has been prescribed or planned for the applicant,”

Prescribed or planned’ has been interpreted very loosely. This was also little noticed at the time and only a tiny minority undertake full surgery which many people even today do not realise. However they were clear that some quite stringent objective tests, including a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, should be taken before granting someone a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Lord Filkin ‘The appropriate test is whether a person has taken decisive steps to live fully in the acquired gender and there is clear evidence of gender dysphoria after a proper process of inspection and testing over a number of years. We do not intend to compel transsexual people to undergo surgery, even though most wish to do so.’

Back to Whittle and Turner’s article in which they refer again to Lord Tebbitt’s thoughts and spell out what they think the outcome of the Act is:

 “In his contribution to the debate in the House of Lords on the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA), Lord Tebbit mobilises a discourse of sex based on chromosomes, as a somatic fact and thus immutable: sex cannot be changed by medical procedure nor by law. The Gender Recognition Act passed in 2004(achieved by relentless campaigning by Press for Change, the UK transsexual lobby group) does exactly that: it changes the legal sex of trans people in the UK and gives them full legal recognition.^[1]. Moreover, the Act does not require any medical procedure (mentioned by Lord Tebbitt above), to change legal sex, as reassignment surgery is not mandatory.’”

The authors suggest that the lack of compulsion to have surgery now means that biology is no longer a pre-requisite for sex change, nor indeed is it important in determining whether someone is male or female. They continue, summing up what they believe to be the consequences of dropping the condition for medical transitioning  in the Act,

 “This reverses the usual legal gender attribution process where from the moment of birth, the presence or absence of a penis constitutes the baby as male or female the sexed body based on the genitals ascribes the gender identity and role of that person. In this scenario, sex determines gender. ““Thus when determining legal sex, the Court’s endorsement of the human rights basis for legal recognition of the new sex of post-operative transsexual people was the minimum line behind which the UK government could not retreat. The authorities had to provide legal registration which enabled trans people to enforce their rights to privacy and marriage to a member of the same natal sex under the European Convention.

However, as a minimum line, it was perfectly possible for a government to go one step further and to make legal recognition available to those who are pre- or non-treatment and thus include those trans people who for health, disability or other reason are unable or unwilling to undergo surgical intervention. This appears to be exactly what the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) has done.”

The UK government had inadvertently gone that one step further, informed no doubt by trans activists, although from my reading of the debate this was only done because of potential  health implications and not because they thought there would be an unwillingness to undergo surgical intervention as the authors suggest.

Any fears raised in the debate about the consequences of allowing male bodied people to become ‘women’ legally e.g. Lord Moynihan’s concerns about men competing in women’s sport as transwomen, were dismissed. Again and this cannot be emphasised enough, absolutely central to the wording and content of the bill was the belief that it affected only a very few people in the country

Lord Filkin ‘…we are talking about only 5,000 people in Britain. That is why this is such a unique and specific set of circumstances. This is one of the smallest minorities in our society, yet the evidence we have had prior to the Bill and during our debates shows that for that very small minority this issue is very significant. I think we have an obligation in justice to help them live their life as they believe it to be’ 

 But sixteen years on, this group has been redefined as transgender or even just trans and its meaning significantly changed with a shift away from a medical model to a social model to embrace a number estimated to be perhaps as many as 500,000. There are many definitions but Stonewall’s is perhaps the most comprehensive:

“Trans is an umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth. Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, cross dresser, non-binary, gender queer.”

We are now talking about a very different group of people for whom the granting of a GRC through the GRA 2004 would never have been envisaged. Indeed even in a paper in 2009 on Human Rights and Gender Identity the European Commission differentiates between transgender and transsexual:

 “It needs to be noted that many transgender people, and probably most transsexual persons among them, choose to undergo this treatment, often including the elimination of procreative organs”.

Whittle and Lewis’s summary of how they believe the GRA resulted in a paradigm shift of the meaning of sex and gender.

One of the authors, Whittle, reveals his own influence to the proceedings in this chilling summary. And in it the authors clearly reveal how the consequences of confusing language and the lack of a condition requiring medical transition has resulted in the assertion that there is no difference between sex and gender, and that sex is actually preceded by gender and concluding that sex is in fact determined by gender identity.

“This (Act)  reverses the original gender attribution at birth which as based on the genitals (and strictly speaking not based on other known identifiers of biological sex such as chromosomes). For the Gender Recognition Act, the body is irrelevant, as neither bodily modification, nor the presence or lack of a penis is determinative. Moreover, the Gender Recognition Act is performative (see Butler 1990), in that as a form of speech-act, what it does is makes gender into sex in law. Indeed, as one of the authors was present at the meeting in the Department of Constitutional Affairs where the question of gender or sex was discussed, it can be verified that the decision to use gender was to bring a contemporary recognition of the complexities of the question to the Act.The decision to include sex as well as gender within the GRA was to acknowledge this and to ensure that the Act could not be challenged.”

“what legally constitutes male and female has changed. We share Sandland’s (2005) view that as we can now have men with vaginas and women with penises, the act does undermine the binary of two morphologically distinct sexes.”

This was indeed what activists had been lobbying for and the Act now provided a theoretical legitimacy, which wasn’t challenged at the time, to push for further social acceptance of this view as well as influence policy.

Reform of the GRA 2004 ?

There was not a rush of trans people applying for a GRC following this 2004 Act. The total number of GRC’s given is estimated to be a total of about 5000, roughly what the lawmakers envisaged.  

However there has been sustained pressure in recent years from the trans lobby to reform the original Act. Are its conditions so onerous that thousands more people would apply for a GRC if they didn’t have to wait two years, pay £150 and get a medical diagnosis? These are side issues. The main proposal, published in 2018 was that trans people should be able to obtain a GRC purely by self declaration.

Most activists today say that trans people can do pretty much what they want without requiring a GRC. A recent article by GIRES said ” Secondly, those who have transitioned to live as women already have the right to enter women’s toilets, without a GRC and without having undergone surgery. They do, and have done so for years”.

It is true that there is very nearly self-ID in facto if not in law, thanks to an exceedingly influential lobby. The demand for GRC’s is not evident. But if successful the proposed change to the GRA would enshrine in law the concept of a self perceived gender identity and give it priority over biological sex. If you said you were a man, you were deemed legally to have been born male despite biologically being female and vice versa. After that it would be hard to reverse. After all Whittle and Turner said in their 2007 paper that “The privileges afforded by legal recognition and gendered belonging should never be underestimated’”

This then would be a fundamental re definition of men and women, certainly not the purely administrative solution for a discriminated against minority, that the lobby constantly claims. It has an obvious impact on the wider population, particularly women and girls which is why it is being challenged by women.

  Conclusion

There are of course many academic papers to be found on this topic but I chose this one because of the clear link between academic theory, trans activism and the law. The first two have developed in tandem and together they have informed government policy and law at the highest levels in countries all over the world. Both authors are veteran campaigners for trans rights.

I have attempted to illustrate how the Gender Recognition Act 2004, influenced and then interpreted by academic activists may have inadvertently enabled and even legitimated what activists were lobbying for; the prioritising of gender over sex. It is not hard to see why this is so important for a certain section of this minority- they can never biologically be female if they were born male and vice versa so the next best thing is to re define what male and female means and demote the biology. Permitting people to change sex legally on the subjective concept of gender identity would cement this process further.

Endnote

*Professor Whittle, a trans man, is an Equalities Law Professor who has been a key figure in the global trans movement, and was part of the group which developed the Yogykarta Principles in November 2006. These Principles, which address key legal frameworks regarding both sexual orientation and gender identity, have been hugely influential in obtaining legitimacy for the concept of gender identity at the highest levels eg. UN, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch etc. which in turn influenced individual country laws.

He was also present as an advisor at some of the 2003 debates and was special advisor to the Women and Equalities Committee on Transgender Equality 2015-2016. Ruth Hunt, former CEO of Stonewall. specifically credits the pressure group he founded, Press for Change, with handing the baton of trans lobbying to Stonewall in 2015 – see my post on her interviews below. His book the Transgender Studies Reader which was co- edited by Susan Stryker, an influential US transwoman was published in 2006.