In praise of the transgender lobby

All hail the most effective campaigners of my lifetime

I have been involved in a number of campaigns in my lifetime, some under the auspices of the Labour Party and others as part of my work for employers. Some more successful than others.

It’s rarely easy, once you’ve identified a problem and worked out what needs to change, then to assess what might constitute success, to martial the right arguments and identify the stakeholders you need to target, and after all that, to come up with a cohesive strategy and timeline that will give your campaign its best chance of success.

Your success or failure depends entirely on how persuasive your arguments are and how sympathetic the decison-makers are towards your aims. Given the many and varied (and sometimes conflicting) issues facing our political leaders, it’s hardly surprising that most campaigns are dead on arrival by the time they reach a politician’s in-tray.

Given the above, it’s easy to see why I am genuinely in awe of the transgender lobby and the success it has enjoyed in the last decade or so. The campaign for transgender rights is frequently compared, not least by transgender campaigners themselves, with the long and eventually successful campaign for gay rights. But that campaign was helped by the vacuity and bigotry of opponents to those reforms. When your primary objection to allowing gay people the right to marry the person they love came down to “It ain’t natural!” and “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, then victory was assured, even if there were many times it didn’t feel that way.

But the campaign for transgender rights? Well, now, that’s one to be filed under both “Unlikely” and “Incredibly successful”. Essentially, the transgender lobby’s primary campaign aim was to persuade first politicians, then civic society and then the population at large that “Trans women are women”. This was quite the challenge. Most big public relations and advertising firms would have smiled politely at the prospect of winning such an account before passing up the opportunity as an unwinnable campaign. You can imagine the cigarette falling from Don Draper’s lips in astonishment when his potential client tells him what his objective is. Elect Richard Nixon? Easy. Repair the reputation of a dodgy accident-prone airline? No problem. Convince people that trans women – men – are women? And not only that they’re women, but that are in every respect just as much women as . . . well, as much as actual women.

And not only convince people of this, but to make it socially unacceptable to contradict that assertion. And not only that, but to make it so vital that people use the new assumed pronouns of those identifying as trans that no one will even think twice about doing so.

Oh, and another part of the campaign is to redefine homosexuality (I’m still imagining Don Draper’s face and it’s turned an ugly puce. Very unlike John Hamm). Being gay should now be about same-gender attraction, not silly old-fashioned, exclusive same-sex attraction. If you’re attracted to someone because of the particular genitals they sport, then that makes you a bigot. And if a female lesbian won’t sleep with a biological male, even though that biological male identifies as a woman as well as a lesbian, well, what’s your problem, sister? Any self-respecting lesbian will be only too happy to enjoy some lady dick if she doesn’t want to be condemned as a bigot.

(Don Draper is now covetously eyeing the thin curtain that lies between him and a 200 feet drop to the pavement.)

Anything else?

Yes, as a matter of fact. Lots. Trans women must have access to women’s toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards and sports.

Sports?

Yes, of course. Trans women are women, remember (“Yes, yes, sorry, I forgot . . .”) so when they compete in any sporting event they must be allowed to do so in the category with which they identify, not the category that some doctor arbitrarily decided you belonged to when you were born.

Well, thank y-. . .

And jails.

Jails?

Yes, when any trans woman commits an offence and is sent to prison, she must of course be sent to a women’s prison and be allowed to mix with other women.

Even in cases of r-. . .

Yes! Even in cases of rape! Women can commit rape too, you know! And talking of rape, there’s no reason why female rape victims must always be counselled by cis women (“Sis? What’s that? No, don’t worry, I can Google it. . .”). If a woman who’s just suffered a horrible violation by a man, then there’s no reason a trans woman, with the lived experience of a woman, cannot counsel her. And if she objects to that, then she’s a- . . .

Bigot?

Yes! A bigot, who needs to reframe her trauma.

Yes, it reads like a comedy sketch, but it’s all true: these are genuine demands by the trans lobby. And in a previous political era, an era that predated obsessions with identity because there were far more important issues to worry about, these demands would never have been taken seriously. Just as a trans woman can be identified using the JK Rowling super-power of looking, the farcical nature of the trans lobby’s demands can be discerned, not by careful analysis and debate, but by reading them.

And yet. Since the middle of the last decade, all of these arguments were digested by our political overlords. And they did not find them outrageous or laughable or even extreme. At some point in the last decade, every single one of our political parties (I don’t include Reform UK because technically it didn’t exist until fairly recently) accepted and supported virtually all the measures listed above. Even the Conservatives, under Prime Minister Theresa May, according to Boris Johnson’s memoir, announced to her cabinet that trans rights were the most pressing civil rights issue of the day. May’s government is thought to have come close to legislating for that Golden Fleece of trans demands: self-ID, to replace the cumbersome process for gaining a Gender Recognition Certificate via the Gender recognition Act (and again, I’m really sorry about that).

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer publicly announced their support for self-ID and promised a future Labour government would legislate for it if the Tories didn’t. Corbyn’s motivations were largely down to the far Left’s commitment to virtually any ideology that threatens the status quo and fucks up society; Starmer’s motivation was because he is easily confused and assumed that if a minority wants something – anything – then it’s the majority’s duty to give it to them. There then followed a farcical and occasionally amusing sequence of events where Starmer told off Rosie Duffield for suggesting that only women can have a cervix and David Lammy said that if they wanted to, trans women could grow one in a petri dish. Then again, this was the man who told Celebrity Mastermind viewers that Henry VIII was succeeded on the throne by his father, Henry VII, so let’s cut the guy some slack.

And it wasn’t just self-ID; the whole smorgasbord of trans demands was accepted without demur by our political leaders. Even when obvious injustices emerged, like male rapists being sent to women’s prisons, or female hospital patients being told that they couldn’t possibly have been raped during the night because there were no men on the ward, just a trans woman, and and as we all know, trans women are women – politicians kept their heads down and chose to say nothing.

And in their silence was the most voluble, most eloquent acceptance of the entire trans agenda. MPs of all parties chose to say nothing in defence of the female victims of rape and male abuse, in defence of women who wanted nothing more than the privacy of women-only spaces to be restored, rather than risk the criticism of the trans lobby.

And while MPs were either capitulating to the agenda or cowering behind their order papers, civic society was busy capitulating entirely to the lobby. The prison service, the police, the NHS, local government, the education sector – including primary schools as well as universities – all of them bent over backwards to adopt and accept the new rules as set out by the likes of Stonewall. There was no need of a Cass Review to tell any sensible adult that prescribing puberty blockers to young boys and girls was dangerous and unacceptable. All you needed was a human protective instinct and a modicum of common sense. Yet all these organisations, many of them publicly funded using your and my taxes, went full steam ahead to make the case for life-destroying health interventions against their young victims.

And we, as a society, let it happen. It was mad. It was crazy. it was insane. But the maddest, craziest, most insane thing was that the madness, craziness and insanity were never hidden; it was there in 144-point block capitals all over the trans agenda. They never hid its true intent or the details of what they demanded. They were honest. They were up front. And our politicians said yes.

Now, it hardly requires stating that ordinary members of the public, those of us who are not lobbied on a daily basis by various and many lobby groups, would have rejected the trans lobby’s demands out of hand without hesitation. Of course we would, because of the insanity and stuff (although the careful use of “trans women” rather than the more accurate “men who believe they’re women” has, I think, helped confuse many voters as to the true nature of what the lobby is trying to achieve). And there’s something to be written about the grotesque disconnect between the current generation of MPs and the public they’re supposed to serve and how that has led to a consistent ten-point lead for Reform in recent polls. But that’s for another day.

Until the Isla Bryson case (see previous post) and Nicola Sturgeon’s ham-fisted, arrogant and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to introduce self-ID for trans people in Scotland, the trans debate had not yet caught the attention of the electorate. The Supreme Court decision in the For Women Scotland v The Scottish Government case in April brought it even more centre-stage, and in a good way. Thanks to their lordships, there is now a decent chance that trans ideology can be sent packing and women’s spaces, services and sports can once more be reserved exclusively for use by women.

But we must never forget that thanks to the indulgence, naiveté, gullibility and sheer cowardice of most of our elected representatives, trans ideology was on the verge of achieving all of its demands. Only a very few children in the crowd had the guts to point out that the Emperor was wearing no clothes. But it was enough. Because for all the trans lobby’s power and publicly-funded influence, for all the success it had had in persuading normally intelligent politicians that two and two could actually make five (and indeed that sometimes only bigots thought that two plus two equalled four), when the fundamental fallacies of their arguments were exposed, the edifice crumbled awfully quickly, for it was indeed built on sand.

The “no debate” approach to any challenge to the trans lobby and to its ideology was a clever and necessary strategy, for the lobby knew that they did not have the persuasive arguments necessary to advance their case, that logic and facts were against them and therefore the best defence was no defence and no debate. Again, this is where the lobby proved extraordinarily clever and impressive. What it achieved over the last decade was remarkable, given the lack of evidence and logic in its support.

It should perhaps serve as a lesson to other campaigners who fear that their arguments are not being listened to, however important they believe them to be. Well, the trans lobby managed to persuade a prime minister and the leaders of other political parties, as well as the most influential and powerful institutions in the country, to support their radical, extreme and damaging aims. And they did that without any persuasive arguments at all. I mean, come on! That must at least be worth a couple of campaigning awards or something!