Mea culpa: my part in the rise of the trans cult

The Gender Recognition Bill looked harmless enough. If only I'd known. . .

Double rapist Isla Bryson, sent to a women’s prison (initially)

When, in February 2004, the Commons came to vote on the Second Reading of the Gender Recognition Act, I was conflicted.

The previous weekend I had driven down to London and in the car had listened to an interview with Lord (formerly Norman) Tebbit, who was talking about his objections to the Bill. I confess that I had given the subject almost no consideration at that point. Nevertheless, I took notice of what the former Tory chairman and Thatcher ally was saying because it struck me as true. Parliament was about to legislate, for the first time in its history, to allow people to lie.

People who had been born either male or female but who had subsequently decided they were, in fact, the opposite gender – “born in the wrong body” – would be able to amend their birth certificates in a dishonest way so that, after they transitioned, the incorrect sex at birth could be displayed. The same would happen with those individuals’ passports.

Even then, I had no particularly strong feelings about the subject, mainly because I did not possess a time machine and was therefore unable to foresee the chaos and damage – particularly to women’s rights – that the genderists would inflict in the next 20 years or so. I happened to have dinner with the government chief whip at the time, Hilary (now Baroness) Armstrong, on the evening before the vote and raised the issues addressed by Lord Tebbit, informing her of my reservations about the legislation. Her only advice was not to endanger a future ministerial career by voting against the government on such a trivial subject.

I sat in the chamber for some of the Second Reading debate, not intending to speak, but rather to listen to the various arguments that supporters and detractors made on the Bill’s provisions. Having heard the debate, I was reasonably content to support the government but I confess I wouldn’t have done so had I not been instructed to do so by the whips. Such are the realities of parliamentary life.

Of course, since then I have had plenty of time to repent of my failure to anticipate properly the march of the genderists and the negative impact that their ideology was to have on our country. The irony is that while the GRA allowed trans people to obtain an official certificate establishing their “new” gender (but only after jumping through various hoops, like securing a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and living in their adopted gender for two years), it paved the way for the campaign for self-identification, which involves none of those hurdles. Or hoops.

The GRC process is deemed too intrusive for our current generation of trans allies; if anyone, including a child, wants to identify as the opposite from their birth sex, who is the state to interfere with that? Its only job – and it is a responsibility that the allies chose to impose on the rest of us too – is to affirm the individual’s new gender, refer to him or her by their preferred pronouns and – crucially – accept their right to have exactly the same access to women’s spaces (in the case of male-to-female transition). That means not only toilets but changing rooms, prisons, sports, women’s refuges, all-women shortlists – you name it.

None of this was even mentioned or alluded to during the Second Reading debate in 2004. To be fair to supporters of the Bill, this was not because they were anxious to hide the long-term impacts of the legislation, but rather because no one at the time imagined that the country would go quite that fucking insane in such a relatively short period of time. Had some of today’s demands made by trans people and their allies been transmitted backwards in time to February 2004, they would not have been taken remotely seriously, because at that time politics was mostly dominated by adults (of human male and female variety).

Once the demand for self-ID took off across social media round about the middle of the last decade, a number of leading politicians who should have known better jumped aboard the bandwagon. Some senior politicians who didn’t know better, like Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, followed suit. But others with less of an excuse for holding insane opinions took the same line, on the basis that (a) trans people are a minority, (b) fighting for minority rights is A Good Thing; and therefore (c) if you demand minority rights you are On The Right Side Of History.

It was only thanks to the efforts of Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, that self-ID at a UK level became a toxic policy. Her quixotic and arrogant attempt to legislate for self-ID in Scotland was intended to signal her own virtue as a staunch ally of what is tiresomely called the LGBTQI+ community, but also, perhaps more importantly, to beat England to the touch, proving once again that Scots are simply better people than those unfortunate enough to live south of the Border. In what remains the most shameful exhibition of legislative arrogance ever perpetrated by the Scottish Parliament, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill completed all its stages in the face of articulate, reasonable and determined opposition from women’s groups who grew hoarse trying to explain to the smug Holyrood leaders what their concerns for women’s rights were all about. Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour, imposed a three-line whip on his own MSPs to support the Bill, despite the rejection by the SNP government of his own party’s amendments that would have raised the age of anyone who can receive a new Gender Recognition Certificate from 16 to 18, and would have prevented convicted sex offenders from taking part in the scheme. Yes, you read that right: Scottish Labour supported self-ID for children and sex offenders. Heigh-ho!

And Alex Cole-Hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, was one of the parliament’s most enthusiastic supporters because of course he was.

Sturgeon even dismissed some opponents of her Bill as “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” That was them telt!

The Bill completed its passage through Holyrood and hope for women’s rights in Scotland started to fade. And then their Seventh Cavalry, in an unexpected guise, came riding over the hill. The Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack, announced he would use powers contained in the Scotland Act to prevent the Bill being granted Royal Assent, because of the way it created conflicts in UK equality legislation. (I was privileged to be a fringe player in this drama; as the lead Non-Executive Director of the Scotland Office at the time, Alister called me the night before he announced his decision to gauge my political opinion. Naturally I encouraged him in his action – a partial atonement for my previous sin of supporting the GRA, perhaps.)

Naturally there was a great hullabaloo and nationalists warned that this kind of colonialist tyranny, this shameful over-ruling of the democratically-elected Scottish Parliament would never be tolerated by the Scottish people. Meanwhile, the Scottish people glanced up from their phones and mumbled, “We don’t mind.”

The extent to which the Scottish public’s support for Jack’s courageous and unprecedented intervention played a role in Sturgeon’s subsequent decision to resign as first minister and SNP leader is still debated. But she clearly misjudged the whole thing. And a few weeks after the Westminster veto, it was revealed that Isla Bryson (real name: Adam Graham), a convicted double rapist, had been sent to Corton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison. Outrageous though this was, and distressing as it must have been for vulnerable female prisoners there, the revelation exposed the fallacy (phallacy?) of self-ID to a public that had not, at that time, been aware of the extreme nature of the demands made by trans activists. No greater example of the sheer stupidity and extreme misogyny of the case for self-ID could have been asked for.

Self-ID was established in the UK years before politicians initially agreed to implement it in law, before changing their minds again. So arrogant have been organisations like Stonewall and their little helpers that they decided that civic organisations, from schools, universities, police forces and local authorities to charities and the civil service and everything in between, should be instructed to embrace self-ID for anyone who wanted it. No democratic oversight needed, and certainly no new legislation needed (although they still demanded it).

And all those organisations fell for it, hook, line and sinker. No challenges, no questions, no reservations. Trans people are a minority? Fine, we’ll do as you say. And if women don’t like sharing their toilets with men in dresses, or if girls lose out on places in their school sports team because a boy has decided he’s a girl and wants to compete instead, well, that’s too bad. After all, trans people are a minority, women aren’t!

We now know, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in April, that every one of those organisations has been breaking the law, but even now most of them continue to insist that men’s rights must always eclipse women’s rights, provided the men in question are wearing dresses instead of trousers.

And it all started in February 2004, with a well-meaning but naive government, and a host of well-meaning, naive and ambitious MPs who probably should have known better.

Mea culpa.