MB: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. How bewildering old fashioned, perhaps worse that sounds at a time when a time when a BBC Schools video tells 9 year olds that it’s really really exciting that there are a 100 genders if not more now. Gender is the new social battlefield. Where minorities who see themselves, with some justification, as having been marginalised and discriminated against, not only fighting the normative majority, but increasingly each other. Two of the three labourship candidate have waded into this increasingly venomous cultural civil war. They’ve pledged themselves to a transgender manifesto that labels named womens and gay rights organisations trans-exclusionary hate groups. The manifesto insists that transwomen are women and trans men are men. Their refusal to accept this fundamental aspect of their perceived identity, or even attempts to discuss it are 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 women’s changing rooms, refuges, prisons, which could, and in many cases are, open to male-bodied people. Some, even, with records of male sexual offences.
There are other issues for those who do want to debate the moral implications of gender self-identification
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 entirely a matter of feelings and individual self-perception.
Where does masculinity end and femininity begin? What constitutes transphobia?
Most worrying, for many, what’s behind the 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?