“It used to be fun being a tranny but people have lost their sense of humour. All you get is this moaning and whining. We’re caught in a right mess.”
Miranda Yardley is joking, but she is deadly serious in her opposition to government plans to revolutionise the very definition of male and female.
At some point in the coming days or weeks, the government will publish its consultation on the Gender Recognition Act. Instead of having to obtain a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, (the condition in which you feel you do not belong in your biological sex), demonstrating that you have lived in your chosen gender for at least two years and providing evidence to an expert panel, people would be allowed to change their legal gender by simply declaring it themselves, under government proposals to speed up the process.
Justine Greening, the equalities minister, has hailed the move as “the next step forward” in advancing transgender rights.
Ms Yardley, a transgender activist, is one of a growing number of critics who are horrified by the lack of thought ministers appear to have given to the consequences of such a move.
She argues that the “deeply regressive” legislation will not only do little to tackle discrimination faced by transsexuals like herself, it would also render women unable to challenge opportunistic men who use it in bad faith to gain access to areas such as refuges, fitting-rooms and support groups for survivors of sexual abuse.
“It’s taking away rights from women to give to men. It is utterly perverse,” said Ms Yardley, 50, an accountant from Essex, who was born male, and underwent gender reassignment almost ten years ago. She defines herself as transsexual, never as a woman, “out of respect to women. I’m not trying to lay any claim to being a woman. I have not had the same life.”
At a meeting in the Houses of Parliament last week, Ms Yardley joined a broad cross-section of clinicians, parents, therapists, academics and gay rights and women’s groups, all united in their frustration at being unable to debate any transgender policy — such as questioning the wisdom of giving children life-changing treatment for conditions that are still not properly understood, or asking how self-declaration might skew female crime statistics — without being shouted down by a small, militant lobby of transgender activists. Legitimate scrutiny, they warned, was being silenced by a single word: “transphobe”.
“Have you seen my Twitter? It’s a bloodbath,” Ms Yardley said. Using the female pronoun is one thing, she says; feeling entitled to hijack womanhood on a whim, at the expense of other people’s rights, is quite another. “We’re being told that a trans woman is a woman. No debate. It’s almost like a cult. Obey the rules of the cult, enforce the rules and anyone who disagrees is kicked out.
“Never in the history of the black civil rights movement, or the lesbian and gay movement, did black people demand to be called white, or lesbians or gay men demand to be called heterosexual. Trans equality shouldn’t come at the expense of equity. Sometimes the most unfair thing to do is to treat everybody equally.”
Critics say that changing the law to protect transgender people on the basis of infinite, undefined notions of “gender identity” instead of “gender reassignment” is identity politics gone mad — as doomed as “trying to legislate for agnostics”, Ms Yardley says. “They’re looking at legislating for my thoughts and feelings and it is nonsense.”
About 650,000 people in the UK identify themselves as transgender. Many have supported moves to ease the administrative burden of changing gender.
A spokeswoman for Stonewall, the LGBT group, welcomed the public consultation, saying: “This review is desperately needed as it’s time to move the legislation on from being a long complicated bureaucratic process, which treats being trans as a mental illness. We believe a better gender recognition act is a crucial next step in achieving equality for all trans people and will help reduce the discrimination and abuse that is all too prevalent in our society. Transphobia in Britain is at epidemic levels and this has to change.”
However, Debbie Hayton, 49, a science teacher from Birmingham who transitioned five years ago, has serious concerns. For her, self-declaration is going backwards, not forwards.
“At the moment, we’ve got the option of saying, look, here are pieces of paper that say we’ve been assessed by society. If you replace that with self-identification only, then effectively these people are relying only on their own assertions. People [who may be hostile to trans people] could simply say, we don’t believe you. It actually weakens our position,” she said.
“The idea that somehow people will face less discrimination if they can self-declare is fallacious and it needs calling out. I don’t see how that is going to help us in our day-to-day lives. It doesn’t address transphobia in society or how we can move on from discrimination.”
How exactly, she asked, does being able to declare your gender overnight stop transgender people being passed over for promotion or discriminated in the workplace?
“How will it stop people being kept in the back office instead of public-facing roles, or change the attitude of employers who might think, ‘If I employ you there may be problems’?
“That is the kind of discrimination that worries me. That’s what I want to see tackled. Instead we’re getting involved in a battle that is totally unnecessary.”
She empathises with the concerns of women’s groups and recommends individual risk assessments if someone born male, but identifying as a woman, seeks to enter a protected space such as a refuge. “Yes, that’s discriminatory but sometimes you just have to accept that if you want to respect other people in society.”
Debate is not discrimination, Ms Hayton said. “If people have concerns, I’d much prefer them to be shared and aired. We need to debate these issues. That is not being transphobic.”