It is perfectly natural – good, in fact – that some people have deep reservations about this strange new crisis of gender, this trend for diagnosing wrong-body syndrome among people who might just be confused about their sexuality or worried about puberty or unhappy in some other way.
Feminists, for example, are worried that the politics of transgenderism will allow male-born people to enter what were once considered female-only spaces and even to take certain roles and jobs away from women. In the UK feminists have set up groups like Woman’s Place to make the case against allowing people who were born male to ‘self-ID’ as women – that is, where the law would allow any man to identify as a woman and would put pressure on employers and institutions to recognise the validity of his (sorry, her) womanhood.
This will mean born-males getting on to all-women shortlists in the world of party politics, they argue. It will mean born-males waltzing into women’s toilets and changing rooms. And it will mean men in women’s prisons. It already does, in fact. Men who identify as women have been incarcerated with women, and it has had disastrous consequences in some cases. In 2017, Karen White – who was born Stephen Wood – was placed in the female prison of New Hall in West Yorkshire. Despite being a convicted paedophile, rapist and sexual assaulter of women. While at New Hall, White / Wood assaulted two female inmates.
Great article, thank you Brendan.