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I’m a middle-aged man and I have a confession. I’d really like to be younger. And I feel young too. I’m very active. I exercise regularly – at levels that very few older people do. I’m in the small minority of middle-aged men in the UK who isn’t overweight. Go me!
Now suppose I decided on those grounds that I will henceforth self-identify as a teenager, and on that basis I demanded access to youth clubs, a place on LibDem quotas reserved for young people, and so on? And suppose I also demanded that everyone should be obliged to treat me as if I was actually a teenager – for example, no one should refer to my actual age. If anyone refers to my actual true age, I’ll call that out as humiliating and therefore claim harassment.
If I did all that, I imagine just about every LibDem member (and indeed just about everyone of whatever political opinion) would rightly tell me I’m not a teenager and to stop being so silly. Because no matter what I might feel inside, physical reality is what matters.
A policy that denies reality
So why is it that if, instead, I decided to identify not as a teenager but as a woman, LibDem policy demands that – despite my very obvious manhood – I should be considered an actual woman and treated as such, and even referred to by female pronouns?
It’s an extraordinary approach that simply denies reality.
Those who support ‘trans rights’ often claim that this is about the right of a marginalised minority to live out their lives peacefully without harming others. But that claim doesn’t stand up because many of the policies demanded by the trans rights movement actually do cause immense harm to other people. The most obvious problem here is the removal of women’s spaces.
Intimidating women is not OK
As just one example, in 2019 the City of London Corporation, which runs the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds, formally made the Ladies’ Pond open to trans-identifying men. This is the resultant experience that one woman reported when a ‘large man wearing a long wig’ entered the women’s area:
“The man stood near where I was showering and obviously wanted me to know he was looking at me. I had no way of covering my body and felt trapped.”
(Source: The Sex Matters One Year Later report, which reports a number of similar cases. I’ve given one example here, but it’s far from unique).
How on Earth does anyone imagine subjecting women to this is in any way progressive? It isn’t – it’s utterly regressive.
Intentions are not always obvious
Before anyone accuses me of trying to smear all trans people, of course not all trans-identifying men would harass women in that way. I’m sure we’re talking about only a tiny minority. But the problem is, there’s no way to tell upfront who does and who doesn’t have good intentions. As soon as you let any men into women’s spaces, you immediately have no way to prevent those who would harass women from also entering.
You also have no reasonable way to distinguish men who actually do genuinely identify as women from men who might pretend to be trans for the sole purpose of getting access to women’s spaces. That’s why women-only spaces have always been strictly single sex with no exceptions: Because the only reliable way to keep potential male predators out is to prevent all males from entering.
No genuinely liberal party marginalises women
But even if you could somehow magically distinguish which men are genuine good-intentioned trans-identifying men, so you only allow those people to enter women’s spaces, that is still unfair to women. I’m not a woman so I can’t speak from any personal experience, but a good many women tell me that having unknown men in spaces in which they have to undress etc. is intensely uncomfortable, even humiliating, and destroys their dignity. Quite simply, so-called trans rights policies prioritise the wishes of a small minority of men above the safety, comfort, and sex-based rights of millions of women. That is wrong. And supporting it is not worthy of any party that claims to be liberal.
“A word means exactly what I want it to mean”
In recent years trans rights campaigners have tried to get round this by redefining the word ‘woman’ – so that in their eyes, ‘woman’ roughly means, anyone who self identifies as a woman. But that is just semantic manipulation. Changing the meanings of words does not at all change physical reality, and it does not change the lived experience of actual, biological, men and women. Besides, pretty much everyone outside the political/trans rights bubble understands what the word ‘woman’ means in everyday life – and its meaning does not include men!
If anyone needs any more convincing of how silly playing with word definitions is, how about if we changed the definition of the word, ‘teenager’ to include anyone, no matter how old, who wishes to self-identify as a teenager? No?
And this leads to one of the other big problems with so-called ‘trans rights’: The demand that everyone accept a fiction as if it were reality. The fiction being the idea that merely self-identifying as a woman somehow makes you actually a woman. Of course it doesn’t! If it did, then by the same logic, I could become an actual teenager merely by self-identifying as one. But I can’t. No matter how much I might wish otherwise, I’m old and there’s nothing I can do about that. And in the same way, if you are a man then you are a man.
Compelling belief is the opposite of liberal
Of course, if you wish to live your private life as if you were a woman, then by itself, that’s completely fine. I wish you well, and I will defend your right to do that, as well as your right to be protected from discrimination as a trans person. I will defend that because respecting the right of anyone to live their life as they wish (provided it doesn’t harm others) is a core part of being a liberal. But demanding that others believe and act as if you are an actual woman is not OK. That completely fails the ‘doesn’t harm others’ test. It’s mixing reality with fiction, and it interferes with other people’s freedom of belief in the worst possible way – by pressuring people to deny observable reality.
No debate
The whole thing does not stand up to any kind of reasoned debate or analysis. And perhaps that is why trans rights campaigners both inside and outside the LibDems have so often refused to engage in debate. Instead, LibDem members who argue against this idiocy have repeatedly been prevented from debating at conference, denied access to various social media discussion groups for LibDems, or been subjected to specious formal complaints.
Censorship must fail
Meanwhile LibDemVoice, for many years the main website (and before Liberal Voices arrived, virtually the only website) for members to debate policy, refuses to publish comments or articles that oppose the ‘trans rights’ line. In the end, this censorship only hurts the LibDems: Because free debate is one of the most important ways that you test your ideas and policies to make sure they are reasonable, fair, and workable. If you don’t allow your views to be subjected to debate, you will becoming more and more detached both from reality and from public opinion.
The current LibDem stance on trans rights vis-à-vis the rights of women, children, gays and lesbians, is wrong and completely illiberal. And the pursuit of policies such as support for self-ID and opposition to single sex spaces is not only losing us the support of many women and gays, but is actually making us toxic to a growing number of voters. If we aim to be a serious party of Government, we have to change course on this issue.
