Okay, I watched Gender Wars last night. The world has, over the last couple of years, become aware of a problem that’s been developing for over 20 years. I’ve been up to my eyes in it for around 5 of those years, and feel I know the issues all too well, but so many people were saying “oooh, watch this one!”…

Was last night’s programme a good presentation of the problem? The fact that this morning, my social media feeds show people from all sides of the debate saying it was biased suggests it wasn’t too far off the mark.

I don’t think this was the best so far on the topic. I think the one Stella O’Malley did a few years back was far clearer, but it wasn’t such a big issue then for most people, so didn’t make such a splash. That at least has changed now, thanks largely to Nicola Sturgeon creating such a god-awful situation in Scotland.

Click here to watch Channel 4’s 2018 programme with Stella O’Malley

Last night’s programme looked rather absurd, and probably confusing to people who don’t know the actual (legal) issues. It looked absurd because 90% of the time, it showed people on either side of the main conflict speaking alone, guessing what the other side was thinking, then arguing with that mythical view.

That is one of the most salient points the programme demonstrated. Absurd misrepresentation is almost inevitable because those who claim women are trying to destroy trans rights have consistently refused to engage in debate. They are out there now complaining bitterly that they have been shown in a programme which features people they disagree with. They wouldn’t even consider talking with someone like Kathleen Stock, so each side has to guess what the other is actually thinking. That refusal to debate is the main reason why the situation has become such a bitter impasse.

As Kathleen Stock was there to say, we desperately need a wide, public, well-informed debate, to clarify these issues and find a solution.

‘The man on the left’ is Stephen Whittle. Stephen Whittle is a female. Whittle has lived most of their life as a trans man. Whittle was part of a campaign that looked very necessary and sensible to me at the time, because back then there was no Gender Recognition Act – you couldn’t get a certificate that says you can act, in most circumstances, as the opposite sex; and back then, there was no acceptance of same-sex marriage. As a result, a trans man living with a woman – that is, two females – could not marry, and could not have legal responsibility for children.

Now, we have the GRA, and anyone can marry, and be parents. Whittle’s campaign is no longer necessary for the reasons they originally stated, and yet, as part of a very wealthy and well-connected lobby, Whittle has spent the last two decades undermining women’s legal rights in every arena of public and political life, in the belief that forcing the world to deny sex is the way to gain further acceptance for trans people.

Personally, I think this has had precisely the opposite affect.

Passing: Get Real

It was a trans man (ie, a female) who said during the programme that they had ‘outed themselves’ for the sake of the ‘trans rights’ campaign and, in the case of the trans men, I guess this is often true. It may be that many trans people pass unnoticed – I wouldn’t know, would I? But in my experience, women are much better at spotting a male amongst them than men are at spotting a female. This, dear reader, is evolution. Women are at risk wherever males are lurking, and they know it. They have known it all their lives and they are on the lookout, for their own safety.

That’s not something you can legislate away. All you can do is try to bully those women into silence, and that is precisely what many ‘trans rights’ campaigners have been doing. It’s made a lot of people very angry and that, I believe, is the second reason this situation has run into toxic deadlock. It’s also why so many trans people are currently feeling so cornered.

For most of my life, I have seen women politely pretending not to notice trans women are male. The main effect the aggressive trans rights campaign has had is that some women no longer do that. They either make a big fuss about spotting and supporting them, or they are alarmed by them.

Toilets

One of the consequences is that many trans people now feel more uncertain and unsafe than they used to over the toilets issue. It’s notable that one transwoman who commented on this in the programme said they’d realized they could be alarming women, whilst another presented it as a problem for themselves, in that they’d had to leave a pub where there were no gender-neutral toilets. Well, I have news for you guys. I have a trans friend who now regularly has to leave places, or does not go to places, because they’ve realized that males in the female toilets is a problem for females, so they don’t go in women’s toilets.

It’s all very sad.

Over time, we can solve this issue the same way we’re in the process of solving the toilets for people with disabilities issue. We build toilets that work for them. It takes time though, and while we’re waiting, life is hard on those who are affected. As someone who’s been through pregnancy and menopause, I know there are times when it’s a very urgent issue indeed. It would help if all concerned took the ‘am I making someone else anxious?’ line and acted on it, but we do need everyone to realize the anxiety that comes from breaking the social norms (females and males in separate facilities) is not just anxiety for women, it’s a real reaction to a real danger. Whatever other facilities organizations provide, it is a well documented fact that they can prevent most violence and abuse by having clearly labelled, separate loos and changing rooms that are only for females. Where they don’t do that, there are more cases of violence against women. QED.

The programme was full of people talking about the ‘hate’ and the ‘dreadful behaviour’ on both sides, and yet 100% of the footage they had of people behaving badly was of trans rights activists objecting loudly to women’s meetings. It was full of talk of how trans people had suffered, and yet all the crime scene footage, and all the examples of attacks they came up with, were situations where men had attacked women. There has been one fatal attack on a trans person in recent years and, terrible though any fatal attack is, I’m not aware that there has been a judgement on why it occurred, yet. Whatever the motivation though, it was youth knife crime – nothing whatsoever to do with these mythical, violent, feminist hags you hear about.

As for the rise in ‘hate crimes’ those councillors in Norwich were talking about, judging by police records, the vast majority of what’s been reported is not ‘hate crime’ but people reporting things they object to, such as the misuse of pronouns in arguments on twitter – things police keep record of because if there is a hate crime, they might be used as evidence of it.

[NB That’s why I’ve used ‘they’ all through this article. I don’t like it – I think it’s clumsy but that’s how fraught things are just now – any other solution, and the arguments about pronouns would have been bigger than the attention given to the actual issues that actually matter.]

Hate crime? Really? Genocide, some say. Really? For goodness sake, if these terrible things are going on, show us the evidence.

For now, I’m sorry that so many trans people are now in the situation that women have always been in, of sometimes having to think ‘is it safe to use those loos.’ Can I be sarcastic and say ‘congratulations, you just had a genuine female experience’? Not really, because it does also happen to men in some circumstances. Badly planned and unsupervised toilets have always been potentially dangerous – that’s why we used to have toilet attendants in public toilets. Can I wax political here, and point out that many of our problems in recent years have been made worse by privatization, and by staff cut-backs, and the erosion of public services? Yes, I think that is a salient point.

I am more upset though, about the fact that women’s meetings are now so often beset with thuggish protestors that many women dare not take part for fear of who they might run into on the way home; and I am far, far more upset that we have a generation of young people who’ve been seriously misled over the realities of sex and gender, and that many are hurting themselves, or signing up for so-called doctors to hurt them, as a result.

If you didn’t watch Gender Wars last night, please do watch it. If you still don’t know what this furore is about, please find out because the continuing impasse over how we deal with women’s rights and trans rights, and what we should be teaching children about sex and gender, is seriously harming many, many people.

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