Controlling the Narrative
Both sides try it
I think the thing that perhaps bothers me most about the current situation is the way that views which I have rejected for literally decades are automatically imputed to me.
I saw an item in Spiked Online yesterday which on the one hand I agreed with but on the other know will be used against me.
It said that now that the Supreme Court has given us its judgment we’ll know who the crazy people are when they claim that a man can become pregnant or that a woman can have a penis.
I myself have been attacked and excluded by radical transgender ideologues because I have said similar things as this Spiked article, many years ago.
It was in about 2012 or so when I first saw a news item about a ‘trans man’ called Thomas something or other who was pregnant. I was roundly ticked off by the social media crowd I was then hanging out with online for saying that I thought this preposterous. I’m willing to accept that someone might want to be the opposite gender to that in which they were apparently born but realising that the medical transition would deprive them of the ability to have a child and that they would not be able to be a father, might seek to have a child before taking the medical transition, the hormones for which might mess up the child’s development. One of the principal hypotheses for transsexual ideation is that the mother took hormone disrupting drugs during pregnancy thereby affecting the neurological development. Any doctor who provided a pregnant mother with drugs of any sort that might adversely affect the child would be irresponsible and deserve to be struck off in my humble opinion.
More recently, in 2017, someone similar came to my attention because they were seeking to have themselves entered on the child’s birth certificate as its ‘Father’. I covered this in my book and stated that I was glad that the presiding justice refused the request. The plaintiff, whatever inner state of mind may have pertained at the time, was performing the organic biological function of a mother and surely that should be recorded as the state of affairs, besides which every child has a mother and deserves to have it recorded as such. The Gender Recognition Act (2004) provided for recognition in the ‘acquired gender’ from the time of the issuing of the GR Certificate, it is not retrospective and cannot be applied to one’s past identity (such as having children). I don’t have a problem with this.
However, a recent case has gone well beyond this in a way which makes a mockery of the conditions of the Act. A person claiming to be a ‘transsexual man’, in other words someone ostensibly born as a female wants to be a male and has begun the process. Okay, but what comes next is, to my mind, unacceptable not only in terms of the GRA as it stands, but medically as well.
This person has been granted a Recognition Certificate as a male, despite the fact that they are pregnant with child. I’m not clear as to whether this person is actually taking male hormones while pregnant¸ a course which would surely be medically dangerous, or whether they have simply received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and been granted recognition on that basis.
Frankly, I find this preposterous. The mission creep with Recognition has been going on since the Act was presented to the Commons as a Bill. David Lammy, now Justice Minister, proudly stated in 2004 that the Bill was ‘groundbreaking’ in that it was the first Bill of its kind in the world which did not require that applicants had had the appropriate medical reassignment. In other words, people wanting to be seen as women would not need to have had genital reassignment before they could be legally accepted as such. It was unanimously agreed in the Yahoogroup of post surgical transsexual women to which I belonged at the time that this would inevitably lead to people who had no intention or desire whatsoever of ever seeking to undergo such treatment applying for Gender Recognition as women, and probably having it granted.
It was some years later, in about 2008/9 that I saw a comment on a transgender website which ultimately provoked me into writing my book. The writer of the comment claimed that they were ‘perfectly happy’ with their ‘female penis’. Questioning this absurd remark I found myself to be on the receiving end of what I believe is known as a ‘dogpile’.
It was another several years before the trans train really got under way in 2015 with Caitlyn/Bruce Jenner coming out in public and almost immediately being awarded a ‘Woman of the Year’ Award. At that stage I had been medically transitioned for nearly three decades and had worked in both nursing and teaching without one single complaint, besides integrating and assimilating into society to the extent that I was involved in several local community groups. My gender history was never mentioned and I had always been addressed as a woman. No-one was giving me Woman of the Year awards, and I didn’t expect them to. Jenner’s award was clearly some kind of social engineering attempt to influence public opinion.
There can be absolutely no doubt in my mind that someone somewhere high up in the media world had given the word that it was time to roll out the transgender agenda. This, the tail end of the Obama era, was characterised by statements that you shouldn’t challenge someone in the women’s toilets if they don’t look like a woman because they might be trans. This has now rebounded big time, I’m only surprised that it took so long.
But after the last two decades, and especially the last one, the impression that has been received by the public is that this is the ‘trans world’. Their memory doesn’t go back to any time before all this, the twentieth century doesn’t exist. The trans trender ideologues insist that all that stuff that went down in the last century is now out of date and entirely obsolete. Even the fact that when the GRB was introduced in 2004 the word ‘transsexual’ was used several times in the first few minutes. And yet it is absent from the Equality Act (2010), replaced by ‘gender reassignment’. The term ‘transgender’ had by now come into general usage and the ideologues were doing their best to cancel ‘transsexual’ claiming it was ‘outdated’ and ‘inappropriate’.
I would ask how it is that a term used in Parliamentary debates and statutes can become ‘obsolete’ and ‘irrelevant’ within a decade or so? Certainly words from hundreds of years ago have changed their meanings through variations in usage, but those of us who have applied the term to ourselves within the space of our own lifetimes have not changed its usage and do not wish such a thing to happen. The only people who want to change meanings and replace usage are the gender ideologues who want transgenderism to be a much more amorphous and poorly defined concept while at the same time excluding the meaning which was the core, and the gencrits who want to delete certain ideas. In my book I reference a conference where transgender was described as ‘open ended without a core’. In other words, pretty much anything you want, while at the same time excluding that core which existed before it was appropriated.
I have an acquaintance here in Headingley who is a few years older than me, in her mid-seventies. She transitioned some ten years or so ago, in other words in her early sixties. I don’t hold anything seriously against late transitioners like this, but I do have certain reservations. While I had dedicated my twenties to seeking to cure myself of this curse, as I had seen it, she had apparently got married and developed a career in the Civil Service. The main problem I have with this person is how she regards me and my views. When I went through my process in the nineteen-eighties this was an extremely unusual thing. You had to really need to do it. Or as Robert Hunter wrote in ‘Box of Rain’ Believe it if you mean it, or leave it if you dare.
It’s not for me to say whether it was right for this person to transition in her sixties, but there can be no doubt in my mind that if one really does mean it, then it is more authentic to do it when one has most of one’s life ahead rather than when most of it is behind you.
But the thing which really bugs me is her critical attitude to my views about this. We have discussed the implications of the Supreme Court ruling (a vexatious mistrial in my view since no defence was allowed against the litigants, or appeal against the judgement, which surely makes the case meaningless and void) and when I said that she would be eligible to join the Legal Advocacy for the Surgically Transitioned group of which I am a member (charitable status applied for) she said that she did not wish to since she doesn’t believe that completing medical transition should be necessary for recognition. [Even if that is the only reasonable way out of the vexatious position which the Supreme Court has provoked.] She herself has a Recognition Certificate and has completed the medical process but holds that there are those who would like to get recognition who are unable to go through the process for whatever reason.
This is what to me seems a very far left position. My own view is that one should be rewarded for achievement but such rewards should not be given to those who have not passed through the gate. To quote Robert Hunter again ‘You just want the cup but you don’t want the race’.
The Left today demands entitlement to everything for having put in nothing.
I obviously want to have the rights for which I qualified twenty years ago protected, and those who have gone through the same process as myself. But I do respect that natal women should have input on how this affects them. It is my belief that the balance would have been about right, under the 2004 Act, had it required that applicants for a GRC had gone through a standard and recognised medical process of reassignment.
Women should be protected from intrusion into their spaces by male bodied individuals, but I am no longer male bodied and I also have my dignity and safety to think of. I have been using female facilities for nearly forty years now without a single complaint. To force me to use men’s public toilets and be admitted to a male hospital ward in the event of being admitted to hospital would humiliate and endanger me in several ways. Firstly it would involve me publicly ‘outing’ myself, despite the conditions in the 2004 Act which provide for my privacy, the foundation of the 2002 Goodwin case. People who are privy to this information should not disclose it and we ourselves should not be obliged to disclose it. Furthermore, since I am perceived as a woman by men there is the possibility that I would be seen as soliciting (unlikely for someone of my age, but not impossible) or that I would be vulnerable to assault. A post-operative male to female transsexual committed to a men’s prison would be in serious danger of sexual assault. This is a very real danger and the possibility that such a thing might happen is intolerable, but surely must be something that the members of the Equality and Human Rights Commission are aware of. Curiously, in her book Trans (which presents itself as the definitive work on the subject when it is actually highly selective in its choice of evidence) the only time she uses the term ‘sincere’ about a hypothetical trans woman is in such a case, thereby associating even sincere transsexuals with criminal activity when the association is clearly incidental. Indeed it is the case that a post-operative male to female transsexual could be sent to a men’s prison for using a women’s toilet. I believe that this would be what is commonly known as ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.
It is indeed the case that there have been a small number of high profile cases in which male bodied people have been arrested and claimed to be transgender without any previous assessment or diagnosis. When committed for trial these individuals claim usage of female pronouns and when convicted somehow manage to get themselves placed in women’s prisons. Small though their numbers may be, they have definitely been noticed by the public resulting in outrage and fuelling the gencrit movement.
When I wrote that last paragraph I was of the understanding that such cases were rare. Since then I have discovered that there is one prison where five such people are being detained. I can’t be sure, but it seems quite possible that none of these people had had any kind of diagnosis, medical treatment relating to gender reassignment, or gender recognition document. The newspaper reports which I have read have stated that these men had intact male genitals.
In a previous blog I have posted a short video of one of the leading gencrits saying that transsexual women should be barred from female toilets because the law didn’t require genital reassignment and that you couldn’t be sure that they didn’t have a penis. The obvious consideration that if the law were to be amended so as to only allow those who have had medical reassignment to be granted recognition then this problem wouldn’t arise seems to have completely passed her by.
Doubtless she would find problems even with this since there is a (hopefully) small number of people who have been granted recognition without full medical transition and it would be vexatious to remove their privileges since their qualification was bona fide under the existing law as written, though the law in this case may be an ass. Thereby ensuring that she even has the law by the scruff of the neck and an excuse not to allow it to be revised. But also ensuring that she manages to exclude a much larger number who would satisfy an amended law.
Simply put, they don’t want to allow a single person to be recognised whatever arguments may be presented. This is clear from the fact that no arguments have been allowed, and no appeals either.
The fact remains that the 2004 Act was intended to provide confidentiality and safety for that small number of us who have undergone a bona fide process of medical sex/gender reassignment and that this is in effect being abolished by the Supreme Court and potentially by the Equality and Human Rights Committee.
Dr Kathleen Stock has said that she believes she had refuted all linguistic arguments for the recognition of transsexuals in our acquired sex/gender but this is a distraction. The 2004 Act did not seek to redefine the meanings of terms (as Professor Stephen Whittle claimed in his 2007 paper) but merely to create a small legal category which should have been applied to those of us who have passed through the full reassignment process. I don’t care if it is called a ‘legal fiction’, so long as it doesn’t leave us in a legal limbo or force us to use facilities that would be inappropriate and expose us to risk.
This summer I went to a new branch of opticians and when the receptionist was taking my details I noticed that she had ticked the ‘F’ box without asking me. This would indicate to me that she perceived me as female. As far as I’m concerned, besides the fact of how she obviously perceived me, this would all be in accord with the 2004 Act which stated that upon receipt of a Recognition Certificate (which I did in 2005) I should be treated as a woman ‘for all legal purposes’. I’m fairly certain that registering at an optician’s is a legal purpose but there are those who are now fighting to get even the documentary usages of recognition such as this revoked. Stella O’Malley wanted me to disclose my status generally when I spoke to her. If she thinks that this should be required legally then she too, like the optician’s receptionist a few weeks later, must have perceived me as female, otherwise why should she want me to do it? If I was merely a self identifying transgender who plainly looked like a man, she wouldn’t need to ask that of me, would she?
It seems to me that far from my identity being subject to linguistic analysis as Dr Stock wishes, it is rather dependent on my appearance. (I have just seen a news report that due to difficulties with policing and enforcement people using toilets will be allowed to do so on the basis of their appearance. This may create other new issues, but at least these problems are now being acknowledged. I will address this more fully in a future piece.) In recent weeks when out with friends we have been addressed as ‘ladies’ on numerous occasions, a bartender called me ‘darling’, the local butcher chatting to another customer said ‘I’ll just serve this lady [me]’, a delivery man of perhaps forty addressed me as ‘madam’.
And yet hard core gencrits demand that I am referred to as a ‘trans identified male’. A term that to me is definitely a post-pandemic usage, one whipped up in order to redirect the narrative away from examination of the distinctions between transsexuals and transgenders. This has already suffered from the insistence by transgender ideologues that the term ‘transsexual’ is oppressive and offensive since it distinguishes between those of us who seek, or have already undergone, medical sex/gender reassignment and those who merely cross dress and claim ‘self identification’. Many gencrits speak about transsexuals as if we had intact male anatomy like transgenders. Do they realise there is a difference or are they just trying to control the narrative? ~ misleadingly.
Blaire White, a gay transvestite, or transgender as it has become known, is one of the chief distractions here. I will address Blaire as ‘she’ for the sake of courtesy, but it is hard to do that when she says that she isn’t going to have surgical reassignment and makes podcasts in which she speaks to people who have regretted surgery and is obviously briefing against full medical transition.
This is all about narrative control. Unfortunately it was the transgenders who first engaged in this and then made it worse by pressing for self identification in a proposed amendment to the 2004 Act. Fortunately, despite the Holyrood assembly passing this in 2022 the UK Government at Westminster blocked the legislation in January 2023 using Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998, the first time this had been used since devolution in 1998.
I’m no big fan of the Tories or their recent attempts at government but I’m extremely glad that they did reject the Scottish amendment. The present maelstrom would probably be a great deal worse had it been allowed to pass onto the statute book.
And yet my late transitioning acquaintance in Headingley continues to insist that people should be allowed to get recognition simply on the basis of self identification. One of her favourite cases is that of someone she knows who is married and whose wife is unwilling to go along with a medical transition. It’s perfectly reasonable for a gender clinic to decline to treat someone who is still married and whose wife resists their partner transitioning while still married. This person who is unwilling to divorce, apparently cross dresses in private and my acquaintance thinks this should allow this person to be granted gender recognition. On the basis of what? An unsupported claim of private behaviour?
It’s this kind of thing which has provoked the gencrit wave. They focus on people like this, make out that this is what the problem is all about and ignore what anyone like me has to say.
But what really vexes me is that having ignored what I say some gencrits then go on and accuse me of these very things myself. I spend a lot of my time trying to engage gencrits in debate but few of them even reply to me. Jamie Reed, an American gencrit activist is one who did recently. She accused me of being a danger to gay people, women and children. She didn’t explain why. Clearly she hasn’t read my book in which I decry the way that probably gay children and young people are rushed into medical treatment, puberty blockers and even surgical interventions. I don’t approve of ‘affirmation’. Nor do I approve of ‘conversion’. I am a qualified therapist. Therapists should inquire and challenge, but they should seek to get the client to find their own solution. The worst thing is for the therapist to impose a result. This is what therapists on both sides have done.
I knew a young man in the late eighties who was making a social transition but who seemed to me to obviously be gay. I gently tried to broach the subject with him on several occasions but as the basis of my training in Art Therapy was not to impose interpretations onto clients (he was not a client, but I still wanted to exercise that kind of personal respect) I withheld my views insofar as I could but I think he could tell. Then he disappeared for a while and some time later I bumped into him on the street and he blurted out that he had realised that he was gay and that he had previously sought to transition because it allowed him to be attracted to men without being gay. This didn’t surprise me. But I do still find it hard to see how people can let social perceptions and attitudes to so run their lives.
So when people like Jamie Reed accuse me of being a danger to gay people, of wanting to ‘trans’ minors I despair that I am being traduced through false narrative control. Is she just ignorant of my views and falsely assuming that I am part of a ‘movement’ that I am doing my utmost to resist, or is she purposely lying? I don’t know, but the fact is that she refuses to engage in conversation because she imputes that I not only hold such beliefs, but that I actively promote them, when the reality is entirely the opposite.
Check out this conversation I had with Ben Appel of the LGB Courage Coalition which I have cross posted from their page. I was most grateful that someone in his position would speak to me in such an open and accepting way. Reed is apparently involved with this group so she should have already seen my views but I don’t suppose it would make any difference if she did.
https://claireraerandall.substack.com/cp/179500778
If she is so right, and I am so wrong, she should be keen to engage in debate so as to roundly dismiss me from the public square. You will see in the comments below that there are people who make attacks on me simply on the basis that I am transsexual. I’m also attacked by transgender activists because I won’t agree with their nonsense either.
So whether these people understand my position or not, they are unwilling to debate. The moral high dudgeon approach which is taken towards me is laughable. They are so offended that I dare to exist. I’ll respond to legitimate debate but they just condemn me. Hmmm…. a bit like the Supreme Court in which no defence was allowed.
But it encourages me in that it demonstrates that the actual reason behind their coy behaviour is that they are too arrogant to believe that there might be loopholes in their own position, or more importantly that this arrogance is simply a cover for the fact that they know how falsely constructed their own position to be, conflating entirely different groups for their narrative and are unwilling to allow that to be exposed. I am a therapist and philosopher, I debate, they don’t. They don’t have any answers as to how to deal with this kind of problem, they just want to say ‘Suck it up’ and then sneer and laugh. And when I say that this is bigotry they lay on some more abuse. Have I criticised them? Only when they make false claims. Jamie Reed used to call herself ‘Queer’. Well I think that is a meaningless term but if she wants to use terms like that it’s not my business.
Their position is one based only on their power and position and it seems to me that they are seeking to control the narrative because they are afraid or unable to deal with arguments and evidence outside of their narrow opinion corridor.
To put it in one word, they are cowards.
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https://lgbcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/the-heretical-transexual/comments#comment-67236862