Rowan Moore asks how we can have a fair discussion about transgender rights. The way to do this would have been to set out what he thinks those rights are and to consider other people’s arguments in good faith.
Moore doesn't do that. Instead he strings together a dazzling chain of vague accusations: "supposed" victims of cancel culture such as Kathleen Stock and Allison Bailey are given extensive supportive coverage while “little space [is] given to countervailing points of view”; journalists and editors (including some of his Observer colleagues) publish obsessional and misleading arguments; some respected gender-critical figures "descend into outright nastiness" by comparing trans women to “blackface actors” or medical gender reassignment to a forced lobotomy.
He doesn’t say who he is accusing of outright nastiness here, but it is clear to anyone who has been following trans activist talking points that he is referring to Magdalen Berns (a young YouTuber who died of a brain tumour in 2019), JK Rowling and me.
My story is the one that JK Rowling told the world about: I lost my job at the Centre for Global Development for having gender-critical views. I took my employer to tribunal in a landmark case and, after an initial loss, won on appeal in a legal battle that took three years and created a precedent that protects others at work. The tribunal found it would be “an error to treat a mere statement of Ms Forstater’s protected belief [that human beings cannot change sex] as inherently unreasonable or inappropriate” and concluded that I had been directly discriminated against simply for holding my belief.
Rather than explaining this, Moore obliquely references two tweets of mine that have attracted criticism from trans rights activists. In one I share an article about compelled speech entitled “Pronouns are Rohypnol”. In the other I defend the decision not to allow biologically male athletes with differences of sexual development to compete in women's middle-distance running, disputing statements made in an advertisement featuring Caster Semenya which argues “everyone has the right to run”. Moore challenges people who seek calm and open debate to disown my statements, which he calls toxic and attacking—intellectual junk and spite.
The challenge to disown even carefully expressed gender-critical arguments—or face being disowned yourself, by your friends and your colleagues—is what keeps so many people cowed. Defence is pointless. Mud sticks. Apparently, we don't even deserve to be named. Thanks Rowan. Thanks Prospect.
All of this takes us further away from calm discussion of what "trans rights" are. Moore weaves assertions of rights through his article. The right to dictate other people's language. The right to use opposite-sex facilities. The right to compete in opposite-sex sports. None of these are in fact rights, they are demands. We have every right to reject them, and to state in clear language why we have done so—as the judgement in my case established.
“Trans rights” are in fact much more limited. They derive from the universal human rights we all share, in particular the rights to freedom of expression and privacy. Both of these are qualified. Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. In fact it stops before that, because institutions need clarity about what sex means in order to collect accurate data; administer and regulate services; and communicate, enforce and comply with laws.
Moore argues that the feeling of having a gender identity that is different from one’s sex is deeply important for some people. No one is disputing this. The question is what we should do to accommodate and protect them, given that in reality human beings cannot change sex.
With the unprecedented rise in children seeking to transition, it is parents who are dealing with this awful dilemma first, and then schools. Should parents support a child to transition in the hope that it will make them happier? Or keep talking and hope that they grow out of their gender distress without taking puberty blockers and hormones, or going on to have their breasts, uterus and vagina removed, or their testicles excised and their penis turned inside out?
Do you promise them that other people will accept them as the opposite sex, or do you explain that the fabric of reality cannot be forced to bend to their wishes?
The heart of this is that human beings cannot change sex, your daughter does not become your son by cutting her breasts off, and other people cannot be forced to deny the truth. I am sure that hurts with a pain I can barely imagine. I have spoken to many parents with children who identify as transgender. Many feel desperately betrayed by society’s institutions that have encouraged their children into dysphoria and the dream that they can change sex. Others, who have encouraged their child to transition, desperately want society’s institutions to tell them they have done the right thing.
It may well turn out that putting distressed young people on a treatment pathway that can lead to sterilisation and loss of adult sexual function is a medical and ethical scandal, not the next human rights frontier. Doctors, teachers, social workers, academics, medical researchers, journalists, regulators, lawmakers and judges have a duty to deal fearlessly with evidence and truth. They should not have to fear for their jobs when they do.
