Sex

It has been clear for some time that this general election, when it came, would see Conservative politicians attempt to whip up a storm around sex and gender. Targeting poorly understood minorities is standard play for the party when it’s in trouble, and lately it has been drawing heavily on the tactics of the US evangelical right, which has found transphobia a useful tool through which to start radicalising people. Kemi Badenoch’s latest move, however, isn’t just transphobic – it’s unworkable.

Of course, the right has always hankered after the days when ‘men were real men and women were real women’. It’s not for nothing that Rishi Sunak chooses to pose on the exercise machines he rarely uses while Liz Truss prefers to sit beneath a tree in a walled garden wearing a dress that makes her look like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Faced with fictive claims about schools teaching there are 72 genders, and other such nonsense, one can understand why the average person might feel a bit confused and might long for the simplicity of the past. But sex was never simple. It just looks that way through a veil of ignorance – and when laws are based on ignorance, they don’t work.

The LGBTQ movement—first the campaigners for gay and lesbian rights, and now for transgender rights—deserve credit for shaking up our thinking. They’ve made a compelling case that most of the old beliefs about gender were arbitrary taboos, trapping people in lives that confined them and made them miserable. Just as we’ve rejected stereotypes about how women or people of color were “meant” to live, we’re now confronting these stereotypes in turn.

However, every step forward provokes a backlash from those who benefit—or seek to benefit—from oppression. The Catholic church (and, sad to say, Richard Dawkins) are clinging to the notion that all the old beliefs about gender were fine as they were and nothing needs to be questioned or changed. They continue to insist that people should be compelled into roles determined at birth, with no regard for what those people want for themselves.