The trans nonsense must stop

I first stuck my neck out on “trans” nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having kept my own counsel in print for three years thereafter, but this radical fad emerged inexplicably in tandem with the stern message that a single discouraging word would end your career. I delayed writing about the topic because I was cowardly and, regarding my self-interest, smart.

This entire fiasco is based on lies, and a society that embraces bald falsehoods is eating itself hollow

Yet even in 2016 we’d not yet pulled back the curtains on the Overton window. I was still taking my career in my hands with an essay contesting that what I called the “very self” – what the religious call a soul – has a sex. As I did not feel specifically female on my lonesome, I was baffled by a certain contingent’s claim that they “feel like women,” when I didn’t “feel like” a woman and I was one. I objected that transgenderism’s conceptions of male and female rely on crude sexual stereotypes. Miraculously, I got away with that essay. Seems trans activists don’t read Prospect.

Since then, I’ve kept a sporadic hand in this matter, more than once terrifying my Spectator editor, though credit where due: my ever more incredulous pushbacks against the trans contagion were never spiked. So as I join the celebration of last month’s UK Supreme Court decision that sex in law means biological sex, you’ll forgive a fortnightly columnist for being late to the party. This is a subject about which I feel proprietary.

Following Donald Trump’s shocking declaration that there are only two sexes, obviously the Supreme Court decision is a salutary juncture. But it oughtn’t to be. Why should a legal definition of women that excludes, well, men be controversial? The purple-faced outrage of protesters literally pissing in the wind in Parliament Square exemplifies how far we’ve drifted not just from common sense but physical reality.

Because for me this freaky social infatuation has occupied significant intellectual bandwidth, I sometimes wonder whether the ludicrous trend is worth the bother of battling it. Does this goofball movement even matter? The population swapping Y-fronts for knickers and vice versa may have soared, but it’s minuscule in comparison to, say, the population affected by a national housing shortage. Have we trans naysayers lavished our precious, finite energies on a trivial side issue? Maybe the fashion for aping the opposite sex is so overtly dumb that it should be left alone to collapse under its own absurdity.

Yet I come round to the view that defeating this trans nonsense is important. I’m not the only one who kept her mouth shut for ages over this stuff; most of us did, and for far longer. Schools, universities, corporations, police forces and the National Health Service are still buying in. This is an alarming case of mass social brainwashing. In 2010, if you’d polled the public whether it was a good idea to induce widespread and often permanent in-abilities to orgasm and to reproduce in their nation’s children – or in anybody, really – almost no one would have said yes. Virtually overnight, the public has come to endorse child sacrifice.

Any culture that squanders its efforts on drug regimes and plastic surgery meant to deceive both patients and the world at large that they are the sex they are not is profoundly decadent, if not debauched. We’ve a shortage of neither men nor women and pretending to swap them back and forth is a waste of money, medical expertise and social aggravation. Private insurance and NHS coverage of this elective “treatment” is a scandal. If people want to play fleshly dress-up, they should do so on their own dime.

This entire fiasco is based on lies, and a society that embraces bald falsehoods is eating itself hollow. You cannot change sex. “Trans women” aren’t women. There’s no such thing as “gender identity,” “brain sex,” or being “born in the wrong body.” Sex is not “assigned” at birth; it’s observed. Sex is not a feeling but an external, immutable, biological truth. All these mystical notions are medieval, and in institutionalzing them across the modern West we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.

We’re inflicting those lies on a whole generation of children, who are taught that their sex isn’t a fact but a decision. We’re convincing misfits that the solution to their misery is mutilation. We’re enticing both kids and adults into an indefinitely medicalized future and make no mistake: loads of these awful surgeries go wrong. We’ve still no idea how badly adults are damaged by skipping puberty. We’re emotionally imploding whole families.

Promotion for a children’s graphic novel called Homebody describes it as “about trans identity and the importance of living authentically.” Authentically? “Trans identity” is explicitly inauthentic. It’s a performance. It’s posing as something you’re not. Some of these thespians for life are better actors than others, but they’re all phonies. They’ve not discovered their true selves; they’ve adopted an artifice. Adults are free to make that choice – as I should be free to note that even successful imitation of the other sex isn’t “brave,” much less “authentic,” and it achieves exactly nothing.

Until recently, dysphoria was a rare mental illness, which we’ve now elevated to a prestigious designer label. It’s still a mental illness, but the only one we “treat” by nourishing the delusion – worse, a delusion we compel others, in the UK legally compel others, to pretend to share. Losing touch with reality is the definition of insanity. For more than a decade, the better part of the western world has been deranged. Myopic, destructive, unproductive and deeply sick, the trans mania suggests that collectively we’ve no idea what to do with ourselves and we lack a rational sense of purpose. As it does for susceptible individuals, the fad indicts a whole society’s weak sense of self. Does trans represent the demise of our civilization? Maybe not quite. But it’s a bad sign.