I’ve seen this movie before. Australia passed a law clearly defining marriage as between a man and a woman. One by one, US states and other countries were doing the same. A bitter and divisive debate was conclusively ending. Common sense had prevailed, and we could get back to talking about the serious issues of the day.
And a decade later it all started to unravel. We had to do it all over again, the bitter arguments, innocent people dragged through the mud just to prove a point. All to reach a conclusion that we all knew we’d reach eventually, but late and via the dumbest route possible.
The TERFs at the BBC are in raptures. This article persistently uses the past tense. The war is over. Do you hear? Over. All that remains is to discuss the electoral implications for the various political parties.
It completely fails to address how weak and temporary this ruling is.
The point is that we now know things we did not previously know. Science has advanced. We know a lot more about genetics, hormones, embryonic development, psychology, gender dysphoria, and the sociology of gender, than we ever did before. That’s why we’re having this conversation now. Previously it was simply never a question anyone needed to address, whether someone is male or female, and we accumulated centuries of law based on the assumption that this was always clear. We now know that it’s not clear. And that has pulled the rug out from under the legal status of millions of people.
You can’t have millions of people queuing up outside the Old Bailey to one-by-one have a judge stamp a paper with “male” or “female”. For the first time, we need a concise definition so that we can all get on with our lives. And I’m not talking about transgender people here. I’m not transgender, but I’ve never had my gender genetically tested. It’s just a fact that science has rendered my gender legally unproven, until a clear definition is created.
So what has the supreme court said? They’ve said that legal gender is “biological sex”. And that means nothing. Transgender people are not cyborgs, they’re 100% biological, top to bottom, all the way through. Nothing about their sex is not biological.
Which part of biology are we talking about here? Genes? Hormones? Gametes? Genitalia? It can’t be any of those things, because all of those would lead to blatant injustice. You can’t tell a middle-aged heterosexual woman, born female, who lived through female puberty, got her first period, married a man, conceived a baby, endured natural vaginal birth, and raised a daughter to adulthood, all without ever questioning her gender, that the genetic test says she’s a man and therefore no longer the mother of her daughter. It would be a scandal, and something would need to be done.
Injustice is not just wrong. It’s unsustainable. Democratic or authoritarian, all regimes mess with injustice at their peril, and they know that very well.
If I cut off your penis, would you start wearing dresses? No. So it’s not genitalia either. It can’t be hormones: we can’t have a system where people change gender by working out. And many, many people never produce gametes. All of these things just throw ordinary people into legal limbo.
So what else? Perhaps it’s not just one of those things, but a combination of factors? Maybe we should have a points system for womanhood. 10 points for getting a period, -5 points for having a Y chromosome, and a number of points calculated from the ratio of oestrogen to testosterone. That would probably solve the injustice problem. And now you need to hire an accountant and have several medical tests before you can know your own gender. Common sense!
There is no other plausible outcome from this supreme court decision. There is no way this is going to be a popular decision in the long term.
Everything got a lot more complicated, but not because of “extremist gender ideology”, but because of the steadily increasing knowledge of the human race. The lesson of the story of the Garden of Eden is not that there are two genders, it’s the tragic truth that you can’t unlearn something once you’ve learned it. “And then they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That’s not a literal fruit you see, it’s a metaphor. Did you catch that at the back? I SAID IT’S A FUCKING METAPHOR!” You’d have to be pretty dim to miss the point there.
Gay marriage is no longer in the news much, because we solved the controversy by just making the obviously correct choice. Similarly the “gender question” is not going away until the “common sense” approach of self-identification is enshrined in law. If history is anything to go by, that change won’t take generations. But it’ll be plenty long enough to destroy a lot of lives.