Transgender

Richard Dawkins – the biologist, humanist, and author – is a well-known critic of religious faith. As he once put it, ‘Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.’ Traditional religion may have loosened its grip on society, certainly in the United Kingdom, but new quasi-religious ideologies are taking root in spaces that the churches have vacated. Earlier this month, Dawkins upset the transgender brigade by questioning their core beliefs. He Tweeted, ‘In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women,

It’s great that Britain’s high court has ruled that children can’t give informed consent to receive puberty blockers. I only wish that we had made that sort of progress here in Australia. But we haven’t — we’ve gone the other way. Not only are we still handing out puberty blockers to children, we have also introduced ‘self-identification’ for legal sex status in multiple states. What’s more, there are serious attempts under way to introduce legislation that could be used to make it an offence to fail to affirm people’s chosen gender identities. This is happening under the banner of expanding hate speech protections and prohibiting conversion therapy. I’m not writing this

One of the guiding instincts on the political left is that society should be ‘progressive’. Social attitudes, politics and the economy should all advance together, making society fairer and more equal in the process. In this view, a tax can be progressive if it targets the income of the wealthy, just as a law is considered progressive if it protects the rights of a minority. This progressive worldview permeates almost all thinking on the modern left. And yet the contemporary idea of the progressive society has undergone a logical collapse. It has been driven that way by activists, some of whom represent groups with valid causes, but whose messages have

The Care Quality Commission has released its reports on the gender identity services offered by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. They make for grim reading. The CQC describes an NHS facility that — until last month — put vulnerable children on a pathway to the use of untested medicines and life-changing interventions, sometimes without keeping proper records proving consent for treatment or demonstrating the reasons for that treatment. An NHS service where staff were afraid to raise concerns about procedure and practice for fear of ‘retribution’ from their employers. An NHS service that failed to ask fundamental questions about the growing number of vulnerable children being presented for

Academic freedom is vital in a functioning and healthy democracy. But when it comes to questioning and debating ideas around gender identity and sex, many of my colleagues in academia do not appear to agree. The latest glaring example of this came last week. An open letter, signed by over 600 of my colleagues, primarily in academic philosophy, suggested I was personally responsible for ‘transphobic fearmongering’, helping to ‘restrict trans people’s access to life-saving medical treatment’, and serving ‘to encourage the harassment of gender-non-conforming people’. Their pretext was my OBE for services to higher education and academic freedom, awarded in the New Year’s Honours List. Since 2018, I’ve written several

This is an article about some difficult, complex subjects: suicide, mental health, support for transgender children. It’s also about something very simple: a horrible failure of journalism by the BBC. I’ll come to the BBC in due course, but given that this is about the potential for self-harm among young people, I think it’s important to take some time to offer some context and background facts. The first thing to do is to note the longstanding advice to the media from the Samaritans on how to report responsibly on the issue of suicide, in order to avoid the risk of adversely influencing the behaviour of vulnerable people. ‘Steer clear of

The Keira Bell judgment, which said that children are unlikely to be able to give informed consent for taking puberty-blocking drugs, ‘puts trans people everywhere’ at risk. That’s the verdict of Grace Lavery, a professor of English, critical theory, and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. From the other side of the Atlantic, Lavery described the case in an article for Foreign Policy as ‘an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K.’ It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  The High Court determined that children as young as 12 were highly unlikely to be competent to understand and weigh the long-term risks of receiving such radical treatment. As such, the

I’ve always been perplexed why anyone lucky enough to be born male would want to swap sexes. But it seems completely rational to me that girls might rather be boys. The UK’s recent High Court judgment that under-16s aren’t mature enough to give informed consent to puberty blockers highlighted the extraordinary switcheroo that has recently taken place in transgender clinics. Not only have diagnoses of gender dysphoria gone through the roof, but who wants to be what has reversed. A few years ago, nearly three-quarters of patients unhappy with their sex were male; now it’s almost exactly the other way around. So in this season of goodwill, I’d like to

I’m often asked why Channel 4 recently banned an episode of my show The IT Crowd because of ‘transphobia’. I blame spell check. Before the internet, people who sent in crazy, entitled, demanding complaints were known as the ‘green ink brigade’ because of their tendency to write letters in what they thought were attention-grabbing colours. These same lunatics are now taken seriously because spell check means they no longer confuse ‘there’, ‘they’re’, ‘their’ and ‘antelope’. It’s still the same crazies, but these days they’re on Twitter and jumpy executives carry out their every wish. A Sydney production of the musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch was cancelled because the lead