There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of a German village in the Middle Ages. One day, a resident began to run down the high street. Soon he was joined by another person, then another, then another, until before long the entire populace was running away in panic. The headlong dash continued for some miles until fatigue overcame fear, at which point the steeplechase ceased and the townsfolk began, one would imagine rather sheepishly, to dribble home.

Afterwards, all mention of the incident was forbidden among the citizenry. Embarrassment proved stronger than curiosity. To this day, nobody knows why the first man ran, there being (unusually for the period) no conflict nor other disturbance to have prompted such hysteria. 

Something similar has happened in British politics over the past decade. The latest issue to have demonstrated this phenomenon in full, ignominious flow has been the furore over ‘trans rights’, brought to a head on 16 April when, in a decision surprising for its assertion of reality over entrenched ideology, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that only biological women are women. 

This will strike many in Hungary as an otiose legal judgment, akin to insisting that the Danube flows southeast: simply a matter of fact. The shame of recent years, however, is that truth and facts have been at a heavy discount in Britain. C P Scott’s dictum that ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’ has been trampled frequently and giddily, not least in the pages of The Guardian, a newspaper he edited for nearly 60 years, and most of all on the matter of biological sex versus chosen gender.

‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’

The foundations for this insanity were laid, with wearying predictability, by Tony Blair’s New Labour government. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 allowed adults to change their legal sex on the basis of gender dysphoria, having been prompted by a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 2002 that Articles 8 and 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights were breached by Britain’s refusal to allow trans people to change the sex on their birth certificates.

Blair, having, as usual, rolled over to have his tummy tickled by the European elite for being a good little puppy, the law became effective from 4 April 2005. From then on, successful applicants would receive a Gender Recognition Certificate, allowing them to change their sex at birth as stated on the birth certificate. 

In 2017 the law was proposed to be updated by Cameronite Tory MP Justine Greening, well known for her LGBT activism, and later Penny Mordaunt, with the requirement for medical evidence of having lived as the new gender for at least two years being replaced by the principle of self-identification. As Ms Mordaunt said at the time, they would begin with the idea that ‘transgender women are women’. 

In a rare fit of conservatism from the Tory Party, the government decided in 2020 that it would not change the law, though in practice it had long since ceased to be any kind of obstacle to receiving the coveted GRC. 

That is the Parliamentary background. To a large degree, it is typical of recent years: British law being trumped by European law. Disappointing but not an especially ethical issue. 

The broader political and medical background, however, is far more disturbing. The extent to which this new article of faith was seized upon and amplified by the media, NHS, broader public sector bodies, quangocracy, universities and private enterprise was such that any voice of dissent from within these institutions was silenced ruthlessly. People lost their livelihoods, regardless of the legitimacy of their concerns, previous adherence to left-liberal orthodoxy or public stature. 

Year Zero had been reset, and there could be no quarter given to those insisting that serious questions of medical ethics and political coercion remained to be answered by the trans zealots.

The case of comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and other far-from-conservative programmes, is instructive. Concerned by the rapidity with which trans ideology had been adopted by governments across the United Kingdom, he began to become more public in his questions about it. 

In 2020 he was banned from Twitter for posting that ‘Men aren’t women tho [sic]’ and only had his account returned once the medium had been acquired by Elon Musk. He was cancelled from performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; his marriage failed under the financial strain; he decided, as a consequence, to leave Britain for Arizona, having concluded that the climate of censorship in this country was so great as to be an effective bar on free expression in the arts. 

Another casualty of this culture war was Professor Kathleen Stock, a philosopher at the University of Sussex. As a lesbian, she objected to the way that trans women, particularly those self-identifying who retained male genitalia and expressed sexual attraction to women, were granted unconditional access to previously women-only spaces such as changing rooms, lavatories, prisons, hospital wards and dormitories. This is regardless of the risk to biological women that they would be sexually assaulted. 

In 2021, she was forced from her academic position after a campaign by students and fellow academics accusing her of ‘transphobia’ and alleging that her views made them unsafe. It was only in March of this year that the Office for Students fined the University an unprecedented £585,000 for failing to uphold its right to freedom of speech, particularly in its 2018 ‘non-binary equality policy statement’, by which it was demanded that all teaching material portray trans people in a positive light. 

The University is, of course, challenging this ruling.

‘Many remain too afraid for their careers to speak out, aware that brave people like Linehan, Stock, Rosie Kay, Maya Forstater and others have done so at great personal cost’

Perhaps most illustrative of the way that this ideology captured the public square is the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s vacillation from declaring, while Leader of the Opposition, that men can have a cervix and women a penis, to his recent statements that he has always believed that only biological women are women. Sir Keir is the non plus ultra of the contemporary left’s paralysing terror of aggravating leftist activist opinion, allied to a rigidly legalistic mindset which can assert a thing and its opposite without the hint of a blush, just so long as the law (of whichever court) has led the way.

Starmer’s failure while in Opposition to defend women’s rights will, I think, be seen by future historians as the beginning of a sea change in British political life. Once lifelong leftists realized that their own side would not defend them against trans radicalists if they were to come under attack for asserting biological truth, they began to question all of their associated beliefs about progressive causes and whether those with whom they are allied deserved their support. 

Many remain too afraid for their careers to speak out, aware that brave people like Linehan, Stock, Rosie Kay, Maya Forstater and others have done so at great personal cost. Others are doing so tentatively, others with increasing courage. It is clear, though, that the hegemony of trans ideology has ended, and with it, we must pray, the unquestioning rush of the British state to leave the village as quickly as possible, regardless of the fact that there is nobody to run from.

Related articles: