Whatever we may think of Trump and the MAGA fans, the voters of America gave a startling wake-up call against woke politics earlier this month. It wasn’t just the economy or immigration that won it for “the Donald”. There is clear evidence that what tipped the balance of an election forecast to be finely balanced was the identity politics with which Kamala Harris was so strongly associated. In the first of two related blogs, today I will examine the implications for future MAP strategy, not that I will be saying much about that today. Instead, I will focus on how the wheels have come off the transgender political bandwagon, with particular reference to the damage done by activist extremism.   

Trans women are men. Get over it.

Not my words, but those of trans woman Debbie Hayton.

Blunt language.

So, she must be a self-hating transphobe, right? Wrong! What science teacher Hayton hates after years of being subjected to the bogus “transphobia” slur, which wrecked her opportunity to lead the teachers’ union NASUWT after she had been elected president, is the untold harm done to trans kids by unhinged activists who have lost all touch with reality.

Truths about transness have been swept under the carpet for years now, the inevitable outcome being that “woke” ideology on the topic has been utterly discredited – so much so that it could well have been the tipping factor that has given Trump another term. A single campaign ad on this theme shifted viewer opinion 2.7 percentage points towards him according to data gathered for Kamala Harris’s side.

Prodigious HTOC commentator “Prue” gave us a hefty steer on the idiocy of the ideologues by posting a link the other day to a YouTube video by Sophia Narwitz – another trans woman with her head screwed on properly, unlike the swivel-headed ranters. We learn that, according to the sort of activists who are “their own worst enemy”, straight guys are transphobic if they prefer to date actual women rather than trans ones, who may well still have a penis. These woke whingers seem to have forgotten that for relationships to work they need to be based on mutual attraction and consent. You can’t just demand that someone else should find you sexy. With the best will in the world, that’s not how sexual attraction works.

What the extremists have managed to get away with very successfully, though, is their argumentum ad baculum. In plain English, “Agree with me, or there will be… consequences” – a word freighted with all the understated menace of a gentle word in your ear from the mafia. These are no empty threats. The “consequences” might include anything from getting someone fired from their job for alleged transphobic speech, to making hostile moves involving their children, as happened to psychology professor Mike Bailey, to launching police investigations over so-called “hate incidents”.

We have been under a tsunami of the latter lately, haven’t we? As The Times reported recently, “13,200 hate incidents had been logged in the past year, including against schoolchildren, vicars and doctors”. Some look superficially quite amusing, too bonkers to be taken seriously, such as a front-page lead story in The Sun a couple of days ago, about a hate complaint based on someone being given “a dodgy haircut”. Another complaint was literally batty: someone was reported for asking whether a Chinese meal came “with bats”. Another was a Welsh so-called victim upset over being called a “sheep shagger”, which everyone knows is something all rural Welsh males get up to, starting from about age five, as soon as they are strong enough to hold the sheep steady, with its back legs down their cute little wellies.

Sticking with the trans-themed ones, ex-police officer Harry Miller won a legal challenge at the Court of Appeal after Humberside police logged alleged transphobic tweets from him as “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs). His posts on X included, “l was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.” A NCHI was logged in Cumbria after a victim complained they had been misgendered, and in Northumbria a caller reported “incorrect pronouns” were used when addressing them. These, bear in mind, were complaints to the police – in other words, complaints which would inevitably have consequences, tying up Miller and so many others in lengthy legal procedures aimed at the difficult but vitally needed task of clearing their names of any wrong-doing.

To appreciate exactly why even a clearly tough and combative ex-cop like Miller should not be subjected to the chilling effect of such possible consequences, it will help if we come back to Debbie Hayton, with whom we might feel a lot more in common and who plainly knows what she is talking about – unlike Miller, whose forte is the law and free speech rights rather than trans issues, although he has made clear he is not anti-trans. “Don’t mis-species me” is a clever line, but if he’d totally mastered his satirical brief he’d have said “but I identify as fish”. We can perfectly well identify as fish, after all, but have an orientation towards mammals.

Pedantic? Trust me, in the confusing world of sex/gender semantics it is impossible to be too pedantic. There are times when conceptual exactitude is imperative. The deliberately disruptive queer strategy of challenging hegemonic, heteronormative concepts through such means as contesting established binaries has its uses, but it is also capable of marooning us in a meaningless verbal morass, leaving us vulnerable to stupid policy making that harms kids.

So, back to Hayton. I described her as a trans woman, but that is a term we need to unpack if we are to understand why she is so utterly at odds with all those other trans women who insist that “Trans women are women” and there should be no debate about it. In particular, we need to get our heads around the clunky term “autogynephilia”. It’s a safe bet that few of the many celebrities from showbiz, sport, etc., who have been quick to jump aboard the fashionable trans bandwagon, lecturing us on how we just need to be kind and understanding, have even heard the word. They may be genuinely kind. But understanding? Not so much.

The trouble is that the public at large, including the celebs, have a poor understanding of what it means to be transgender. Even worse, they mistakenly believe they do know plenty, especially on the liberal side. Which is why the gung ho libs and radicals cannot see any reason for discussing trans rights when, as they think, all that is needed is to uphold them. Specifically, they appear to be largely unaware that there are significantly different types of trans psychology, which have major (and differing) political implications.

One of these types is autogynephilia. Psychologist Ray Blanchard worked out back in the 1980s that trans women fall into one of two very different psychologies. First were “homosexual transsexuals”: gay men whose boyhood effeminacy can make living as a woman seem an almost “natural” next step. The second are “autogynephiles”: heterosexual men who mainly transition later, often after fathering children. Not only are they sexually attracted to women, just like regular straight guys, they often have very masculine interests and jobs. As a young newspaper reporter back in the 1970s, I encountered Roberta Cowell, who had been a Spitfire pilot in WW2 and later became a racing driver. These males (Roberta had started life as Robert and will not mind me “deadnaming” her now she has been actually dead for many years) are sexually turned on not only by cross-dressing but by the idea of being a woman.

Blanchard’s theory was adapted by doctor and psychologist Anne Lawrence, to whom I was introduced at a conference in Paris many years ago. Anne is herself an autogynephilic trans woman, who argues autogynephilia is both a sexual and romantic attraction. She and I had what I felt was an interesting, pleasant, mutually respectful encounter, discussing both transgender and paedophilia.

One reason we hear so little about autogynephilia, apart from the less than catchy name, is sheer fear. There are militant activists who hate this now well substantiated concept, are in denial about its reality, and who do their damnedest to make sure there are serious “consequences” for those who publicly give it credence – the most prominent among them, perhaps, being Mike Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen, which goes into the evidence for autogynephilia. He is a leading professor who has courageously championed my pro-MAP writing. They call him a transphobe. I know he is not. But why the controversy? Why the denial?

“First”, said Hayton in a recent Times story, “what man wants to admit fancying himself? Second, the ‘the wrong body’ theory posits being trans as a terrible misfortune, so everybody needs to be kind to us and give us rights. Whereas if you’re having an affair with yourself you’re obliged to take responsibility for your own actions and the damage you cause.” Damage? What damage? She continues:

Moreover, it’s harder to demand access to intimate female spaces if that need is erotically motivated. For decades, transsexual women have relied upon female goodwill to use their bathrooms and changing rooms, but self-ID destroyed that precious trust. Women were happy to take in the odd refugee from masculinity. But in the past five years it’s become a wave of colonisers, and that is very different.

As her interlocutor in The Times says:

These days, Hayton’s classic “persistent, consistent and insistent” childhood [gender] dysphoria may have led to doctors prescribing puberty blockers and hormones. Does she wish she’d transitioned earlier? Hayton points to a photograph of her adult children on the wall. “There’s three people who wouldn’t be here if I had – and not being able to have your own kids is huge. … Second, try finding a life partner as a post-operative 22-year-old trans woman attracted to females. Your dating pool is tiny. Basically, you’re looking at bisexual women and many of them end up with men.”

What we are hearing from Hayton, I suggest, is a perfectly reasonable plea for caution over early surgical transition, from someone with unimpeachable personal experience. She has her own recent book Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality. Of course, her story is not the whole story of transness. Social transition is much more common and much less drastic than the full-on physical kind, which relatively few trans kids will undergo. But the numbers are not trivial. More than 14,000 American children had gender-related medical interventions between 2019 and 2023, of which 5,747 minors received gender-transition surgeries. That is boys having their dicks cut off and girls losing their tits. Serious, heavy stuff. Not something to be chosen on a whim like getting your ears pierced or having a tattoo done.

And don’t be deceived by the counter-argument that trans kids are at even greater risk, from suicide, if they are denied the puberty blockers that could start them happily on their way towards cross-sex hormones and full surgical transition. You know the activist slogan, “Better a live daughter than a dead son”. It’s bullshit. The figures do not stack up. Trans kids often have mental health problems that sadly means they have a higher level of suicidal feelings than average; but the balance of research evidence does not point to an elevated suicide rate in the absence of gender-confirming treatment. The loony militants are also deep in denial of de-transitioning, falsely claiming hardly anyone ever regrets undergoing trans medical procedures. They have to keep up this pretence because the truth would prick their propaganda bubble.

Prue rightly pointed out in the comments space here recently that there is no conspiracy of “trans groomers coming for your kids”. That expression implies a sexual motive for which there is no evidence. Some militant trans activists are shamelessly devious, but there is no reason to suppose they are “deviant” in the implied way. In this respect, the “groomer” allegation is the sort of baseless fearmongering one might often see in the right-wing social media.

But Prue has also shrewdly drawn attention to the role of capitalism in our affairs. What’s that got to do with it? Plenty. Just follow the money. It is no accident that it is in the US, where medicine is a business like any other, that the bad stuff has been most rife. Not grooming for sex but pushing for profit. Much like the Big Pharma drug pushers behind the American opiate epidemic, hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery (that’s what trans operations are, medically unnecessary just like nose jobs and butt lifts but far more drastic) have been pushed on kids in the US just because there is profit in them.

It is also no accident that it is in Europe, where medicine is largely a not-for-profit public service, that patient’s interests come first, and where the transgender treatment scam has been most effectively exposed and demolished. Remember the UK’s landmark Cass Review earlier this year? It has been widely hailed for its calm, careful, thorough, trawl through the issues and the research evidence, along with smaller reviews from other European countries that have come to similar conclusions. America, by contrast, has seen high-profile attempts to trash its findings, with a series of feeble, distorted, false “rebuttals” emanating from outfits that have fallen to profit-driven regulatory capture (in the guise of championing trans rights) including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the staggeringly super woke magazine Scientific American – which long ago sacrificed science to liberal politics.

Let’s support adults in their choices, and also minors, but only once we can be sure they truly know what they are doing. This must be not only after proving themselves “persistent, consistent and insistent” but also after being properly counselled on the downside of any choices as well as the benefits.

Trans treatment options are not the main point of this two-part blog, though, just a necessary step on the way. The even bigger issue I want to get across next time concerns how we need to get back to reality in progressive political activism, whether it be of the trans variety, or MAP, or whatever. The big question is how we can generate credible, truthful messages rather than peddling fantasies such as “trans women are women” when plainly they are not, in anything but a courtesy sense. I have no problem with using someone’s preferred pronouns, respecting trans people’s legitimate employment rights, etc., but there are compelling reasons why we should not allow our language to be hijacked.

It is a deep subject, taking us into the philosophy of language and the different ways in which culture and biology influence our thinking on gender, sex, and the often confusing relationship between them. While the massive legal implications of all this will not be my primary concern, it is worth just briefly noting that the UK Supreme Court has spent the last two days pondering the “What is a woman?” question, in a case brought by For Women Scotland. With any luck, by the time the second part of this blog comes out the ruling in this case will have been given and I’ll be able to say a few words about it, including any policy implications.

IT’S NOT THE SEX, IT’S THE VIOLENCE

They say it is unprecedented. No Archbishop of Canterbury has ever been forced to resign over a “sin of omission”, or possibly anything else (although a couple have been martyred), in more than one and a half thousand years since the top church job in England was created by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. Until now.

So, even after decades of decline in active membership of the country’s “established” church, the resignation of Archbishop Justin Welby this month following a child abuse scandal is a big deal.

And no wonder he had to go, because this time there can be no dispute as to the abuse in question really being grotesquely abusive, with very little excuse for Welby being unaware of it or for failing to act more decisively against the abuser.

As readers in Britain will probably be aware, I am referring to John Smyth, a barrister whose sadistic beatings of teenage boys and young men over a period of decades in a context of church-related activities was documented in the recent Makin Review. He ran the influential conservative evangelical Iwerne camps, and had acted as a lawyer for Mary Whitehouse, a notoriously censorious Christian morality campaigner in her day. The Iwerne Trust organised Christian holiday camps to instruct boys from public school in “muscular Christianity” and, with a conservative evangelical theology, to become future Christian leaders, especially within the Church of England.

A book documenting Smyth’s dark deeds came out in 2021. Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of the Iwerne Camps was written by Andrew Graystone, a journalist and theologian who had been involved in Smyth’s exposure. Graystone described how Smyth involved himself with boys in the Christian Forum at Winchester College, one of Britain’s most prestigious fee-paying schools.

He would regularly drive two or three boys from this group to his home just outside Winchester, to share Sunday lunch with him and his family. “Those boys whom he had successfully groomed”, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, would individually be taken to a shed in his garden and subjected to canings, “initially equating to the severity of their supposed spiritual infringement” or specific “sin”. Knowing teenage boys, masturbation was doubtless the top “sin” on the list: Smyth often preached against it.

These canings were so prolonged and ferocious that the boys were given adult nappies to prevent them from bleeding on the Smyth family furniture. Smyth had a special garden shed designed, soundproofed and equipped with a variety of canes. When he was carrying out a beating a white yachting pennant would be planted on the lawn so that his wife Anne and members of his family knew that he should not be disturbed.

Hideous, or what?

But the most disturbing thing is that no one at the time appears to have been disturbed. The church hierarchy, as well as Smyth’s family, must have known what was going on, according to a number of investigations; but all of them, including Welby, decided for far too long that Smyth “should not be disturbed”.

The Makin Review describes a focus on personal sinfulness in the church, “a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission”, often focused on young men’s masturbation. But as high-profile vicar Giles Fraser noted, “Christ died for our sins, he was whipped for our transgressions”. So, it is not very surprising that earnest Christian young men could easily be persuaded that their religion required their own, Christ-like personal suffering.

Did I say the church’s silence was the most disturbing thing? Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that these young males appeared to have submitted to the beatings of their own free will. These were not little kids. They were committed Christians who had long enjoyed the benefits of a sophisticated, expensive education. They included those who were well over the age of consent and might be thought to have known their own minds and had the right to decide such matters for themselves. After all, few now dispute the right of adults to take part in BDSM practices.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I am not at all comfortable with that thought. It complicates the question of consent, doesn’t it?

THE PENNY DROPS AT LAST

Would you Adam and Eve it, just as I dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s of my main article above, into my inbox drops news from America that supports my case against trans activist extremism more convincingly than anything I could possibly write myself.

It’s a cough. A confession. Trans activists in America have started to admit that their tactics have backfired, with electoral consequences. A report in The New York Times sets it out all very clearly, so I hardly need add a thing. The following is taken, unadorned, from the first few paragraphs of a substantial report:

After a Democratic congressman defended parents who expressed concern about transgender athletes competing against their young daughters, a local party official and ally compared him to a Nazi “cooperator” and a group called “Neighbors Against Hate” organized a protest outside his office.

When J.K. Rowling said that denying any relationship between sex and biology was “deeply misogynistic and regressive,” a prominent L.G.B.T.Q. group accused her of betraying “real feminism.” A few angry critics posted videos of themselves burning her books.

When the Biden administration convened a call with L.G.B.T.Q. allies last year to discuss new limits on the participation of transgender student athletes, one activist fumed on the call that the administration would be complicit in “genocide” of transgender youth, according to two people with knowledge of the incident.

Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.

“We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.”

Precisely, Rodrigo! Just such a shame it took y’all so long for the penny to drop.