Snippets

The trouble with women is that they have opinions and not necessarily the correct ones. Some even have the audacity to demand a say in how the term ‘women’ is defined, which has been causing all sorts of problems lately. All credit, then, to the Liberal Democrats, who have devised an ingenious solution to the hassle caused by women and opinions: they’ve adopted a definition of ‘transphobia’ that effectively silences women who have the wrong opinions about ‘gender identity'.

As the party says up-front, its new policy has ‘drawn on the work done by organisations such as Stonewall and TransActual UK’. Bothersome women used to get stoned, now they get Stonewalled.

Also forbidden is language that ‘eradicates the trans person’s gender identity in favour of their biology at birth’. In practice, it will be deemed transphobic to refer to a biological male as a ‘biological male’ if said biological male identifies as a female and even if that biological male hasn’t undergone surgery and remains an anatomically intact biological male. To give the definition the appearance of robustness, sections have been lifted directly from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism

No mirroring of sturdier definitions of prejudice can conceal what the drafters of this pronunciamento appear to be up to. The phrase ‘knowingly promoting policies and practices that actively discriminate against trans people’ gives the game away, especially when the examples cited include requiring trans people to use ‘segregated facilities’, ‘denying them access to facilities which would be required in order for them to fully participate in public life’, and ‘advocating the withdrawal or defunding of access to transition-related medical treatment’. The clear intention is to make speech or beliefs contrary to the dominant gender ideology incompatible with membership of the Liberal Democrats.

More sinister still is that this definition would appear to cover endorsing provisions of the Equality Act 2010. That law, which recognised sex as a protected characteristic, allows separate services for the sexes where ‘a joint service for persons of both sexes would be less effective and the limited provision is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’. It further exempts single-sex services where ‘only persons of that sex have need of the service’ or ‘a person of one sex might reasonably object to the presence of a person of the opposite sex’.

It’s not hard to imagine the kind of services where gender-critical feminists would want to see these exemptions remain in place, but such women within the Lib Dems could face being censured by their party for ‘transphobia’. Given that party falsely claims on its website that the Equality Act created a protected characteristic of ‘sex/gender’, the writing has been on the wall for some time.

The Liberal Democrats say their list of transphobic behaviours is ‘not exhaustive’. No doubt, but it is exhausting. Progressives are so unnerved by debate and democracy that instead of pursuing political change through persuasion, they are trying to enforce a radical orthodoxy via law, institutional capture, social pressure and even intimidation. The result is as likely to be backlash as it is submission. In the end, though, it’s up to the Lib Dems to set their membership policies and if they want to redefine politics as bigotry, that’s their business. They’ve been redefining ‘liberal’ and ‘democrat’ for some time now.