Before being a judge, I represented a rape victim who was deaf and unable to speak. She was so badly traumatised that, in a cry for help, she took a kitchen knife out in public and tried to kill herself. She was arrested and brought to court. She did not get bail.
The probation officer – before even meeting me – told me she had decided to oppose bail. A cruel pre-judgment: custody would immediately end her job and change her life. Law has no feeling; it embodied the passive-aggression of society to disabled people and women: it processed her, like meat for dogs.
Two weeks ago, the UN Special Procedures group – 19 specialists in fields including freedom of peaceful assembly and association, freedom of opinion and expression, and violence against women and girls – issued a statement of human rights concern about the UK, towards transsexual and other trans people.
It came in response to the infamous, deeply confused decision of the UK Supreme Court in April in For Women Scotland, where trans people and the vast bulk of women and lesbians were not heard. We were judged by a court packed with non-trans pressure groups, and human rights were scarcely mentioned.
In my opinion, the Supreme Court’s decision forced on women the notion that they are inescapably defined by biology, presumably basic urges and wandering wombs, for sexual relationships, free association and equal rights. It reversed more than 20 years of peaceful co-existence between the trans community and others.
The UK is beyond crisis: the economy is down, inflation is up; electricity and gas are unaffordable. Violence against women is up. Men are discarded, angry. Such a country becomes vulnerable to extremism and minority-blaming.
In 2021, European parliament research revealed how foreign actors use media to stir LGBT+ hate. It is in Russia’s interest to damage our social fabric, rendering us dysfunctional and divided, as there is evidence it did, too, with Brexit.
This LGBT+ emergency is ripping apart tolerant British values. It follows the rise of the Gender Critical Ideology Movement (GCIM). I need not go into suggestions that GCIM is sometimes used as cover for people seeking LGBT+ conversion practices – or that some groups oppose banning conversion therapy towards trans people. Let us note, however, that GCIM did not seem to exist until around 2016, when UK-US movements arose preaching traditional sex roles.
Let me concentrate on the immediate UK human crisis. The government ruled that people like me, previously legally female and (still!) having female anatomy, at risk of assault as with all women, must henceforth change in men’s changing rooms, use men’s loos in pubs and be excluded from female rape services. Despite my female birth certificate, I am apparently a “man”. The EHRC followed suit.
The police confirmed that people who are (or seem to be, one assumes) “trans” shall be strip searched only by men, anatomy be damned. Such sexual assault of “unfeminine” women may now be the law on the ground.
Women with mastectomies are confronted, accused of “transness”. Trans people not “out” at work face disclosure of pariah status. Non-feminine women are confronted by other women in loos. A database has been proposed to enforce segregation. A fund has been created support civil legal enforcement of the new “sex-based” rights. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, wants to segregate trans people in hospitals. Bridget Phillipson, our equalities minister, is MIA.
I formed the Trans Exile Network for those leaving the UK now.
Heterosexual families with kids, where, say, the husband is trans, have been re-designated as “lesbian” because the court redefined “lesbians” as well as “women”. Nobody asked them, of course – unlike the 2004 Act, which was with national consent and consultation.
Trans people are now two sexes at once: one for equalities law (I am now unable to claim equal pay rights as a woman) and one for everything else. Nobody at the top cares: it is “clarification”, says Keir Starmer, ignorantly. Now the GCIM want this rolled out across Europe. Next stop: Ireland.
I’ve been contacted by suicidal people and the parents of kids who have been denied medical treatment. Parents fear for the future of their kids: if not helped now, they face forced puberty against their medical best interests and a harder life. Puberty delaying hormones are reversible and have been used upwards of 20 years to “buy time” until kids are adults and can make decisions.
The court must have assumed that the EHRC is neutral. More fool the court.
But the biggest victim is our country – which I served as a judge for more than 18 years – and truth and humanity in public life.
