The Great Woke War heats up

And has not been tempered by a court ruling on Trans rights

Much ado about loos

Transgender people are so much in the news these days that it might be imagined that Britain is overrun by them. In fact, according to Office for National Statistics, 0.15% of the population, amounting to 9,000 people, are trans women and 0.22% or 14,000 are trans men.

So, that’s a very tiny percentage of the population. Obviously the role of government is to look after the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people they govern. But the interests of the majority can only be safeguarded by securing the interests of the minority. It seems to be a paradox but it is a consistent fact of history.

Sometimes minorities are hard to fathom, at other times annoying and at yet other times dangerous. In other words, minority groups are not homogenous and need to be treated with respect up to the point that they have proved not to be worthy of this respect.

Within the incredibly small cohort of trans men are some very bad people who have used their actual or false transgender transition to exploit and even harm women. Understandably this gives rise to concern. More generally many women are understandably concerned to preserve the safety and reassurance of women only spaces.

The leap from valid concerns to the mass demonization of transgender people is terrifying. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, seems to be quite obsessed with this issue and is seemingly transfixed by the idea of male genitalia (who has it and who does not). She and an avid band of newspapers combined with the usual suspects, such as Nigel Farage, believe this issue stands on the frontline of their war against woke.

The idea that they have become born again feminists in protecting women’s interests is derisory. Just wait until they have another opportunity to deride any move towards sexual equality.

Those of us who are comfortable in our birth genders find it hard to understand the trauma of people who are not. But there are many things we don’t understand about other people which makes them stand out as being different. This is no excuse for demonization, even though some trans rights activists seem determined to go out of their way to diminish understanding.

A recent Supreme Court ruling has been billed as bringing clarity to this matter by confirming that a person’s birth gender is the only gender recognized in law when it comes to things such as lavatory facilities, prison allocation etc.

On the surface the ruling appears to be perfectly sensible and might have calmed things down because the judges also went out of their way to insist that the human rights of trans people need to be protected.

Lamentably calm has not ensued. This is a complex matter which should have been dealt with by examining the need to change equalities law rather than interpreting the law. The government declined to wander into this minefield and was thankful that the courts have helped them out.

What this inevitably means is that the government’s opponents and the shrill populists have declared ‘victory’ and, because enough is never enough, they want to go further in what they see as a winning battle in the Great Woke War.

Most trans people just want to get on with their lives and have no desire to be caught up in this war.

There is also polling evidence that the average British citizen is far more open minded about issues of sexual identity than the warmongers would like to believe.

But it is a fact of life that the attention seekers and political opportunists (actually the same thing) are reluctant to let go of an issue which they firmly believe is working for them.

If there is some collateral damage, such as wrecking the lives of trans people, so be it. If there is still confusion within places like hospitals and police forces over how to handle all this, the demagogues are, if anything, delighted because they like the confusion and anyway have a lurking suspicion that something called political correctness is far too prevalent within public bodies.

I know it’s not the same thing but it is part of the sexual identity and diversity debate, so when in 1986 the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, reformed the draconian laws making life difficult and dangerous for homosexuals, the same newspapers and the forerunners of today’s demagogues issued dire warning of the collapse of society. No child will be safe, they screamed and more of that ilk.

Today only the most ardent homophobes seriously believe any of this to be true. Time and experience have shown that majority of people who are not homosexual, have absolutely no problem living alongside gays and, particularly in the younger generation, find it hard to understand why there was ever a problem.

Will trans people ever get to live in peace? That’s not clear.