Why Are Trans Scared of Free Speech?
JON GAUNT
If your daughter was in the Girl Guides or Brownies and was going on a camp, would you expect to be informed if she was sharing bathroom facilities and sleeping accommodation with boys? Obviously, the answer is yes.
But in today’s “topsy-turvy never criticise a transworld,” you would be the person who is in the wrong and you would be accused of being a transphobe. Even worse, if you were a leader of a rainbow pack for girls aged between five and seven, you would be kicked out of the Girl Guide Movement for expressing any such concern.
Yes, this Orwellian nightmare is alive and kicking in the Girl Guides. Helen Watts, the leader of a Rainbow group for girls aged 5 to 7 in London, has been kicked out of the organization after volunteering for more than 15 years.
Her crime? She dared to oppose new “equality & diversity” rules which compel Brownies to let transgender-identifying boys share showers and other facilities with girls as young as five.
According to the Sunday Times Helen was one of 12 leaders who signed a letter in April saying the new transgender guidelines raised safeguarding issues. Which seems a pretty reasonable concern to me and probably most people reading this article. However, the Girl Guides association saw it differently and closed down Helen’s group along with one other and launched disciplinary investigations into five others.
Helen was told that as she was “not willing to follow Girlguiding’s equality and diversity policy in so far as it provides for transgender inclusion” she had to leave and have no further contact with her girls or their parents.
This is disgraceful but it gets worse. Since last year the Guides have allowed male-bodied trans adults who self-identify as women to be Guide leaders. Even worse, the policy states that parents should not be told if their daughter’s leader, or a child, is transgender. I am sorry and I am prepared for the accusations of being transphobic but this is clearly dangerous and putting our girls at risk.
Now I don’t think every trans adult is a potential pedophile, but I do think that as a parent I have a right to know if someone has self-identified as a woman even if they are biologically still a man, don’t you?
Worse still, this nonsense isn’t just happening in the Brownies. The feminist writer Julie Bindel wrote a fascinating piece in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, called Transgender Activists Are Fanning The Flames of Misogyny.
In this column Julie highlights the fact that the all-male National Executive of the Fire Brigades Union, the FBU, have passed a policy that supports the rights of men to self-identify as women, which, in turn, enables them to use women’s dorms, washing facilities and lavatories.
Julie points out that women comprise only 7 percent of the fire brigade, but that number will now go up but “these “women” are likely to have penises and Adam’s apples.”
Julie quotes Lucy Masoud the FBU’s LGBT rep who says, “Many of us are outraged that a group of men has decided, without any consultation with female members, that a man can self-ID as a woman.”
So that’s the Girl Guides and the FBU, but this madness is happening in every walk of life. If you dare to criticise it, as the conservative and Catholic commentator and mum of four children, Caroline Farrow did on GMB this week, you are attacked by what looks like a well organized and coordinated mob on Twitter. They will accuse you of being a transphobe in an attempt to silence you and kill all debate and make sure you never get invited on to the programme again. I think, if anything, I find this Orwellian shutting down of the debate more dangerous than the actual silly politics.
It started with the “no platforming” of even top academic and feminist Germaine Greer for daring to hold the view that transgender women are not women and that they do not “look like, sound like or behave like women”.
Then there have been attacks on Woman’s Place. This is a small group of women who want to discuss whether the law should be changed to make self-identification easier. Judith Green of Woman’s Place talks about the fact that, “the managers of the venues we book are harassed, our attendees are abused, our organisers are threatened.”
Today a Trans activist, Adrian Harrop has succeeded in having a billboard removed that only had six words on it, “Woman, women, noun, adult human female.” Adrian is a Twitter activist and NHS doctor, and he complained that it made transgender people feel unsafe. The words by the way are just the Google definition of what a woman is! Primesight, the billboard company caved in and apologised, after he went on social media, accusing them of being complicit “in the spread of transphobic hate speech”.
It is clear that Trans activists are trying to suppress all discussion of the Gender Recognition Act and the changes that they are proposing.
ER Editor: The UK’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 requires a set of criteria to be satisfied before gender changes are officially accepted:
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 enables transsexual people to apply to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). A Gender Recognition Certificate is the document issued that shows that a person has satisfied the criteria for legal recognition in the acquired gender.
In essence, if these changes go through, I as a man can just say I am a woman today and that is the end of the matter. From that moment on I, even though I still have a penis, can have access to female toilets, changing rooms, women’s refuges, female hospital wards, girl guide camps and tents and even female prisons.
Well again, call me a transphobe but this is ridiculous – almost as ridiculous as Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner being voted woman of the year and being given a cover photo on Vanity Fair when he was still biologically a man! Now, if you even refer to a trans by their birth name, or dead name as the activists call it, then this is career suicide in the modern media world.
If you doubt this would actually happen, just wait a moment and consider this fact from Julie Bindle’s column: “This idiotic campaign has even been adopted by the Labour leadership (consisting of macho men reminiscent of the Seventies), who have decided to support having men who claim to be women on all-female shortlists.”
I haven’t got a problem with trans people. However, I do doubt whether a child at five knows or has the ability to self-identify their gender. I also have very real concerns about changing the Gender recognition act, and I should have a right to discuss these views in a reasonable debate.
I also have a major problem, as Julie says, “when Self-appointed “feminist allies” such as the Leftist poster boy, Owen Jones seem to get a thrill out of screaming “transphobe” at those of us who make it clear we do not believe men can be women simply because they say they are.”
We desperately need a real open debate about this subject, and this attempt at suppression of free speech by the Trans lobby must be resisted by all, no matter what side of the debate you are on.
I am not sure I would go as far as Julie when she says that, “transgender ideology is nothing more than gross misogyny dressed up as progress.” However, the debate is vital and I am definitely against this Orwellian closing down of free speech on the subject.
According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s best estimates, there are between 300 thousand and half a million trans in the UK. If this is the case, although of course, I believe they deserve equality and not to be persecuted, I cannot quite believe that this small minority of people is exercising such draconian, bullying and quite frankly fascist control over the agenda.
Just what are these activists so frightened of? Surely if their arguments are so well balanced and justified, they should fear no one in debate including Julie Bindle and Germaine Greer?
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