It is impossible to square theses two viewpoints and in trying to do so Sir Keir has been tying himself in knots. Previously he was unable to define a woman, and in his more recent utterance he opines that 99.9% of women do not have a penis. He justified this absurdity by stating ‘there are some people who identify as a different gender to the one they are born with. That is why the Gender Recognition Act was passed to recognise that they need legal support and a framework, and most people don’t disagree with that’.
He is wrong on both counts. People who claim to be transgender have always enjoyed full legal rights. They have never been prohibited from claiming that that they are ‘a different gender to the one they are born with’ or for dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex. They have always been free to do so and the rest of society could choose whether or not to support or encourage them in this delusion. So there was no need for the state to step in on the grounds that they supposedly needed ‘legal support and a framework’.
What the Gender Recognition Act has done is to diminish the rights of the rest of society, who now risk being criminalised if they do not conform to the demands of the ‘transgender community’ and their hard left supporters. So, for example, a failure to address them in their preferred pronouns, or to assert that ‘trans women’ are not real women, can now be interpreted as a hate crime. As a consequence, this legislation allows a very small number of delusional freaks to intimidate the rest of society. Contrary to the views of Sir Keir, it is very unlikely that ‘most people don’t disagree’ with this dangerous development.
