The new politics of marginalised identities, now marching across the West, frequently clashes with classical liberal values like freedom of speech and association. Nowhere, however, is this clash and its consequences for civic life more obvious – and dire – than when it comes to the trans movement.
What began as an informal social and economic pressure campaign has crossed over into a formal effort by coercive state agencies to restrict freedom of expression, assembly, and conscience. In Norway, a feminist organiser named Christina Ellingsen could face up to three years in prison for tweeting that males who identify as women cannot be lesbians or mothers, because this statement violates Norway’s newly expanded hate crime laws. In Canada, a human rights tribunal entertained the complaints of a trans-identified male against religious-minority women who refused to provide intimate hair-removal services. Professors like Selina Todd and Kathleen Stock have needed security to accompany them on their own university campuses after voicing concerns about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In England, police have investigated ordinary citizens for tweeting salty limericks or displaying ‘transphobic’ stickers.
In the United States, with its uniquely robust First Amendment protections, we are unlikely to see police sent to investigate violations of new identity doctrines. But here, as elsewhere, activists rely on aggressive use of private coercion to shut down dissent, targeting critics’ reputations and livelihoods. In November 2020, a prominent lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that ‘stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on’—referring to a book that questioned the sudden spike in girls identifying as transgender. Feminist groups attempting to organise in-person meetings have faced bomb threats and cancellations by venues nervous about optics and security risks. Teachers have been suspended or fired for refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns.
Then there is the soft pressure campaign underway across the West, involving the expectation that good, progressive people will not exercise certain freedoms: that lesbians will not refer to themselves as same-sex attracted, that women’s groups will make space for males, that everyone will engage in routine self-censorship, lest feelings be hurt or certain uncomfortable realities be drawn into the light. What is politically inconvenient becomes unfashionable, morally objectionable, even ‘dangerous’. Civil liberties have become distinctly uncool, panned by young activists, and more than a few grown-ups who ought to know better, as tools of marginalisation and oppression. Advocate for the right to freely speak your mind and activists will accuse you of harbouring specific heresies. In an interview with the BBC in September 2021, Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, defended his party’s decision to cast out a female member for asserting that women are adult human females: ‘Well, we absolutely believe in free speech but we also believe that we need to protect human rights and we believe in equality.’
Civil libertarians who have sat this conflict out so far may be startled to see free speech set up in opposition to human rights and equality. But when it comes to gender, an atmosphere of wartime censorship has set in. Trans activists claim these strictures save lives, but in reality it is the survival of the cause itself that requires such exceptional treatment.
So why do civil liberties violations and calls for further clampdowns follow trans activism wherever it goes?
The short answer is that the trans movement threatens civil liberties because the movement is not what it claims to be and thus is threatened by free and open enquiry. If a movement cannot withstand scrutiny, it will create and enforce taboos—and undermine civil liberties in the process. One of the trans movement’s central claims is that there is no conflict between its claims and demands and the rights of any other group. Stonewall, a leading trans rights organisation in the United Kingdom, states upfront that ‘we do not and will not acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and “sex based women’s rights”.’ Merely ‘claiming [that] there is a conflict between trans people’s human rights and those of any other group’—such as women, children, religious minorities, or lesbian and gay people—is defined as transphobic hate speech that governments and private corporations alike should censor.
Unfortunately—for the trans movement and the rest of us—the conflict exists, whether we are free to acknowledge it or not.
To put the conflict in plain language: trans activism argues that gender identity should override sex in law and society. Trans activism redefines ‘women’ and ‘men’ from sex classes based on reproductive role into mixed-sex classes based on individuals’ inner sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither. A mixed-sex definition of ‘woman’ will put males on women’s shortlists, in women’s sports, prisons, and domestic violence refuges. Even if we were to believe that redefining women as a mixed-sex class inclusive of males who identify as women is an urgent and just cause—that is, even if we believe that the outcome should be settled in a particular way—there remains a conflict between two clashing interpretations of the law and two distinct groups of people.
Rather than acknowledge this conflict and propose a satisfactory resolution, trans activists seek to deny it altogether—largely by stripping meaning from language. This is how the ubiquitous claim that ‘trans women are women’ functions. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter if ‘trans women’ outcompete female athletes in women’s sports. In fact, if ‘trans women are women’, then questioning whether Lia Thomas should compete against female athletes becomes part of a ‘long tradition of “gender policing” female athletes’. Rather than make a compelling case for why trans inclusion should trump fairness, trans activists seek to make sex—the very crux of the conflict—unspeakable. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter whether or not placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons puts female prisoners at risk. ‘Trans women are women’ means no scrutiny and no debate.
We see the same approach at work when it comes to ‘gender-affirming care’ and its casualties. If activists inside and outside the medical profession want to remove barriers to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, then the experiences of detransitioners and people who have been harmed by transition represent a serious challenge. Rather than address these concerns head on, organisations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health seek to reframe detransition in an attempt to deny its relevance. Detransition, regret, and medical harm become ‘gender journeys’, ‘non-linear gender transitions’, or ‘gender dimensionality’—just another exciting detour on a patient’s lifelong quest of personal discovery, with no implications for clinical assessment, treatment, and accountability.
This insistence that there is no conflict lodges a falsehood in the very heart of the trans movement. When a movement is not what it pretends to be, this creates a vulnerability that activists must defend.
There is a parallel here to when individuals come out as transgender and seek to be seen by others as members of the opposite sex (or as sexless, in the case of non-binary people). When someone comes out as trans, they ask other people to overlook their sex. Ideally, they want everyone they come into contact with—family and friends, classmates and colleagues, even perfect strangers—to personally redefine sex and re-educate themselves to see trans people as they want to be seen. You will reinforce your trans friend or family member or colleague’s self-identification with your speech and actions. At a minimum, you will keep your perceptions and objections to yourself, lapsing into polite silence so as not to upset your interlocutor’s feelings. Trans activism operates with the same expectations, but on a society-wide scale, and with civil liberties as the target.
The temptation to violate civil liberties and undermine the basic principles of a free and open society will remain as long as the need for cover remains. Whenever activists attempt to smuggle undeclared goods under the guise of a civil rights movement, undressed speech becomes a threat that must be managed.
The only way out of this situation is for the trans movement to reconnect their public pronouncements with their actual agenda: they must make their case in the open and anyone must be allowed to question it.
However, there are compelling reasons to think that the trans movement would not have got this far operating in the open. The lobbying guide by IGLYO, ‘the world’s largest LGBTQI Youth and Student organisation’, even seems to acknowledge as much, urging campaigners to ‘get ahead of the government agenda and media story’, ‘tie your campaign to more popular reforms’ and ‘avoid excessive press coverage and exposure’. The guide praises Irish activists for piggybacking on marriage equality and using it to provide a ‘veil of protection’, since ‘marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for’. It then observes that:
‘[M]any believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress, as much of the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise. In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue.’
This approach has been a success for trans lobbyists in countries like Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, but it has done great damage to the fabric of civil society. If the trans movement insists on its current course—shutting down public debate, subverting open democratic processes, and punishing critics—the movement will create openings for opponents with much more objectionable agendas than recognising that sex matters and advocating caution on youth gender transition. As Jonathan Rauch warned in his 1993 book, The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought:
‘[No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.’
The realities the trans movement is so keen to suppress will persist—no matter how doggedly activists hound dissenters. It is time for them to return to the public sphere and play by the same rules as everyone else: no special pleading and no final say. And it is time for every institution that has enabled this movement to put an end to trans exceptionalism. Free and open societies depend on it.
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