Some of us who are attentive to politics will be a little on edge, as the General Election approaches and the main parties start attacking the rights of transgender people in an attempt to appease the gender-critical mob. And they'll be parading authoritarian ideas on a range of other issues - ban this, outlaw that, make society more depressingly puritan, etc.
Something must be done, they'll argue, about the hypothetical possibility that transgender women could hypothetically be wearing a dress for the sole purpose of accessing womens' spaces. Invariably that space will be the public bathroom, because the gender-critical activists have a rather creepy obsession with the genitalia of complete strangers and other vulgarities. If anything, they are the ones effectively campaigning for a world in which it's legal to sexually harass women on the pretext they might be men, and to harass women who aren't deemed feminine enough.
The aim of those who radicalise the gender-critical, through lobby groups and media organisations, however, is to outlaw the public existence of transgender people, with one piece of 'common sense' legislation after another. Anything that plays on our fears about a minority, it follows in the minds of politicians disconnected from the average person, is sure to win votes.
And this is how we end up reading about the Tory leadership deciding, at their recent conference, in the face of all the huge challenges facing Britain, to make a point of demonstrating how vindictively anti-LGBT their party is. Or rather demonstrate how desperately it needs to throw a minority under the bus for the possibility of winning the next election.
Some of their ideas for the NHS illustrates this perfectly: The most pressing issue, health secretary Steve Barclay seems to think, isn't the fact that ambulances are functioning as makeshift wards because care homes don't have the resources to accommodate patients who should be discharged, or the layers of management that accreted over the last couple of decades, or that reportedly 7 million people are on waiting lists. Instead, he's concerned himself with the preferences of the gender-critical mob, vis a vis which hospital wards transgender women should be accommodated in. And he thinks it's important that patients are informed about whether a doctor is transgender, which obviously would be a gross violation of the rights and dignity of healthcare staff.
Oh, and for some reason he's making a fuss about staff being advised to state their pronouns, which is something almost nobody, except those who absolutely feel the need to misgender people, gives a toss about in the real world.
Thanks to the work of Steph, writing for TransLucent, we know that Barclay isn't proposing solutions to any actual problem here: Steph banged off 102 Freedom of Information requests to hospitals around England, with the question: 'How many natal female inpatients complained that a trans woman inpatient was being cared for in the same ward?'. Apparently there were no complaints whatsoever recorded.
Barclay's endeavours to 'restore some common sense' into the NHS would create some awkward problems of its own. What would the gender-critical say about a situation in which a masculine transgender man, with facial hair and a healthy dose of testosterone, yet is still a woman by their own logic, is accommodated in a female ward? Where would a transgender man give birth (which has been known to happen) and recover? Or haven't they thought of that?
I can also see a few lawsuits resulting from it also. The Equality Act doesn't allow blanket discrimination - it can only be justified on an individual basis, and where there is a compelling reason. And, if an NHS trust were to out a transgender person by placing him/her on whichever ward the gender-critical deem the correct one, there would probably be some costly legal case to answer.
We have got to get rid of this government at the next election. They astound me.