The government is currently consulting the public on possible changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. In this article, Carys Moseley shows what transgender campaign groups are calling for.
You need to realise that transgender rights groups in the UK are demanding that the government brings in legal gender recognition for children. This means they want your children to be allowed to change gender. They are encouraging their supporters to demand this in their responses to the consultation on changing the Gender Recognition Act. The consultation closes on 19 October this year – in only two week’s time. You can read our response here and our simple guide on how to respond here.
Legal gender recognition for children
In response to the consultation, transgender campaign group GIRES (founded in 1997) and the Trans Equality Legal Initiative have teamed up to provide legal guidance on pushing for gender recognition for children. The Transgender Equality Legal Initiative was founded in response to the government’s response to the Transgender Equality Inquiry in Parliament in 2016. It is supported by Action For Trans Health; not the best advert for its work given that its demands include making cross-sex hormones available free ‘on demand’ for anyone of any age who wants them. It has also said that it wants the abolition of gender markers on birth certificates.
One of the speakers at the inaugural conference of the Trans Equality Legal Initiative was Jane Fae, who compared Christian Concern to ISIS on the BBC news and was not challenged by the presenter. The legal firms that are sponsoring the Initiative are Linklaters, One Pump Court, Garden Court Chambers and Leigh Day (who are interestingly specialists in medical negligence.)
Amnesty International UK demands legal gender recognition for children
Transgender rights campaigners have often operated internationally, and have stepped this up in recent years by getting international NGOs to respond to country-specific consultations like this one. This happened with third-party interventions in the High Court case on gender-neutral passports and it is happening now with the push for legal gender recognition for children.
Amnesty International UK is publicly supporting and promoting the consultation response by Mermaids, the charity that promotes the normalisation of cross-gender identification in children. Mermaids is encouraging respondents to tell the government to bring in legal gender recognition for children, even though there is no specific question for this on the consultation form.
Do transgender groups have privileged access to government civil servants?
Gendered Intelligence, a transgender rights group working with young people, appears to have contacts inside the Government Equalities Office (GEO). It says this:
‘We’re working closely with the Government Equalities Office to make sure this is a real opportunity for all trans and non-binary people to have their voices heard.’
There is no need for them to work with the GEO as civil servants are required to read every response in order to advise the government on its policy anyway. So why make this point?
The government needs to be careful here. Transgender groups are not the only stakeholders of this consultation – all of society is, as there are few things more basic about us than being male or female. The published responses to the Scottish Government consultation on the Gender Recognition Act illustrate the problems involved here. Sixty percent of respondents wanted changing gender to be made easier, yet polling from Scotland has shown clearly that most people in Scotland are opposed. The question arises as to whether the Scottish government provided sufficient opportunities for the people of Scotland to meet publicly to discuss the proposals. I did not see any such public events being advertised. In the same vein, the UK government has not provided public notification of any public events regarding the current consultation. Yet it is well aware that most people oppose the proposed changes.
The same question arises about the LGBT Consortium, which has published its response for its supporters to see. It has had funding recently from the Government Equalities Office to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in schools. Provision of government funding does tend to suggest that the government approves of a particular group.
The real problem here is that transgender and LGBT groups have been too close to government for many years now, often receiving grant money despite being charities. This leaves us as Christians with a unique responsibility to speak for the broadest range of concerns for the good of society. In this respect it was good to see so many Christian organisations finally wake up and send responses to the Scottish government.
Why are some transgender groups silent?
Some influential transgender groups have not given any advice on how to respond to the consultation, which suggests that their members disagree amongst themselves or that as an organisation they do not agree but do not want to say so for fear of showing up the existing cracks in the fictional and largely disingenuous narrative of ‘born in the wrong body’ that made transsexual/transgender rights possible.
For example the Beaumont Society, originally founded as a secret society for male transvestites in the late 1960s, has not provided an opinion, merely reprinted the blurb from the government website. This is interesting because for many years campaigners said nothing about children. It is also important to realise that there are people who have problems with cross-dressing and gender identity disorders who do not believe they were ‘born that way’, and they would be more likely to object to allowing children to change gender.
The hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of secular groups
As regards non-transgender campaign groups which are ‘allies’ to the transgender movement, we have already mentioned Amnesty International UK. Liberty, the civil rights group, is also supporting a change in the law, and has teamed up with Amnesty and the British Institute of Human Rights to this effect.
Most interesting however is the silence of Humanists UK and the National Secular Society, both of whom would dearly love to see Christians silenced in public life. Whilst the sub-group of Humanists UK, LGBT Humanists, has responded favouring a change in the law, the National Secular Society has said nothing at all about the consultation.
All this is very important because the last two groups in particular are founded on hostility to Christianity and to religious belief more generally. The National Secular Society campaigns for ‘a separation of religion and state’, without realising or admitting publicly that claiming to belong to a particular ‘gender’ is a belief, and that the government is promoting it.
Secularists have historically objected to Christianity being the official religion and source for the morality guiding legislation on several grounds, including denial of the factual historical truth of the Bible. Yet it is they now who are culpably silent in the face of the transgender movement’s blatant demand that everybody be forced to lie about who is male or female, and to treat ‘male’ and ‘female’ as matters of belief. Does telling the truth in the face of this ideology not matter to secularists? And do secularists simply not care about the effect that transgender politics is having on children and families?
It really does look as if secularists are far more motivated by wanting to oppose whatever it is that orthodox Christians say on matters of fundamental importance. The abject cowardice of secular groups, their unwillingness to confront a culture of lying and deceit emanating from these never-ending demands, and their cowardly and sinister silence on the effects of all this on children and families, will go down in history as a major reason for the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of secularism. It will be compared to the decline of paganism during the last days of the Roman Empire.
Legislation like this not even proposed during the Roman Empire
Legislation of the kind under consideration has never been proposed in the entire history of Britain, not even under the Roman Empire, of which the province of Britannia, comprising modern-day England, Wales and southern Scotland, was a part. When Roman Emperors such as Decius and Diocletian persecuted Christians they forced them to sacrifice to the false pagan gods of Rome, including the Emperor himself. If we do not tell the government en masse to reject transgender demands we likewise will be forced to lie about God’s creation and about God as Creator, on pain of losing our jobs, our livelihood, our churches and our children.