What I learned about gender ideology in the Deep South

Rishi Sunak says a man is a man, a woman is a woman and that’s just common sense. Carol McGiffin doesn’t want to see a man wearing a skirt, she just doesn’t.

Gender ideology is already woven into the fabric of the UK, and the people successfully promoting it are not necessarily who you think.

I recently spent two weeks in America, visiting states that voted by significant majorities for Donald Trump and for Republicans in their state government. I wanted to talk to people who were thinking about how divided society had become, providing support to people while debates carry on and thinking about how to achieve longer term change. In particular, I wanted to hear from people who lived in states where gender ideology about what a man is, and what a woman is, is being enshrined in law and enforced in classrooms.

I met with a law professor who is looking at the ways in which government decisions can directly and indirectly lead to discrimination. As part of those efforts, she is working hard to understand where people are coming to the conversation from.

She told me that she can understand that when maternity services say things like “women and birthing people”, or “pregnant people”, or offer support in the practice of “breast and chest feeding” – that this can feel to some women like an erasure. That it feels like the efforts to use more inclusive language are disregarding the hard and difficult work that they have put in to making sure women recognised and understood as a group of people who experience relentless social, economic and political barriers.

What she finds less hard to understand, she told me, is the argument from the same people that their definition of woman cannot and should not ever include trans women.

Because so often, part of the rationale that she hears comes down to a definition of woman that is inextricably linked with a functioning reproductive system. That trans women can’t ever understand what it is to be a woman because they didn’t have periods growing up. That we should only use the word woman when describing someone who is pregnant because pregnancy and child rearing is intrinsically part of being a woman. That the biological purpose of our bodies has determined that no matter what someone wears, what medical intervention they seek – the existence and impact of reproductive organs is what makes someone a woman or a man.

That’s why, she thinks, she sees otherwise progressive women, with values in so many other areas that would skew closer to inclusion, allied with men who would prefer (and who are willing to pass laws to create) a world where a woman is someone who makes babies and looks after the family home. She is hearing, now, from coalitions made up of women and the very men that they were at odds with in the 60s and 70s, as they fought for women to be recognised as more than wives and mothers.

She hasn’t found a way to square that yet.

In America, President Joe Biden recently announced a package of new regulations to protect LGBTQI+ young people in foster care - so that when young people are looked after by the state, they are protected from influences that would seek to manage or punish them.

With the caveat that opinion polling is flawed because it doesn’t capture the multitude of (sometimes contradictory) ways that we all think, Polling in the US suggests that a majority of people support policies that would stop trans people from being discriminated against at work, in housing and in public spaces. The Biden administration is doing something that people in America generally support.

Statistics released most recently by the National Centre for Social Research show that the proportion who characterise themselves as “not at all prejudiced” against people who are transgender has fallen from 82% to 64% since 2019. Which means that almost 20% of people have picked up prejudices about trans people in the last three years.

So we find ourselves in a peculiar position in the UK where we are to the right of the United States. Where not only do we have women who feel that the thing they fought for is being erased joining forces with men who are invested in gender ideals for potentially different reasons; we also have a Government, which has presided over abject failures in our economy, in our health service and our communities, joining in the bashing to distract us from their atrocious record.

We are politically and socially moving backwards on trans rights because there is a coalition of people who, for their own reasons, want to see trans identities de-legitimised. And harm to trans people – from physical efforts to make trans people go away or comply with a gender ideology, to the emotional impact of relentless exclusion and questioning -  is a consequence of that.

In a situation where elected officials are making it clear that they want to roll back rights and force compliance with their gender ideology, or want to be led by rather than develop the public mood, it is hard to imagine the purpose of dialogue.

Especially when what we see is a dialogue where a Prime Minister says that trans people and allies are bullies, while saying that “a man is a man” from the most prominent platform in the country. Or when it is a dialogue that seeks to define trans people with an example of a single person’s behaviour, while almost 5,000 hate crimes against trans people were recorded in the year ending March 2023.

It is a week that I imagine will have taken people’s tank of hopefulness close to empty. The lack of upbeat ending to this blog is part of that. Things are really bad and it is not clear how we move through it when the party in charge of equality policy seems determined to redraw the boundaries of inclusion, and the leader of the only party who can replace them changing his position to a more regressive one.

I’m trying hard to do what I can with what I’ve got. So if you’re in a situation where some counselling might be useful, from someone who you know is thinking about this stuff, then I have some pay what you can spaces available.