Language and erasure

‘Trans women are women’ is the mantra of the trans activist movement. On this statement rests the key political aim of that movement: the replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’ as the distinction between men and women in law and public policy, enabling any man to access women-only spaces by the simple means of saying ‘I am a woman.’

Just recently Keir Starmer said that a factually and scientifically correct statement – ‘only women have a cervix’ – “shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.” The reason it is not allowed is because it states the biological distinction between men and women, thus suggesting that transwomen are not women. To enforce the belief on everyone that transwomen are women, and therefore entitled to use women-only facilities and services, is a strategy characterised by the bullying and silencing of anyone who disagrees.

A political goal of adult activists should not be the basis for the education of children.

To believe that sex is immutable and cannot be changed is a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010. The Education Act 1996 prohibits the political indoctrination of children in schools. The gender ideology enshrined in the Wales LGBTQ+ Action Plan, if taught in schools as fact, would be in breach of that Act by indoctrinating children into a belief in a highly controversial political ideology.

The substitution of ‘gender identity’ for ‘sex’ as the distinction between men and women, takes away the rights and protections of girls as the female sex. ‘Gender identity’ is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010; ‘sex’ is.

The Welsh government commits to delivering ‘LGBTQ+ inclusive RSE for all’ and providing “statutory national trans guidance for schools and local authorities.”

Based on the Action Plan, this means teaching children that they have a ‘gender identity’ and it is this inner feeling that determines whether they are a boy or a girl, not their biological sex. This is scientifically incorrect information which adolescents are bombarded with online, on social media platforms such as Tumblr, TikTok and YouTube. This coincides with the unprecedented rise in the number of adolescents being referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) over the past decade, around 75% of whom are teenage girls.

These girls are arriving at the Tavistock clinic already convinced that they are really boys. A medical pathway is all that awaits them: medical intervention with serious and irreversible lifelong consequences.

The case of Keira Bell, who regretted her transition, we know is the tip of the iceberg. The unscientific concept of ‘gender identity’ is an especially harmful way for children to conceptualise their discomfort with their bodies or their feelings of not fitting in.

Teaching children to understand themselves as gender identities rather than sexes, teaching them denial of reality, is a serious and harmful social experiment on this generation.

But of course teaching this ideology in schools is not for the benefit of children. Activist targeting of children with the message they may have been born in the wrong body, teaching them that ‘gender identity’ overrides biological sex, destabilises children’s perception of reality. Teaching children that transgender people must not suffer discrimination is admirable. Nobody would disagree with that.

But teaching children gender ideology results in a school environment of deception, secrecy, violation of boundaries without consent and separation of children from parents. It serves only a political agenda: to introduce a system of self-ID in schools and to indoctrinate this generation of children into the belief ‘transwomen are women.’

Merched Cymru and LGB Alliance Cymru are working together to respond to Welsh Government’s LGBT+ Action Plan. See our page here.