David Aaronovitch reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.

Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.

That had definitely happened by 2015 – that’s when I was explicitly and furiously told that I had zero right to express such a view, by people who 5 minutes earlier had been friends.

Here I drew the line. I saw people I knew being bullied and harassed for having an opinion on biological sex (actually the majority opinion on biological sex), and even if I didn’t know whether I agreed with them, I knew that was wrong. And wrote so, inevitably drawing the accusation from Britain’s most-followed far leftist, Owen Jones, that I was an “apologist for transphobia”, a sentiment published to his one million followers on Twitter.

As to the subject of the dispute itself, I was still deliberately agnostic. But two things were beginning to worry me. The first was the absurdity of what was happening to the language. For health publications to eschew using the word “women” in relation to the need for cervical smears, substituting the phrase “people with cervixes” seemed not just awkward but damaging. Some women, for example, might not even know they had cervixes. Why would a transwoman feel her existence was denied by health authorities recognising that people with cervixes were, to a statistical vanishing point, women?

It’s much more than that though – much more. We need the word “woman” for more than just medical tests. If we can’t have the word “woman” we can’t have feminism. We have to have feminism.

The point Joyce is establishing is that you cannot simply become a woman or a man by saying so. But that in recent times a fashion, an industry, has developed based around the idea that you can. Not long ago, Joyce writes, “the idea of a non-hormone, non-op transwoman — someone who retains a physiologically normal male body but understands themselves to be a woman because that is their ‘gender identity’ and expects everyone else to agree — would have seemed nonsensical to almost everybody”. And now in many places it’s the law.

Joyce places the origin of this development — which, as she establishes, has (unlike debates over gay equality or reproductive rights) somehow sneaked onto the statute books of several countries — in a new ideology about gender. This holds that biological sex is as much a “social construct” as the idea of gender is.

One benefit of Joyce’s book is its intellectual clarity and its refusal to compromise. So she takes apart this ideology of gender with a cold rigour. What, after all, is the woman or man you want to become, if there’s no such thing as a woman or man? The thing that is yearned for will often be precisely the fashionable and frankly prejudiced notion of what a person who was born a woman or man would ideally be like. So you ditch biological reality for a set of shifting aspirations and call it progress?

Correct. Women don’t get to call themselves women, and everyone is required to call men women on demand.

Something odd has happened and is happening. Younger people in particular are, out of good-natured tolerance, accepting an ideology that is so empty that its proponents hugely prefer assertion and “cancellation” to argument. But in seeking to cancel JK Rowling, trans activists met their Joe McCarthy accuses the US army moment — the point at which they tried to take down a loved and respected institution and came unstuck.

I’m off the fence. I will call people by the name and pronouns they tell me they want to be called by. I am prepared to defend their right not to be discriminated against at work and in shops, to defend them against bullying and harassment. But as Joyce says so passionately, that doesn’t change reality. A penis is a male sex organ, men don’t have babies. Women exist.

And without women, no humans exist.