WHO could be surprised that professional campaigner Tim Hopkins, director of the Equality Network (Letters, Dec 12), would disagree with Neale Hanvey’s contention that the addition of trans to LGB issues has impacted adversely on the rights of LGB people?
Haven’t we witnessed campaigners like him promoting his vested campaigning interests by extending beyond LGB to T(rans), Q(ueer), I(intersex) and to + (the catch-all that ensures campaigning well into the future)?
I’m not not sure about the Equality Network’s credentials, because Mr Hopkins clearly demonstrates that its director has a fundamental flaw concerning what real “equality” is.
READ MORE: Neale Hanvey: There's never been a more dangerous time for LGB people in my lifetime
Equality can’t be gained by reducing the fundamental rights of others, which is precisely what the trans lobby seeks to achieve in regard to sex-based rights. It is surely illogical, beyond natural reality, to consider “men” giving birth and “women” having male genitals as proper.
Mr Hopkins’ premise about Neale Hanvey being in error has two basic flaws.
First, there is a fundamental difference in the campaigns for LGB rights and those of contemporary trans campaigns. LGB rights reflect the sexual and personal attraction to those of the same sex. Their preferences impact only on themselves and their partners. They have no impact on those in wider society and therefore there was never any reason or right for them to be discriminated against. We all have the right to live our lives as we see fit, within fair and just law that enshrines the rights of all in society equally.
The trans lobby, supported by Mr Hopkins and his ilk, wants to ride roughshod over that and impose on society a premise that does impact on others against their will, as we’ve seen in the case of women’s sex-based rights to safe spaces being compromised. This is surely intolerable. Equality doesn’t exist by one group’s rights diminishing another’s.
READ MORE: Karen Adam: UK is seeing an alarming shift towards authoritarianism
Second, I have spent my entire life responding to gender questions as male. The question should have asked for sex, but sexually embarrassed society salved the harshness of this by conflating it with the term “gender.” But the two are not the same, and Hopkins and the trans lobby have failed to understand this, or chosen not to, and lumped the two together, creating the confusion which has resulted in the flawed bill passed by parliament, which the wider public have not been given the proper opportunity to consider and vote on.
When this bill was being debated in parliament, I asked my MSP to inform me what definition of male and female it was founded on. There is none. There is no legal precision, which means the bill was founded on imprecise accepted understanding. In the absence of such clear definition for male and female, how on earth can parliament even begin to decide the changes to them they have legislated on?
READ MORE: Ellie Gomersall: Trans lives will hang in the balance until Section 35 is overturned
Existing laws on changing sex protect young, immature and vulnerable people. They provide full psychological assessment to ensure the proper outcome is arrived at, in a calm, measured and professional manner. They prevent abuse of overtly confusing gender mantra that facilitate males interloping in female safe spaces. With the exception of physical sporting competition, they already afford full equality to those changing their legal sex, a huge, largely irreversible life change that should only be embarked upon wisely with the advice and support of professionals, not the promotion of campaigners.
Without the legal foundation of what is male and female, and the separate consideration of sex and gender, the GRR bill is so fundamentally flawed it needs a complete rethink and thereafter the public should decide by plebiscite on this single issue, following full disclosure of the terms of the measures proposed.
However, I do understand how it is not in Mr Hopkins’ professional interest for this to happen.
Jim Taylor
Edinburgh
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