Marc Glendening: Don’t be fooled by Labour’s new rhetoric on the trans issue – its plans remain deeply authoritarian | Conservative Home

Marc Glendening is the Head of Cultural Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Sir Keir Starmer, after much contemplation, now appears to believe that a female human cannot, after all, have a penis (though, naturally, he still hasn’t said this in as many words).

And Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary, announced earlier this week that in order to reassign yourself as a member of the opposite sex you will need a medical certificate confirming that you suffer from gender dysphoria.

Unlike the law that the SNP wants to push through – against popular opposition north of the border – people will thus not be able to just assert their wish to be so legally recognised.

But as ever with Starmer, all is not what it appears to be.

In order to pacify Stonewall and its followers outraged by this apparent new outbreak of Labour flip-flopping, Dodds also made two very significant, but less publicised, promises: that hate crimes against trans people would subject under a Labour Government to “aggravated” (i.e. lonnger) sentences; and that LGBT+ conversion therapy would be made a criminal offence.

These pledges have potentially quite extraordinary implications for free speech. Two crucial questions now need to be put to Dodds.

First, will allegedly misgendering trans people be defined as a hate crime? Second, will psychotherapists and parents who challenge their patients/children’s stated gender identities, and question their desire for surgery designed to give them the appearance of the opposite sex, also face the prospect of doing jail time?

Labour has, with the exception of the courageous of Rosie Duffield and a few other party members, sought very close ties to the trans ideology movement. The party hands over money to Stonewall to be part of its Diversity Champions Scheme; Nancy Kelley, its outgoing chief executive, recently addressed Labour HQ staff; in May, Starmer, Dodds, and Angela Rayner attended a Stonewall breakfast with business leaders.

Kelley has equated gender-critical views with expressions of antisemitism and said: “Those who deny trans people’s existence, misgender them and advocate anti-trans discrimination echo the prejudice of racists and homophobes.” She urges legal intervention to stop such expressions of alleged hateful belief.

(In this context, it is worth remembering that Stonewall defines transphobia as “the fear or dislike of someone based on the fact that they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it.”)

Starmer’s desire to court the approval of trans ideologues was apparent when he addressed the Pink News awards ceremony last year. In what passed for him as a rabble-rousing speech he promised to implement the hate speech policy now promised by Dodds. This led to speculation at the time that misgendering – that is to say correctly describing the sex of another human being – would become something that could result in a criminal record.

It would be strange if the party’s newly unveiled, if ill-defined, promise in does not result in this. The contemporary left’s definition of hate now includes simply refusing to recognise trans women and trans men as they identify themselves.

For example, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights has denounced Women’s Place UK and other gender critical organisations as “trans-exclusionist hate groups”; Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey, when running for leader in 2020, signed this group’s pledge card, which included a commitment to expel all ‘transphobes’ from the party.

The campaign to outlaw so-called conversion therapy is supported also, bewilderingly, by Conservative politicians as senior as Theresa May. But what does the phrase actually mean? Given it is self-evidently illegal to physically force trans people, and everybody else, to submit to a diatribe urging them to correct the supposed errors of their ways, what would such a law amount to in practical reality?

Stonewall states that it wants to outlaw any conversation that seeks to “direct” a person struggling with their gender orientation “to suppress, “cure”, or change their… gender identity.” However, those advising others to go ahead with life-changing surgery should, trans ideologues maintain, be free to do so.

Surely, in an open society, free speech should cut both ways?

Stonewall refuses, revealingly, to accept the possibility that the type of hypothetical person depicted above could possibly consent to a private conversation in which another person might advise them not to reassign as a member of the opposite sex. It asserts:

“It is not possible to consent to conversion practices in a free and informed manner, and it should not be a defence that victims appeared to have consented.”

The authoritarian implications of this patronising statement are jaw-dropping.

A law based on this baseless assumption will therefore bring the state right onto the therapist’s couch and into the family living room, bedroom, loft, broom cupboard, you name it; the contemporary, culture-control left is making the illiberal second-wave feminist slogan that “the personal is the political” a sad reality.

The two potential threats to free speech identified earlier need be seen also in the context of Labour’s plan to introduce Section 40 as a way of forcing newspapers to submit to state media regulation. The left now seeks the state oversight of all communication.

The stranglehold that cultural authoritarianism today enjoys clearly extends well beyond the natural boundaries of the left, as the Online Safety Bill sadly testifies. Likewise, the battle to save free speech requires the building of a coalition that reaches beyond the confines of the centre right.

Advocates of free speech should thus seek to get answers to the two questions that I, initially, want to see Anneliese Dodds respond to, from candidates of all parties in the run-up to the next election. Voters should threaten to withhold their support from those who will not commit categorically to our right to employ our own powers of judgement concerning what is empirical reality,and to engage in honest and consenting talks with others.