18. To grow, or give way to populism and scapegoating

 

As a good society do we seek to open up our culture so everyone can flourish, or do we retreat into divisions and hatred, demonising people and sinking to the worst and lowest public discourse, massaging contempt for minorities, and seeking to make scapegoats of the marginalised?

In sections 1 to 7 on this site I have outlined how propaganda and campaign groups, social and news media, have been used to generate a social witch hunt against trans people. We can see the playbook being used: it is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s.

But there is a better way, if people want to build a compassionate country, and that is to welcome diversity, and seek to protect minorities, with policies of inclusion. Just as trans people go through transition to grow into the whole and best of who they are, so in the communities we build, we can seek to rise to the top rather than sink to the bottom, and in doing so grow as a society into the whole and best of who we could be: not dividing and scapegoating minorities, but opening up to respect for others, and affirmation of the diverse but real lives that people lead.

That was what the Equality Act truly set out to do. Sadly, there is a vendetta being run against trans people's acceptance in society. That vendetta is deliberate, ideological, with the aim of setting people against one another.

 

19. Politicians running scared of losing votes and caving in to populism

 

Politicians need to have courage to reject simplistic slogans, and resist what Yeats called the catch cries of the clown: those craven populists who use division and scapegoating to distract, and incite artificial fear or contempt. The 'monstering' of trans people is low politics. It is not accidental. Rather, out of fear of losing votes to even more extreme groups, the weaponisation of trans people has been a race to the bottom.

What is actually needed is decency and proportionality, which is exactly what the Equality Act in fact advocated, for example building on the Gender Recognition Act, rather than rendering it incongruent. That was never the Equality Act's intention. It reasserts that people can and do change sex and gender (you find those words), it follows the 2004 Act in recognising trans women as women, trans men as men, and deploys the appropriate and congruent pronouns to that effect.

Even where scenarios may - exceptionally, to use the Act's language - benefit from compassionate intervention (such as a trans woman not being the appropriate person to lead a rape counselling group)… the Act calls otherwise for proportionality, not a generalised repudiation of what the GRA and EA both set out to do. Politicians know there is far more nuance than that.

But where is the courage to be decent?

Of course, too many in Parliament are running scared of losing votes by sticking their heads above the parapets on these issues. Many opt to hide behind the Supreme Court's highly-contended judgment and the EHRC blitz, so those people can carry the can while the politicians lie low. But that's political cowardice and not real leadership: it leaves trans people abandoned as the real people carrying the can in their actual lives. Everyone knows there is a terrible 'monstering' of trans people going on, but too many politicians prefer to cave in to that populism than take a stand on decency, if it means losing votes.

At least 140 MPs have had the guts and principle to sign a Motion to challenge the EHRC's guidance. If others were morally decent, they would not cut trans people loose, and abandon them for the sake of dog-whistle politics, while news media continue to treat trans people like pariahs. As so often happens when justice is at stake, it is a political issue of courage or cowardice.