Getting politicians to listen

How can we get through to elected representatives who seem to believe transactivist falsehoods?

The past couple of weeks have been extremely busy, with various journalistic deadlines and also a “lobby day” last Wednesday – a coordinated campaign to get people to contact their MPs and ask to meet to talk about a specific topic, in this case the importance of single-sex spaces and the need for clarity in the law about their permissibility. And then straight after came the start of party conference season. 

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I took part in a fringe event at the Lib Dems’ conference last Saturday on free speech, with two academics, Laura Favaro and Almut Gadow, whose universities failed to protect their academic freedom and discriminated against them for gender-critical beliefs (Laura’s case is settled; Almut’s is ongoing; I’ll share a link once the recording of the event is online). Next weekend is the Labour Party conference, and colleagues will be attending though I won’t. At the end of the month it’s the turn of the Conservatives’, which I again won’t be attending though I was invited to speak at a fringe event, because it clashes with the Genspect conference in Lisbon.

Helping people to prepare to talk to their MPs on Lobby Day, hearing back from some of them about how it went, and talking with colleagues about preparing for party conferences prompted me to think about what it will take to shift individual politicians’ opinions on sex and gender. More broadly, I don’t actually think changing people’s opinions is in fact the most important part of our work – most people don’t have much of an opinion on any particular topic, and why should they? The issue is laws and practices. But legislators’ opinions matter for those laws and practices, so each one we can move in the right direction is a win.

One individual MP can make something as consequential as the Cass Review happen (it was commissioned by a former Conservative health secretary, Sajid Javid). One individual can direct the work of an influential parliamentary select committee – and unfortunately the newly appointed chairs of two of the most important ones, Sarah Owen, chair of the committee for women and equalities, and Layla Moran, chair of the committee for health and social care, are both hardcore transactivists. 

Here are a few of the specific examples I heard about from individual constituents, anonymised because these were private conversations. I’d be interested in hearing more from readers about conversations they have had, especially with politicians, and what they have found helps to shift people’s positions.

1. An MP who has been indoctrinated by young, activist staff. This MP claimed to believe that there are no differences between male and female bodies except for the sex organs; refused to accept that there was such a thing as a “trans woman” who had not had genital surgery; apparently found the statement that “a woman is not the same thing as a man who has had his genitals removed” perplexing; refused to accept that male puberty conveys a strength advantage; and seemed to believe that trans women are already receiving womb transplants and will soon be able to carry pregnancies to term. This is someone who has wide experience of life, and is a parent. 

How to get through to someone who seems so utterly confused? I’ll start by saying that people can and do break free of indoctrination. By chance as I was writing this issue I read this really interesting post on X, and it gave me hope. It’s possible to believe quite fervently that it can be right to treat some men as if they are women, and then realise that you have got it wrong.

When I watched Orange Is The New Black, I totally bought that Roderick Laverne Cox should be in a women's prison. I believed that there was a solid diagnostic criteria for transgenderism, that it was a real & proven disorder, & that men with this disorder posed the same threat to… pic.twitter.com/DatuLYbSP5

— Billy Bragg (@Serena_Partrick) September 18, 2024

I am always tempted to think that nobody over the age of about 30 could really think the things that this MP seems to think (under that age some people have been so catastrophically miseducated that all bets are off). I can’t help but feel that they know, in their heart of hearts, that men and women are stable, non-overlapping groups, and that what’s going on when they say “trans women are women” isn’t really a truth claim but a profession of faith. I tend to think they are saying they believe it because they think it should be true rather than that it is true, or because they know it would be impolitic to say otherwise. To the extent that they “believe they believe” this, it’s doublethink – holding mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously.

But maybe I’m wrong? Maybe there are adults who have so little understanding of basic biology that they can get this lost? Maybe I’m making the (common) mistake of thinking other people think more similarly to me than they actually do?

This particular MP has young, virulently activist staff. Presumably they keep their boss away from anyone or anything that might penetrate the epistemic bubble that’s been carefully constructed around them. What would happen if something managed to make it through, and what should that something be?

For example, would it help them to read a short, clear, authoritative explainer-style document debunking the myths they seem to believe? And if so, what myths? Judging by the report of the conversation with them, how about these?

Doctors are able to reshape male bodies to be very similar to female ones

In the near future womb transplants will enable male people to get pregnant and give birth.

Strength and speed differences between males and females are not significant.

Trans people have brains that are more similar to members of the opposite sex than to their own.

Trans women who suppress testosterone see their strength, speed and stamina move into the female range.

I realise that the last two of these questions are in tension, but in my experience people who profess to believe one of them also believe the other. And this suggests a problem: people don’t believe these myths because they make much sense (they run counter to everyday experience and are internally incoherent), but because there’s an incentive to. When someone believes what they believe for reasons other than evidence, providing contrary evidence may not advance things much. Changing the environment around MPs like this and the incentives they’re subject to is at least as important.

Maybe, if that X thread I shared is anything to go by, any debunking should be more personalised and more obviously linked to consequences. It should probably be framed in terms of truths rather than falsehoods, too (mythbusters say you should try to avoid repeating the falsehood, even to debunk it).

How about these?

At least X of the transwomen who have been transferred to women’s prisons in [Location Y] are in prison for raping women.

Every year, x,000 boys under the age of 18 break the women’s world record in [these sports].

Girlguiding permits boys who identify as girls to join, and men who identify as women to become group leaders. These boys and men are treated as girls and women, including for sleeping and washing facilities. Parents are not told if their daughter will be sharing accommodation with a boy who identifies as a girl, or if their group leader is a man who identifies as a woman.

2. An MP who said that they weren’t gender-critical, that “trans women are women” and that “the debate has become much too toxic”. They went on to name a particular (and deeply unpleasant, misogynistic and aggressive) high-profile trans woman as an example of someone they were very happy to accept as a woman “like any other woman”. But then they expressed significant concerns about the rising number of children with gender confusion and trans identification. 

Many people find harm to children a much more compelling reason to reject trans ideology than harm to women. It’s hard for men to make much of harms done to women, especially when a significant number of women dismiss those harms – it feels like telling women their own business. And women, for their part, are often reluctant to face up to the uncomfortable truths that make trans ideology so much greater a threat for women than for men – that we’re physically weaker, that we’re the ones mostly at risk of rape, that we can never be as fast or strong as men no matter how much we train, that men are much more violent and aggressive, and that lots of people – both men and women – still think that men are the default and we’re the support humans. It’s really tempting to lie about all this, perhaps even to ourselves.

But most people do understand that it’s the job of adults, of both sexes, to stand up for children. Moreover, there’s an important moral principle at play that doesn’t activate the thought-terminating cliches about “most oppressed minority”, etc, namely the simple observation that children are “too young” to make consequential or permanent changes.

I’m trying to work out how to build on that starting point to show someone who has got that far and no further that there are more problems than they realised with the TWAW position, and that the baddies they’re so determined to distance themselves from have the right of it on other topics too. 

My immediate thought was to say – OK, you’re “not GC” and that you think “trans women are women” – do you not understand that those statements will get you nowhere with transactivists unless you sign up to the whole package? They are not at all open to people picking and choosing which propositions they accept. By expressing any concerns at all about children you’re already “transphobic” – have you not seen the placards during Pride marches saying “Cass Kills Kids” and “Cass is social murder”?

And as for that “toxic debate” (how sick I am of that phrase!), it’s not a toxic “debate”, it’s a sustained campaign of bullying and intimidation by one group against another. There aren’t extremists “on both sides” – there’s one side that believes in reality and another that doesn’t. One side is desperate for open debate and the other wants to shut down all opposition. You may think you can accept it all except the kids – well, that still makes you an enemy to the second group, as you’ll quickly discover if you try telling them that you draw a line at the kids.

But again, suppose I get that point across – what next? Now I have someone who understands the uncomfortable truth that on this subject, there really is no middle ground. Either you go along with everything the transactivists say, or you are cast out. And sure, if you’re cast out, you are now free to think clearly about all the other things the “gender critical” side says – about sports, or about single-sex spaces.

But it’s not clear to me that this person is likely to choose that option. I think it’s just as likely that they will suddenly discover they don’t care so much about the kids after all.

3. Someone who clearly understood that the trans agenda was ridiculous and harmful, and had gone so far as to say that it was important to hold space open within all political parties to debate contentious issues, but kept repeating “I’m not up for a fight”. Their interlocutor pointed out that sometimes the other guy brings the fight to you, and your choice will then be between fighting and surrendering, but all that produced was a repetition of the slogan. 

Such cowardice is despicable in an elected representative, who is supposed to serve the public and whose salary is paid out of taxes. But at least it has the virtue of being honest. And so, although I despise this person, it’s a hopeful message. There were no myths to debunk and no virtue-signalling – just a desire not to be at the sharp end of nastiness. Once saying the truth on this subject stops being costly, this person will happily be truthful.

4. And finally, the stock email response that went to constituents from Labour MPs who didn’t want to engage or meet on Lobby Day. This expressed pride in the Equality Act (which was passed under a Labour government), and stated – correctly – that it permits single-sex service providers to “prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to services, where it can be demonstrated it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, whether or not the person has a Gender Recognition Certificate”. It said that it should be up to individual service providers and sporting authorities, not politicians, to decide “what is most appropriate, within the law”. 

I’ve started to think of this position as the “Schrödinger’s transwoman” paradox, by analogy with Schrödinger’s cat. I haven’t tried to write this down before, so bear with me as I think it through.

The original is a thought experiment intended to illustrate the bizarre and counterintuitive nature of quantum mechanics, and I’ve just spent more time than I should have trying to write it in a comprehensible way before giving up and Googling to find someone else who’s done it better – in this case, the Open University. 

The most famous example of the puzzling implications of quantum theory is known as ‘Schrödinger’s cat’. This is a thought experiment in which an imaginary cat is sealed in a box, along with a device that will release a deadly poison once a radioactive atom has decayed. As quantum mechanics only tells us about the probability that an atom has decayed after a certain amount of time, it’s not possible to know for sure whether the cat is still alive without checking inside the box. All we know is that the longer we wait, the worse the cat’s chances become.

In the framework of quantum theory, this is described as a ‘superposition’ of two states: one in which the cat is alive, and one in which it is dead. So, in a sense, until the outcome is confirmed, Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

Here is how this email interprets UK law.

Trans women are indeed women, as long as they have a gender-recognition certificate. However, they are a special sort of women – women with the “protected characteristic of gender reassignment” – and this special sort of woman may lawfully be excluded from women-only spaces as long as that’s a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. (Trans women who don’t have GRCs can also be excluded, but that’s easier – legally speaking, they are unambiguously men.) In this interpretation, transwomen with GRCs are both women, like any other women, and not women, and we won’t know which it is for a given single-sex service until the service provider decides whether to invoke the “single-sex exceptions”.

That is the moment of truth, like the one in the original paradox when you open the box and find out whether the cat is alive or dead. But there’s a big difference: in practice the transwoman is always admitted. The “superposition”, as it’s called in quantum mechanics – when the quantum system is in a probabilistic state and hasn’t “decided” which specific state to be in (it seems impossible to write about these paradoxes without anthropomorphising subatomic particles) – always collapses the same way.

And so it’s in theory possible to exclude transwomen from female-only spaces, even the ones with GRCs. It just never happens. This is an intensely irritating state of affairs. Politicians point to the theoretical possibility of lawfully excluding all men, even the ones with bits of paper saying they’re women, as an excuse for not clarifying the law. But any service provider who tries to use these provisions will quickly find themselves under a great deal of pressure not to.

The upside is that this too comes down to cowardice. It’s a fancier way of saying “I’m not up for a fight”. And again, therefore, it’ll be possible to shift as incentives change. It’s depressing how few politicians are willing to offer moral leadership, but at least when getting it right becomes easier, we can hope they will.

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