Right idea, wrong argument

I experience an acute fit of schadenfreude whenever I observe a clash of perverse modern pieties. My position is strictly that of an outside observer – I have no dog in any such fight. One thing for sure: whichever side wins, decent people will be the losers.

This melancholy observation applies to the on-going Commons debate on changes to the Equality Act 2010 that would stop trans ‘women’ going into female-only lavatories, dressing rooms, hospital wards and prisons.

How would you argue against the current situation, where no such restrictions apply? I bet your argument won’t be that different from mine.

Allowing men, whatever they call themselves, into such spaces goes against basic decency, propriety and morality, not to mention taste. Also, as recent events have shown, any such ‘woman’ may well use ‘her’ penis as an offensive weapon, which endangers real women in places where they are particularly vulnerable.

I would go further than this, although I don’t necessarily expect to take many of you with me. My argument will draw on Genesis, a book that specifies exactly what the sexes are, male and female, and how many of them exist, two.

Then I’d enrage the more liberal of my readers by arguing that transsexuals should have no rights specific to them. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ apply to them, as they do to all of His Majesty’s subjects. However, that concept, dating from 1608, didn’t include as its constituent the right of people to change sex and make the change recognised in law.

Moving from high to low, my argument would then state that if some deranged individuals want to identify as members of a different sex or, for all I care, a different species, then by all means they should do so. But no such aberration should have a legal status.

I’d then probably add a touch of pragmatism by suggesting that, should transsexuality not be legally recognised, many more people would want to keep the sex they were born with. For example, if little children weren’t aware that they could choose their sex from a long menu of available options, that possibility wouldn’t even occur to most of them.

There’s nothing especially original or profound about that argument. What I’ve just stated is a basic conservative position, a modifier I use interchangeably with ‘decent’ and ‘intelligent’.

But decent and intelligent people can’t win such a debate, nor can they even join it. Our liberal democracy allows freedom of speech, but only provided said speech stays within the liberal-democratic mainstream.

This is remarkably similar to the Soviet Union, where one Marxist could only have argued that another one was insufficiently Marxist. Someone like me, who regarded every shade of Marxism as illiterate, sinister gibberish, didn’t have a say in the matter.

In a similar vein, it’s unthinkable that any public figure, especially one who wishes to remain as such, could make an argument I’ve put forth. If one wants to take exception to any modern perversion, it can only be done in the terms of another modern perversion, in this case feminism.

The conflict isn’t between vice and virtue, but between two different if related vices. Trans rights clash with women’s rights and, only if the latter win, will it be possible to keep men with a screw loose out of women’s lavatories.

The liberal-democratic ethos of rights is as unchallengeable in Britain (or anywhere in the West) as the Marxist ethos was in the Soviet Union. This is an axiom that all our politicians accept.

That’s why both our PM Rishi Sunak and his Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch support the proposed amendment from the feminist position, not that of common decency. While recognising ‘trans rights’ as an inviolable concept, they both believe that ‘biological sex’ should take priority over ‘legal sex’ where there exists a distinct danger of women being raped in public loos.

Let’s remark parenthetically that the very existence of an equalities ministry is a sure sign of tyranny, albeit of a liberal-democratic kind. Equality may be the overarching deity in whose name modernity was inaugurated and at whose altar it’s supposed to worship. Yet it has nothing to do with any discernible reality.

Contrary to what the American Declaration of Independence says, all men are manifestly created unequal in every intellectual, moral and physical faculty worth mentioning. When allowed to come into play, such differences are bound to create hierarchical arrangements affecting social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual and every other sphere of life.

This is a natural process that can only be suppressed by unnatural means. The state has to be empowered to file away the natural peaks, using oppressive laws as a giant rasp. Hence, skipping a few obvious intermediate steps, the equalities ministry could be more appropriately called the Ministry for Despotism.

The glossocratic language of rights is how liberal-democratic despotism puts its foot down. And all rights immediately become politicised, which effectively turns any group of claimants into a political party competing for power.

That doesn’t reflect any actual reality: few women I’ve ever met perceive themselves as card-carrying, fully paid-up members of a ‘community’, much less a political party. The same goes for members of any race – politicisation is shoved down their throats by liberal-democratic elites seeking tyrannical powers.

Yet actual reality has been disfranchised, going the way of common decency, basic logic and aesthetic taste. Virtual reality reigns supreme, and it has an army of impassioned glossocrats to fight its battles.

So yes, do let’s keep men, former or present, out of women’s-only spaces. But if invoking feminism is the only way to ensure such an outcome, then the argument can have no real winners. It will, however, have real losers: all of us, along with what’s left of our civilisation.