Imagine for a moment that a group started up in your local area wanting to ban you – just you, personally – from the local post office. You would probably find it odd, a bit unnerving, but you would probably shrug it off. The campaign grows and now they’re banning you from the local supermarket, then the pubs, then the town centre as a whole – except for one hour a week when you’re permitted to enter. You start to get hate mail and threatening messages on your phone from the campaign group. Then your local Lib Dem Executive starts talking to this campaign group, to get to the bottom of the problem. Your local party Chair says that the campaigners seem to be sincerely worried about your presence in town, and the local party are going to debate the issue.

How would this make you feel?

Something similar is happening.

The Government has begun its consultation to amend the Gender Recognition Act. The proposed changes would allow transgender people to amend the details on their birth certificates more easily. This would probably be done by a process involving a statutory declaration like the ones that exist already in countries like Ireland, Norway and Malta. At the moment, if you want to change your gender on your birth certificate you enter a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare where a panel that you don’t even meet decides whether to allow your application, with no right of appeal.

This consultation has kicked off a wave of controversy that is deeply unpleasant.

Of course there are the normal bigots and hate-filled rants filling the internet. That’s sad, but hardly out of the ordinary. What’s new this time is the much more seductive approach of the “feminists”. (I’m putting that word in quote marks because I do not buy into the idea that these people are feminists at all.)

These faux-feminist campaign groups say they are concerned about the unintended consequences of changing the Act. They are worried that non-transgender men will somehow abuse the new legislation to argue their way into women-only spaces. They say that they are concerned about how the needs of cis women and trans women intersect. (Cis meaning that your gender identity matches the gender you were assigned at birth.) And some of these groups add on other concerns about gender roles and protecting children from misguided gender confusion or hormone therapy.

A fundamental belief of Liberal Democrat philosophy is the right to free speech and the right to question things. But our belief here needs to go hand in hand with some common sense, sensitivity and caution. Because this is one area where engaging with people’s concerns can actually cause harm and hurt.

What’s so seductive about the argument of the faux-feminists is that they often say that they fully support trans rights. They say they are just worried about non-trans (cis) men using loopholes created by the legislation that helps transgender people. They argue that they want transgender people to have their own safe spaces, away from the cis women. And again, that might sound quite reasonable given how vulnerable trans people can be. But then, as a good liberal, you should really catch yourself and think, hang on… isn’t that just segregation? By demanding that transgender people are labelled as “Other” rather than men and women, isn’t that actually a way of pushing trans women out of women’s spaces, and trans men out of men’s spaces?

To explain briefly why these concerns are redundant, there is perfectly good, robust legislation to keep perverts of any gender out of public toilets and changing areas. Birth certificates have nothing to do with it. I don’t know when you were last asked for your birth certificate before being allowed to enter a changing room or a public toilet? The point is, it never happens.

Women’s refuges already carry out robust individual assessments before allowing people in – that’s how lesbians fleeing abusive partners keep safe. Many of the other “concerns” are really just too bigoted to justify with responses – like worries that boys playing with dolls will turn them gay or trans. Come on people, we should be better than this.

It’s also worth noting that these gender recognition changes have been established already in many other countries including Ireland, without a great crime wave, and no reported surges in any particular pervert-related behaviour.

To tackle what’s really beneath all this, let’s address the actual issue. Trans women clearly do have some life experiences that are different to cis women. But there is no universal experience that makes you a “genuine” woman. We come in all shapes, sizes, colours and backgrounds and no two are alike. I’m a cis, white, middle class, educated, straight, 40 year old woman from the South of England – a trans woman who shares most of those attributes is going to be far more similar to me than a Japanese grandmother who has never left her country, or a Bangladeshi teenager who has grown up in the centre of Glasgow on the poverty line. Those four women would have totally different cultures, experiences, struggles, expectations and biases. But we are all still women.

Yes, the experience of being trans is different to being cis gendered. But women are not defined by biology. We are just as female once we have had hysterectomies or mastectomies aren’t we? Infertile women are still women. We don’t define womanhood on biology, culture or experience – until now it seems.

This is the problem at the heart of these campaign groups, that they are desperately trying to define “female” in a way that excludes one set of women – trans women.

These faux-feminist groups are using a potential change in a small administrative law to promote ideas of difference, division and exclusion. As Liberal Democrats we should not be validating their concerns. The more we engage with them, the more exposure their ideas get. We are giving them oxygen when we engage with their falsehoods and paranoia.

I know that we Lib Dems like to talk to people. To listen to them, hear their concerns and then engage them in a debate that moves them. That is what I have done my whole political life. But here, on this issue, we need to think carefully. By agreeing to engage these people in debate, we implicitly agree that their questions are worthy of debate.

You might be thinking, well we can still talk to these groups and address their non-transphobic concerns, like that one about the cis men arguing their way into women only spaces. The problem there is that the more we engage with that idea, the more we promote the idea that there is a link between this myth and the changes to the Act. We are then actually giving publicity to the idea that this horde of perverted men is just waiting for the opportunity to claim that their birth certificate says they are female. Every time we engage with these groups and these arguments we give them oxygen and allow them to grow.

I do understand that shutting down debate feels like an instinctively wrong move for any Liberal. It is certainly not what we normally encourage! But here, the way to support our transgender friends is to declare our support. Proudly and loudly.

When groups come along saying they are scared and worried by moves to support transgender people, we need to be careful with how we engage in that conversation. Rather than endorsing their worries, we need to carefully explain our take on the issues. There may be some valid points muddled in with the scaremongering, and on those issues we can cautiously engage. But we cannot allow ourselves to be drawn into debates as to whether trans women “are really women”. We should not be dictating who should be allowed access to shelters and refuge – we should allow the experts who run those services to determine what’s best for their clients. In fact, trans women suffer disproportionately high rates of domestic and sexual violence and desperately need access to these life-saving resources.

By recognising the rights of transgender people, we do not diminish anyone else’s right to be recognised. Trans women are women and trans men are men and both deserve help and support when they need it.

It’s important to remember that not every person who is engaged in these faux-feminist groups is transphobic. A lot of them have become concerned because they have a friend who told them there was something to be worried about, or they read a worrying article in the media. And I think that the success of these groups is that the people leading them look like me. Nice, well educated, well presented women. They don’t look like Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage. They don’t seem horrible. But the views that the groups are campaigning to promote – most of those views are transphobic, in that they explicitly deny the rights of transgender people to live their lives in their self-defined gender.

Let’s go back to the example at the start of this article, where you find your local party are engaging in a debate about your rights with a campaign group trying to ban you.

I think you would be horrified that a campaign of victimisation and exclusion was being given legitimacy by people who are meant to be your colleagues. I would be appalled that my colleagues were debating my entitlement to my own liberty when I had done nothing wrong.

This is a very sensitive and unusual issue. It is not like any other area of policy. Let’s understand that and be true to our values, sensitive in our approach and think really hard before we enter into a debate on this topic. We do need to engage with the issue, and change people’s minds, but we need to do so without endorsing these paranoid and prejudiced myths.

If you would like to be an ally for the transgender community, please don’t engage with these faux-feminist groups. Don’t give them any more oxygen. Instead, just promote the facts about the changes to the Gender Recognition Act, champion the campaigns and causes of transgender and trans-friendly groups, and openly state your support, loudly and proudly as a Liberal Democrat. That’s how we can change people’s minds.

———-

If you would like to learn more about these issues, or if you are puzzled by some of the words often used in these discussions, these links will guide you to some useful glossaries and FAQ pages.

Two glossaries:

https://www.theproudtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/download-manager-files/1516697937wpdm_Glossary%20of%20LGBT+%20Terminology.pdf

http://www.gires.org.uk/resources/terminology/

Two “Frequently Asked Questions” pages:

https://www.glaad.org/transgender/transfaq

(American site, but a good basic starting point if you’re totally new to all this)

https://www.stonewall.org.uk/truth-about-trans#grc

What’s Lib Dem policy about all this?

https://lgbt.libdems.org.uk/en/page/lgbt-party-policy-overview

* Miranda Roberts is the Former Chair of Federal People Development Committee 2017-2020.