James Kirkup is Director of the Social Market Foundation, a think-tank in London, and a writer for the Spectator magazine. His experience of being a man writing about transgender issues has left him wondering if the demands of identity politics can be reconciled with the compromises of representative democracy.

Many aspects of the debate about transgender rights, and how they interact with the rights of others, are troubling and even saddening. The anger and fear felt by so many of the participants. The lack of reliable statistics and evidence, and the hostility faced by those seeking to gather better evidence. The unwillingness of many politicians even to try to bring reason and civility to an unbalanced, vitriolic conversation. Personally, the thing I find saddest, and most telling, is that people aren’t particularly nasty to me.

This year I have written a dozen articles for British publications about the gender debate: around 15,000 words. The common theme has been that women who ask questions and express doubts about changes in law and custom on gender issues to favour transgender people, and the implications for those born female, are excluded from political and public debate, sometimes through violent means.

Those articles have been read and shared several hundred thousand times, and brought me more social-media reactions than I can count. Some were negative and a few were outright hostile. Yet none involved threats of violence and none expressed the hope that I die in a fire. There were no meditations on my being raped. No one called me a “transphobic c***” or, indeed, any other sort of c***. Such abuse is routine for others who write and comment about transgender issues. And indeed, that was part of the reason I took an interest. The vitriol of the debate, especially on social media, has had a chilling effect that should not go unremarked or unchallenged. Yet I have largely escaped that vitriol. Other journalists who have written about the topic and said similar things have experienced all of the aggression I describe above, and more. Several say they have sometimes feared physical attack by people unhappy at what they wrote. Those journalists are women. The differing responses to articles making similar arguments are indicative of a misogynistic strand in this debate. In some cases, that strand is easy to identify and describe. It is visible in the words of male journalists and political activists who accuse feminists of bigotry and suggest that their voices should not be heard. Less polite but equally transparent are the threats and intimidation such feminists face when they hold public meetings.

One young male activist who sought to disrupt such a meeting in Bristol in April had written on Twitter that he was prepared to punch “women who speak to invalidate the experience of someone who faces far more oppressive structures than they do”. Most such rhetoric is issued anonymously or pseudonymously, but Josh Connor was happy to state publicly his willingness to use violence against women he disagrees with.

Mr Connor has been associated with Momentum, a grassroots left-wing organisation supporting Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Britain’s Labour Party. His candour about violence is slightly unusual in such circles, but his dismissal of women’s concerns is not. In Britain, as in America, many feminists concerned about transgenderism come from the Left and bemoan a painful lack of solidarity from male comrades. Younger “Brocialists” associated with Mr Corbyn and Senator Bernie Sanders are frequently accused of using the gender debate to practise traditional sexism in modern form through their aggressive criticism of women who do not share their uncritical enthusiasm for trans rights.

It is hard to think of many other instances where self-described progressive political movements would be so relaxed about stigmatising a group (though British Jews might here point to Labour’s tolerance of antisemitism.) People who take pains to use language sensitively—carefully referring to trans people by the pronouns of their choice and abjuring terms such as “trans-identified male” for a trans woman—are notably comfortable ignoring those women (and men) who object to “TERF” or “cis”.

Some of the trans women who play prominent roles in public debate about gender in Britain transitioned in adulthood, sometimes well into middle age. Some women see distinctly male patterns in their speech and behaviour and argue that, having been socialised as males, they should and must be regarded as distinct, and treated differently, from women who were born female. Those trans women would retort that they have turned their backs on that socialisation, leaving gender roles that they never felt fit them. As a man, I wonder whether it is ever possible to shed entirely the assumptions and perceptions that come with being male in a society that affords men more power and privilege than women.

Of course, I’m a man, not a trans woman, so how can I truly know how trans women see the world? This takes us to what I think is a fundamental question of the gender debate, and what is often called identity politics. Who gets to speak?

I am a white heterosexual man with a couple of jobs that put me in, or at least close to, the British establishment. The laws and customs at issue in the transgender debate have little or no direct impact on me. The lived experiences and feelings that are so important to the feminists and transgender people involved in this debate are not ones I have known or can know. Do I have standing here?

Some people don’t think so. When I reported on the concerns raised by some lesbians about the social pressure they come under to accept male-bodied trans women as potential sexual partners, the chief executive of Stonewall, a charity representing LGBT people, dismissed my article as “written by a man”. What business did I have writing about women and transgender people, when I am neither?

There were similar responses when Jesse Singal, another male journalist, wrote for this month’s issue of the Atlantic magazine about children who identify as transgender and then “detransition”, returning to their natal gender identity. Many transgender people and their advocates argued that on such a subject the voices of transgender people should be heard first, and perhaps exclusively. (As an aside, I note the incorrect implication that trans people are unanimous; groups including Stonewall claim to speak for “the trans community” even though some trans people, especially older ones, are sceptical of what is sometimes called “transgender ideology”.)

Questioning the standing of men who apply critical thinking in the trans debate seems to me to have the same aim as denigrating sceptical women: trying to ensure that only one group gets to speak. In this way, the transgender debate marks the collision of identity politics with representative democracy. In the tradition best articulated by Edmund Burke, decisions are made by representatives who weigh all interests, not delegates who speak for just one.

That tradition faces intense challenge from the sectional populism of Donald Trump and other politicians (including some British Brexiteers) who see their job as delivering victory for “their” people over others who disagree. Instead of defeating opponents’ arguments, or even trying to change their minds, they seek to remove them from the conversation and end debate outright. Similarly, transgenderism insists that the experiences and interests of one group be given priority over others, instead of being balanced in a system of messy compromise and complexity.

I am not a woman and I am not trans, so what business do I have writing about women and trans people? My answer is that in a representative democracy, what I share with women and trans people is bigger and more important than any of our identities.

This is part of a two-week discussion on transgender issues, with ten contributors. The other contributions are available here.