Public institutions should show commitment to the scientific facts of sex and gender and reject gender ideology, rather than kowtow to the activists peddling it, a columnist has said.
Writing for The Times, Janice Turner, who has previously been harassed by trans activists, hit out at the “sexist” concept of being ‘non-binary’.
Pretending people can be neither male nor female, she said, is “damaging to the mental health of fragile young people”, adding that people should have the courage to say so.
‘Wholly unscientific’
Turner said because policymakers and broadcasters “prefer to surf rainbow flag approval than suffer a Twitter storm”, public institutions have embraced the “wholly unscientific belief that biological sex does not exist, while ‘gender identity’ is real”.
She highlighted that the Office for National Statistics website now says ‘sex’ is “something that is assigned at birth”, and that gender is falsely claimed to be “increasingly understood as not binary but on a spectrum”.
Turner wrote: “‘Increasingly understood’ suggests some scientific breakthrough when it is merely a fashionable theory.”
She added that it is for this reason that the Government is considering changing a census question from asking about birth sex to ‘lived sex’.
BBC Teach
Turner was also highly critical of organisations promoting this view in classrooms.
She continued: “Even more zealous is the BBC Teach website which provides classroom materials.”
In a film for seven to eleven-year-olds, a Relationships Education teacher tells children: “We know we have male and female, but there are over 100 if not more gender identities now.”
Turner said: “(Note the ‘now’, implying cutting-edge new research.) The unease and puzzlement on these kids’ faces – what are all these genders? Which one am I? – made me furious.”
‘Gender Pokémon’
The supposed 100 genders include “Vapogender: a gender that feels like smoke”. “In other words”, Turner said, “they are made up, mythical nonsense: gender Pokémon”.
What she called “the non-binary fad” would be “harmless”, she added, “if social media and peer pressure weren’t pushing so many towards medical transition”.
She said rather than encouraging a confused individual to transition, it is better “to understand that your sex is immutable, that you don’t need some off-the-shelf gender identity because instead you have a complex, unique personality”.