... knows one sex from the other ...

My tiny baby brother

has never read a book

Knows one sex from the other

all he has to do is look

Doin’ a-What Comes Naturally**, from Annie Get Your Gun

Well yes.  And we get there in the end (if I may use that phrase) as the Supreme Court makes an intelligent ruling on a key aspect of the trans nonsense.  It remains to unhook the NHS from that lunacy.

There are two aspects to this I find very interesting.  Firstly, not so long ago the mainstream progressive left had been wholly captured by the “Self-ID Trans” madness, so that it was de rigeur to mouth “some men have a cervix / some women have a penis” etc etc.  I had this down as a shibboleth, a marker of progressive belonging, being so deliberately crazy that it took a major effort of intellectual self-abasement to adopt it – like any uncomfortable initiation test.  Yes, in order to be a Catholic in the Middle Ages you had to sign up for literal transubstantiation; and to be one of the Progressive gang, you are obliged to pretend you believe that a trans woman is literally a woman.  Well, make that “are” into a “were”, because I don’t detect any of that on the mainstream left just now (though still perhaps amongst the Greens?)  Mercifully, it evaporated some time over the last 12 months or so – something to do with the General Election, I’m guessing.  A very big relief to many, we may be sure.

Second, however, is something that seems to be taking its place, and might possibly be around a bit longer.  There seems now to be a reaction of, well, the Supreme Court’s ruling is what it is, but the whole matter is so complex and “granular”, it doesn’t resolve the myriad of practical questions.  The efforts made to make the waters seem as muddy as possible range from the properly nuanced to outright sophistry.

Armed with the SC ruling as a thoroughly commonsense-affirming breakthrough, we can cut through this second-tier crap relatively easily by noting that society often has annoying problems when willful, sometimes rather unfortunate people are determined to behave oddly, noisily and angrily in public.  Can these ever be resolved by the Supreme Court?  Well, no.  It’s not the SC’s job, but rather, the thankless task of unfortunate school teachers, policemen, NHS staff, HR directors etc etc.  As with stroppy children, be they genuinely disturbed or just playing up, the key is to steer them gently but firmly and confidently into some sensible, pragmatic, quietist outcome.  Easier said than done, I know – but it’s the eternal (and hopefully only occasional) lot of responsible adults.

ND

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** The film version of this song is slightly bowdlerised: the original contained some fruitier verses