‘Trans rights' has never been a civil rights issue

Spectator

25-06-2025

Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a 'trans man' – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement's lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking into real life, much as the unhip once had to keep remembering that 'super-bad' means 'super-good'.
Strangio is a rare example of sexual disguise that is reasonably persuasive. The 42-year-old woman passes for a certain kind of man: weedy, slight and very short, with narrow shoulders, Marx Brothers eyebrows, just-credible facial hair, a tight fade over the ears bursting into a cocky skywards coiffure, and a chronically smarmy, self-satisfied expression. Strangio comes across as nerdy, weak and perplexingly vain. Plenty of bona fide males out there fit that general description while to all appearances failing to embody the once-prized attributes of traditional masculinity. At a glance, Strangio belongs to that benighted class of weirdos, wimps and wusses – the ultimate swipe-left. So much trouble and expense lavished on passing as a male sissy, when the lawyer might have made a respectable broad.
Is it perversity or hypocrisy? Strangio resents that alphabet land is dominated by the 'gay white men' whose appearance she is aping, decries the Supreme Court – before which she has just appeared – as a 'vile institution', believes as a lawyer that law is 'not a dignified system' and, typically, is highly invested in the alchemy of having changed sex yet does not believe in the existence of sex. 'A penis is not a male body part,' she claims. 'It's just an unusual body part for a woman.' Behold, Exhibit B for the Democrats' foisting of crackpots into positions of responsibility (granted, Donald Trump has form in that regard as well). Naturally, Exhibit A is Admiral 'Rachel' Levine, who may single-handedly have convinced Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, because the US military was then apparently a joke.
Before the Supreme Court, Strangio headed the ACLU case against Tennessee, which had banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries for minors. Last week's 6-3 decision in Tennessee's favour rescues similar laws in 26 other states, which prevent doctors from neutering, mutilating and disrupting the maturation of underage patients suffering under the contagious misapprehension that they are not the sex they are. Just like the UK Supreme Court's recent decision that in law biological sex trumps an imaginary 'gender identity', this is a big win for sanity, physical reality and common sense.
The ACLU argued that because puberty blockers are occasionally prescribed to arrest precocious puberty, banning their use to make sexual fancy dress more convincing in future amounts to discrimination. The logic is skewed. The world is full of things that are good for one purpose and bad for another. Nothing against picking crops, but if I used a combine harvester to vacuum your sitting-room carpet, I'd expect you to sue. There's a night-and-day medical difference between a double mastectomy to cure breast cancer and the linguistically sanitised 'top surgery' that lops healthy breasts off bamboozled girls who will never breastfeed their children in the unlikely event they can still reproduce.
From the start, this whole trans business has been sold as a civil rights issue. But there is no movement in the West to deny transgender people equal access to housing or employment, much less to 'kill trans people', as Strangio asserts. There are no water fountains or lunch counters from which trans people are banished.
This is a medical issue – specifically, a mental health issue – slyly packaged as a campaign against bigotry. We don't let children get tattoos, because they're too young to understand the concept of permanence and they could come to regret covering their limbs in dinosaurs. It's therefore just sensible safeguarding for the state to keep kids from opting to take powerful drugs that prevent their bodies from maturing or from opting to get their genitals carved up just because some poor excuses for grown-ups planted this fanciful notion that one can play swapsies with biological sex.
This movement's 'trans rights' decode as the rights to: compel other people to mouth lies that contradict what they see with their own eyes; impose the widespread adoption of dehumanising language such as 'menstruators' and 'birthing people'; force the well-adjusted to finance costly elective plastic surgery through taxation and insurance premiums; walk around women's changing rooms with one's wang hanging out; turn women's sports into a farce; and most importantly, it seems, coax children and mixed-up teenagers to make drastic, irreversible medical decisions which may well result in infection, reduced bone density, lifelong reliance on pharmaceuticals, poor ability to form relationships, sexual dysfunction, impotence and infertility. Perhaps also in searing regret – especially once this sick societal obsession finally subsides and its victims no longer constitute sacralised members of the avant-garde but the awkward residue of an old mistake.
We're making progress, but this festishistic ideology is perniciously entrenched. Children are still butchered in American blue states. Let's relieve insurance companies and the NHS of the obligation to provide gender-denying care. It's past time we restored the conviction you're really the opposite sex to being a mental illness, and one not necessarily that is best treated by humouring the delusion. Sure, men can wear dresses and women tuxes, but doctors who mangle fully functional body parts violate the Hippocratic oath.
Aren't we all to some degree 'born in the wrong body'? I'm an abysmal 5ft 2in, yet I identify as 6ft 7in. I also identify as 23, so that I expect you all to ignore my skin's telltale crenulation and to ask eagerly whether I'm planning to attend graduate school. I identify as beautiful, so watch the mouth. I identify as immortal, too, so that on my deathbed I am sure to identify like fury as an alive person, and if anyone makes a move to call an undertaker I will see them in court. Apologies to the jury in advance, for the smell is apt to be unpleasant.