The trans debate no one dared to have… until now

0:03The Telegraph. Is trans trickery finally coming to an end? Maeve Halligan went viral for a speech to the Cambridge Union in which she drove a coach and horses through trans ideology. She says LGBTQ activism is harming women and vulnerable children and enforces regressive sex stereotypes. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me Camilla Tominey. And me Tim Stanley.

0:40Maeve Halligan joins us in the Daily Tea studio you're a master's student a co-founder of the Cambridge University Society of Women that's the university's only openly females only organisation we should point out that you're also the daughter of our colleague the Telegraph journalist Liam Halligan and you gave this quite extraordinary speech that basically went viral, Maeve. We'll get on to the reaction to the speech and what's happened since but just take us back to the beginning. How did you even come to make that speech in the first place? Thanks for having me. I would say I have been what's commonly labelled gender critical so basically I don't buy the trans stuff.

1:19I've been that way since I found out what trans was so I was originally really, really sceptical of it. I didn't say much about it at the time when I which is when I was about 14 or 15 but you know as I think we can all look back retrospectively now and we can all acknowledge that trans as an idea and gender ideology more generally has really it's grown and it's gathered a worrying amount of sort of strength and influence in spaces like schools and institutions so when I went to university I really really noticed it that was in 2021 and because that was just post-covid there There were still sort of, you know, hints of COVID around.

1:53People had been inside online for a really long time. So trans was booming. I also was at the University of Bristol as an undergrad. So, you know, for a whole host of reasons and the city's sort of political identity means that the University of Bristol swallowed trans in a big way. Also, I think the Colston statue was swallowed by a huge body of water at that period as well. Well, this is the thing. I mean, I was sort of disappointed, but not surprised about Bristol specifically. And there are other universities like it, for example, Brighton. And Leeds is similar. Obviously, my friend Connie Shaw was they attempted to sort of discipline her for having publicly gender critical views.

2:27But anyway, I got to the end of my time at Bristol. I had started speaking more publicly about my views and publicly challenging the trans narrative, partly online, but also just in my day to day life with my peers. And there had already been backlash and ostracization and all the rest of it. But it basically meant that when I got to Cambridge, walked around at the Freshers' Fair and saw literally no societies that were for women only. all of them had some kind of asterisk or said women are non-binary or you know students with their sign-up sheets kind of chastised me for pressing them on when you say woman what do you mean and I left the Freshers' Fair and immediately called two of my mates and said I think we should do something here I think we should set up a society because in and of itself you know before we actually did anything as a society just its existence I've said this before it stress tested the University of Cambridge, which has been very, very unwilling to bend to the fact that there is growing outrage at the pernicious nature of the trans stuff.

3:27It forced them to acknowledge that not everyone goes along with this. Well, at the time that you did that, though, presumably because this is a label that's been thrown at me repeatedly, you were accused of being trans-exclusionary, i.e. that you're a TERF, you're a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which is the term that's used to describe those who are gender critical because they're basically accusing us of not being inclusive enough. And you're saying, look, the LGB is one thing, but including the T isn't appropriate for all organisations. And I'd imagine you've got quite a lot of backlash for all that.

4:05Trans exclusionary, you know, if you want to get into the kind of language that's chucked around at women and men like me, trans exclusionary is pretty soft. I mean, within a couple of days, I remember saying to the two other young women, and Thea Sewell and Serena Wally, the other co-founders, I remember saying to them, like, give it a couple of days and it'll be Turf Sock. And then, am I allowed to swear? It'll be Bitch Sock. And all of that happened. I mean, Turf is a slur in how it's used. I don't personally find it offensive, partly because I think it's a total misnomer. How can you exclude something you don't believe in in the first place?

4:35But it's also, you know, it has been reclaimed, I would say, by a lot of people in the gender critical movement, and that's fine. We were once wearing turf and proud T-shirts, Tim. This is when I myself became radicalised. OK. Can I just ask? Sure. When you were describing the impact of trans thinking upon your campus, you describe society as saying we're open to, we'll welcome people who are non-binary and et cetera, et cetera. But was there evidence to you also of people actually themselves becoming trans or experimenting with gender nonconformity because of what they're reading at home. My point is, is this just a political statement for people, or is it actually changing the way they live?

5:19Do they live the ideology themselves? Yes, I see that. We do know that in the past 10 years, rates of so-called transition have shot up among young women. It used to be the case in the days when people would use words like transvestite or transsexual. Yeah, as I say, until about 2015, it was the case that the vast majority were male. Many of those were gay men. And that's why it was very much a sort of thing on the fringes of society. But yeah, in the last 10 years, it's the case that, I can't remember the exact statistics and I don't want to misremember, but it's young women now far, far, far more frequently.

5:56And specifically, well, let's say girls, they're the people being referred to these gender clinics, including the Tavistock that has obviously been closed down and everything. So there are young women, especially experimenting with gender, as you might put it. How far they go into that experiment, it can really vary. You'll have young women who do what we call a social transition, which basically amounts to changing your name and your pronouns and dressing in a more masculine way, which is funny because all they're doing is pushing the sex stereotypes. but then there are also young women who medicalise which means that either they've been prescribed puberty blockers when they're prepubescent or more commonly they simply start taking testosterone when they're in their late teens, early twenties and then you get on to surgeries very sadly in the case of many young women and they use many euphemisms I mean the trans stuff, euphemisms abound but they call top surgery basically the double mastectomy of their healthy breasts so that's how far it can go right is it i mean that you made a really good point because there are certain truths about this that should have been apparent at the time and yet were sort of dampened down in this sea of condemnation and accusation of those going but hang on a minute you know mave makes a really good point here and you're much younger than us you know for all of our lives transvestites and transsexuals went about their daily lives they did what they wanted to do.

7:21There have always been butch women who call themselves Charlie. Well, of course, but it's interesting the advent of this period where suddenly there are more than two genders. And there is an organisation called Transgender Trend. It suddenly started to be trendy, to start saying things that nobody would have dreamt of saying. You wouldn't say trans women are women. And this isn't, by the way, about we're all much more progressive and understanding now. Something happened and sort of took truths and then turned them into lies. It is extraordinary that that kind of 2015 moment that suddenly we're all using completely different language around an issue that we've all been used to for decades.

8:07Also, they took something which was just part of human experience, people either doubting their gender or experimenting with a different gender, and then they turned it into a medical process where you could see someone who could talk you through it who could prescribe you drugs for it and then it's political then you're surrounded by and then it's lucrative and then it's lucrative and so basically the whole of society becomes interested in something which to me it just from a developmental point of view is a perfectly normal part of growing up which is having doubts about who you are and trying to define for yourself who you are but not just about gender just about sexuality in general yes oh you know sexuality is nothing to do with trans let's make no mistake i mean it's not that you know you're making any kind of error here.

8:50What I mean specifically, though, is that part of the gender movement, such as it is, has been to allied transness with sexual orientation. I mean, look at the acronym. That's why there's a movement called LGB without the T. Like, many, many, and I talked about this in the speech quite a lot, because the motion was, this house believes modern LGBTQ plus activism fails its community. And I was saying, yes, it does. There are so many lesbian and gay and bisexual people, their sexual orientation relies on the factual reality there are two sexes. So as soon as you add the T, which basically represents denying that truth, denying that reality, you're attempting to remove the legitimacy of being same-sex attracted.

9:29To be super blunt, if there's no such thing as sex, how can you be same-sex attracted? So the fact that trans ever gets any kind of a look in in discussions about sexual orientation is madness out the gate. Well, also, if there are multi-genders, why can you only have a sex change into one other gender? Why are there only ever the opposite gender offered to sex change patients? Well, on that note, it's important to remember as well, you know, this assertion has been made quite a few times and it's a good one. If your genitals supposedly don't define your sex, why does changing them affirm it? So, you know, if a woman can have a penis, fine, keep it.

10:06And then, you know, if you think you're a woman and that your genitals don't matter, why are you bothering with hormones anyway? But to be fair, then you get into the point that I think I also made in the speech. These men who claim to be women, they don't actually undergo sex reassignment surgery, as it's known, because why would they? Because for a lot of them, it's motivated by fetish. So if they if there's surgical operation on their genitals, their sexual function and their ability to fetishize in the first place, which is what they're enjoying, that they take that away from themselves. So they stay intact, if you like, consciously so.

10:36Yes, that's true for some people. we should stress there are people who, for instance, are born into sex and have benefited from reconstructive surgery. Yeah, but it's reconstructive. Nobody's claiming that they're reassigning some kind of sex. I should also stress that... No, no, no. They are the chromosome level. There is male and female. But the point is that nature does occasionally throw up complex examples. You could have women born with ovaries and testes. They have to take a decision when they're very young as to what to do. it's easier to turn a penis into a vagina than it is to build a penis.

11:10Blimey, this is starting to sound like Robert Kenyon's Twitter feed. I know it does, but, you know, a friend of mine is a retired consultant urologist. She's carried out a great many of these surgeries. You're fashioning a penis from skin on the forearm. Oh, please, there's a man present. I know there's a man present. It's a very personal and sensitive area of discussion. Yeah, well, it's also a horrible reality that a lot of teenage girls are being put through. Exactly. It's so dangerous. And actually the penis that is fashioned then needs to be operated mechanically with a pump. Of course, it cannot achieve an erection on its own.

11:40It's worth just discussing the nitty gritty of it just to say that, yes, as you say, Maeve, we've got young women potentially going through these sorts of surgeries. Back to the speech, though. Why did you decide at that point to give that speech? And did you have any idea it was going to go viral at the time? The Society of Women that, again, myself and the two co-founders set up right at the start of the academic year, you know our priorities at the start I remember saying we have a shared mission that's really clear and that's that's great that's a boon for us you know we should attract members it's important even though a lot of them remain you know their membership's confidential and they won't publicly say they're in the society and I respect that because you know there's there are social ramifications which we can get into but our membership I was like let's let's boost it let's grow it let's be an attractive thing for these women to want to join maybe even a sanctuary for some of them so you have mission membership and then one thing that we wanted to do at the start was engage with the media and was to basically do what we were doing loudly and break out of the Cambridge bubble in order to you know try and gather some external support which luckily happened and I'm really really grateful for the support that we received from individual members of the public but also from organizations the likes of Women Scotland, Sex Matters like these people they were so you know encouraging and also they empathize with some of the social ramifications I mentioned that we were going through as the kind of public co-founders of it because they totally know what it's like so they were great but anyway so then the society we've had lots and lots and lots of events um guest speaker events but also kind of members only discussion forums fun social things you know we have a society sub stack and a book club and all of these things so we had a very successful year and we welcomed guests like julie bindle victoria smith to um you know nimko ali we were talking about issues that truly do affect women and very rarely did we i mean we didn't have an event that was about trans partly because a bit of our our drive was to get women back on something of a real path when it comes to advocating for women's rights because when we talk about trans we talk about men yeah and that's really frustrating so we had the successful year, I had been involved with, I had not been involved with the Cambridge Union, the debating union at all.

13:54I hadn't ever entered the chamber. I hadn't gone to anything. Very wise. Were you involved in the union, Tim? I lost a campaign for the presidency of Cambridge Union several times. I was once beaten by a man dressed as a frog. Really? I was defeated by trans-speciesism. I was going to say, would it have helped if he was dressed as a woman? So you succeeded. I've done it out of one. Just to say you have succeeded where Tim Stanley failed in going viral with the speech. Well, I found out that they were having this debate and specifically I found out Helen Weberley had been invited to speak. Who is that?

14:29So Dr. Helen Weberley. I hate saying doctor. Let me say, well, let me say she's an activist and a GP who founded GenderGP, a platform that has transformed access to transgender health care across the globe. However, you subsequently, just to put this into context, went on to Piers Morgan's show and accused Weberley of being untrustworthy in this debate because she profits off the transitioning of children and, quote, stands to gain from peddling the ideology that gender identity isn't innate. You think she doesn't deserve to be platformed and that she distracts from issues facing women and LGB people.

15:07Of course, Weberley suggests that she is helping children. Does she make money from her services? Absolutely, she does. Right. Yep. Gender GP as an organisation was set up by Helen Weberley and her husband, who was also a doctor but was struck off. I should also add that Helen Weberley's, forgive me if I get the technical terms wrong, her licence to practice, you know what I mean, was under threat. I think in 2022 it was. She was sort of investigated, but she appealed. but it basically all of that process meant that she would needed to re-register to practice in the UK to this to date to my knowledge she hasn't done that so gender GP it was set up and then it was operating from Spain and now it operates from Singapore and I mean this is all very publicly available information I think it's even on its Wikipedia okay it's so murky decided to take her on yeah well I wanted to I wanted to go and watch the debate that was my original plan um and bring friends and just sort of maybe ask a question or yeah try you know not disrupt her I you know defend her right to speak but i wanted to yeah see what she had to say for herself and then what happened well and then the president of the union who's currently a young guy called jack peters he got in touch with me 48 hours prior to the debate or something like that and was like there's a student speaker slot for the proposition side so that the side i was on basically saying yeah this activism's out of order and you have to audition if you want to be a student speaker Do you?

16:30Yeah, because they basically need to check that, one, you can speak publicly and you're not going to have a meltdown, and also they need to check insofar as they can prior that you're not going to start libeling and all the rest of it. So you passed your audition? I did. He told me there were many other students that auditioned for that speaker slot, but none of them, to my knowledge, had anything like the stance that I had. And how long did you take to write the speech? I didn't write the speech out verbatim. I had some, like, chunks of text and also obviously with stuff like, you know, facts and stats and names and things.

17:06I'd written those things down. Yeah. But I was literally sitting there listening to the other speakers and kind of crossing things out and noting some things down. It's the best way to debate. And then when you were speaking, I mean, did you think at the time this is... I mean, I presume there are some in the audience bringing up sick in their own mouth going, this is an outrage. I mean, there must have been. You must have had the whole snowflake woke crowd absolutely tearing their hair out, whatever colour it may be. Yeah, yeah, I watch people look at me like they'd look at a racist or something like that.

17:36You know, they genuinely think that denying that trans women are women or that trans men are men, as the case may be, they genuinely equate that with views that are genuinely morally abhorrent. So, you know, before the debate, students have come up to me and came with students I've never met before in my life and they'll come up to me and be like, yeah, you are evil for this. Like you're Nazi and fascist and all of these words are chucked around. How do they do that exactly? Tap you on the shoulder and go, oh, hi, are you Maeve Halligan? You're evil. Well, yeah, like in the street and stuff, in pubs, especially, yeah, when students have had a drink, you know, it's courage and it.

18:11These people are meant to be the best of the best, Tim. Your lot, your alumni. These Cambridge types, they're not very tolerant, are they? We're streeting and Rob Jenrick. Yeah, good point. Carry on, Maeve. So this is why they think they're right, though. I'm not surprised that at Cambridge, I'm disappointed but not surprised that at Cambridge, you know, it's literally full of people who are receiving academic affirmation when they walk around. You know, they're waking up in a college. Oh, another day of being at Cambridge. Another day of being a genius. Yeah. Look, I'm not trying to have a go at anyone.

18:40I don't think it's about being a genius. I'm sorry. It's about living in an environment in which you persuade yourself that we are the most tolerant and liberal and best people in the world. Yes. I don't think it's really about IQ at all. It's about... Well, it clearly isn't because if you think a woman can have a penis and that a man can grow a uterus, then potentially you should go back and restudy your biology GCSE. But it's been inverted because now you've got people basically saying that the likes of me are basically just too thick to be progressive. This is kind of what I mean. I agree with you.

19:08It's not a kind of genius-y thing. It's the fact that you've got lots of people in one place who are young, who are in a total bubble, and so their responsibilities are to nobody but themselves. So for many of them, it's no skin off their nose to kind of back this. If anything, there are massive incentives to back trans stuff because it's social currency, especially for young women, because it's basically a declaration, in my view, an incredibly flawed one, but it's basically a declaration of I am kind, I am progressive, I am with the times, I'm on the right side of history, I'm clever because I can kind of work out in my head all the intricacies of gender identity, and then I come along and say, that's a man, and then suddenly it becomes very, very frustrating.

19:44When you challenge trans for a lot of these young people, and that's why at Cambridge I think there's been such backlash, you challenge the ideology itself, but you challenge these people's perception of themselves as the true progressives. I stood in the room and was like, this is not progressive and you need to wake up to that fact. And that's not something people necessarily want to hear.

20:13But we have made progress, haven't we? Because just hearing you retell the tale of actually appearing at the union and making this speech, I'm thinking to myself, you would not have got anywhere near this debating chamber three, five, seven years ago. I mean, we did go through an era where even suggesting that trans women weren't women could get you sacked from your job. Correct. Hounded out of a university by basically blokes in balaclavas. It was heresy. It was heresy, wasn't it? It was heresy. I mean, let's just have some witch trials and let's just burn feminists at the stake. So it's extraordinary we've moved on.

20:47Do you think that's because of the Cass review into the Tavistock Clinic and indeed the Supreme Court ruling that we now have a bit more of an open debate about these sorts of issues? Notwithstanding that I know it's still an extremely febrile environment. Death threats are received by those who are gender critical. And I'm not trying to underplay at all some of the awful things that are said to people like you, JK Rowling and others. Do you know what? I mean, where to start? That really is the question. Where are we now with the gender debate? One thing I will say, I feel this personally, but I know it's a view that is shared within the gender critical movement.

21:22A lot of us are so bored of this now. And it's, I mean, you know. It's like Brexit, isn't it? Oh, it's like COVID. That's enough already. People are very frustrated. I remember seeing somebody tweeted the other day, trans is exhausting. And it's so true because it's literally like bashing your head against a wall sometimes because you're stating factual reality to somebody who is at best calling you a thicko and at worst calling you a fascist. It's so maddening and that's why I think it's important. I mean, I'm a student and I do other things in my life than this. I consciously take myself away from it because when you're in an environment where people are spouting such blatant lies as truths, it's like religious doctrine to these people almost, it can threaten your own sanity in the immediate.

22:14Do you know what I mean? But anyway, on to where we are with the debate. I agree with you. There have been some really, really important moments of windfalls, really. I mean, yes, the Supreme Court ruling of April last year, which was for Women's Scotland against the Scottish ministers. And that was so important. And I remember sitting on my own in my room at Bristol, having started to publicly say turfy things and being ousted for it. And I was so moved. I was just so optimistic. Could you find anyone in Bristol that shared your joy? I found some people, yeah. There are some amazing groups of women.

22:47There's a branch of the Women's Rights Network, which is a great organisation and has branches all over the country. There's also a brilliant group called the Women of Wessex, among whom I found friends and it was a bit of a support system at times. among students a lot of young men young women i remember being at house parties and there would be women kind of drunkenly being like i really agree with you by the way and then sort of staggering off it was it was so cloak and dagger and so strange um yeah but then they're scared aren't they yeah i mean as is ever the case the women are always on the receiving end of the abuse yes i mean what do you what's your analysis i think it's i think it's strange and sad that it took the Cass Report and the Supreme Court for so many people to decide maybe trans stuff isn't true.

23:35Yeah. Because like 90 % of the rest of the population never bought it. And we realised when this kicked off, if I stick my neck out, I'm going to get sacked or something. So we'll just go quiet. I know, but that's so depressing. But we'll just go quiet because this is something the elite is into, something Cambridge is into, Labour's into, parts of the Tory party are into. And we'll just let them do it and we'll let them correct themselves. And that's what Cass and the Supreme Court are. They're intra-elite competition. They are the elite saying to the elite, we've gone too far. But the rest of the population, we could have just locked the door and pulled the curtains and ignored it for 10 years and come out the other side.

24:19And our views would never have changed. No, but we could have until you had men with male chromosomes in boxing rings knocking six bells out of women. Yes. I totally agree with you that there was a period of this where I thought, well, this is just complete madness, so the wheels are going to come off. I mean, come on, this can't stand. I thought that when I was 14 and I'm 23 now. Look where we are. But it's taken such hold that now my daughters are at risk because a guy can turn up in a changing room self-identify and be allowed in to be changing next to my girls, be it at a swimming club or in a changing room in a shop, that's not safe.

25:01Then if my girls are in competitive sport, which by the way they are, I also have a son, you're now saying that they might have to compete, what in athletics, against male born kids that are identifying as women. No, that's not fair. So then it gets like that. And then you obviously then see the likes of Rowling or Kathleen Stock or anybody, hounded out of their jobs because they've presented a counter-narrative. What in academia, we're now saying in academia, we can't have somebody restating the immutability of biological sex. That's where the majority's silence has failed everyone. But what I would say in defence of our cowardly majority is I don't think the Supreme Court or CAS happened because of much of what you've described.

25:53My experience of the last 10 years when we all went mad about a number of things, we went mad about COVID, we went mad about race, we went mad about gender. And in each case, it seems to me you can shout and scream against it, and you should because you should stand up for the truth. But what actually happens is it has to go horribly wrong. Right. And when it's gone horribly wrong, then the elite steps in and says, OK, that went horribly wrong. We won't do that anymore. And suddenly, overnight, everyone changes their mind about the whole thing. To give a counter example, Black Lives Matter, right?

26:26Five years ago, Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer are literally taking the knee for something that's going on in America, and statues are being tossed in the river. And for like five minutes, the elite is like, this is what we're anti-racist now. This is what we all are. And then what happens? There are riots. It turns out to be completely mad. And then gradually the elite comes around to the view, oh, maybe went a bit too far. But you say the elite. So I'm just checking out here because I've got to let society go through these periods of madness. If I just go in my bunker, I can emerge in 10 years' time.

26:58Hang on, I think it's more mainstream than the elite. This was about multiple organisations and institutions buying into stuff. I went to my school reunion the other day. One of the girls in the group sort of started questioning because she doesn't have children. What's all of this? Why is there LGBTQ plus stuff everywhere? And I said, I would just keep your voice down. You know, it was the same as BLM. You said keep your voice down. No, I said that in relation to how I didn't want her to be lynched by the other girls that were there. OK. But it's not. And also, it just wasn't the forum to kind of have that discussion.

27:34I mean, I made a joke. Neurodiversity is a strength. I joked. And I've got neurodiverse people in my family. So before you write in, I joked neurodiversity is a strength. in our day when we left school 30 years ago, it would have been a reason for expulsion. You know, things have come on, okay? This was in a private girls' school and we had a lovely time. But institutions bought into this and as a consequence, you have people like Keira Bell who now have no breasts. Can we just please contemplate this? We have got young women with no breasts because of what's happened. We've got young men with no penises because of what's happened.

28:15So this whole, oh, society had some kind of COVID nervous breakdown. But it did. It's because the stakes were higher. The stakes were higher. And frankly, I was not willing to put my head in the sand. Not that I'm saying that's what you're necessarily doing yourself. But I was not willing to just sit there and wait for the craziness to blow over because I watched it become mainstream very, very quickly. I watched you know people in my life my peers many of them young women who frankly were going through the difficulties of being 14 and a girl and your body changing and society sexualizing you and whereas that's always been hard but it used to be survivable whereas now these girls are being told that yeah their bodies are wrong and they should change them irreversibly and you mentioned yes of course you can have surgeries you know on your genitals on your breasts as the case maybe these things also sterilize you yeah so the stakes are too high i was not willing at any point and so many people like me were not willing to just wait for the craziness to die down and it to blow over it's different in that sense this movement of trans ideology is different it's so pernicious it became mainstream so quickly it's also different let's not forget insofar as there's not really nuance either you will acknowledge and respond to the factual reality of biological sex being real binary and important or you won't there's no in between and so many institutions just happily opted into trans ideology they opted in there was conscious shifting in institutions in schools in universities in the whole medical establishment and it was all the way through from you know language changing which is always a real litmus test of are we how mental are we going you suddenly it was birthing persons and cervix havers which is deeply offensive as well as unclear chest feeding Yeah, it was ridiculous.

30:00So awful. And it skewed, you know, on the topic of language, it skewed stuff like data because you had the census, people being, you know, you had loads and loads of women. Women rapists. Well, no, you had loads of women basically and men answering wrong the question, do you identify with the sex you were assigned at birth? Because especially if English isn't your first language, what a weird word salad. It skews everything. It skews data. It skews crime statistics. That's awful. At every possible level, it trickled down. It got its hooks in. And it's why I describe it as pernicious. It's deeply, deeply sinister.

30:30The young suffered. The LGB population suffered. Women constantly suffered. Sport, and it's the integrity of competition, suffered. The media suffered. Suddenly, truth went out the window in such a fundamental way because you're denying literally men, women. It's like, you know, it's the two plus two equals five idea. Everything, you know, whether slowly or very, very rapidly, has been decimated as a result. I believe that we can get back to sanity and people absolutely are in the movement, the gender critical movement. It's many things, but it's healthy and it's strong and it's respected and it's organised, partly because, by the way, it's full of women who are left leaning and used to unions.

31:07Don't ever let anybody tell you that, you know, it's party political to be gender critical. It's absolutely not. No. The other thing, of course, and why this is so pernicious, it taught a generation of children the opposite of what was true. And therefore, how can they have any trust in anything else? You know, there must be a correlation, frankly, between this sort of misinformation and the transfer of it. And as you say, sort of this kind of progressive cloak that's worn by people masking actually very prejudiced and non-inclusive views. Because if you're arguing in the interest of inclusivity in one hand and then saying, but anyone I disagree with isn't just wrong, but a bigot, then you've got sort of intellectual problems.

31:53But you then also see this kind of it has an effect on other areas of policy. This is how you then get the Queers for Palestine brigade. You get young people on pro-Palestinian marches failing to recognize the subjugation of women in some Arab states. You get this absolutely blinkered. I can just believe in my truth rather than the actual truth. And that is so dangerous for society. Don't you think? You know I do, because I've been saying it for 10 years, just no one ever listened, so I gave up. But on the question of queering, this label queer is really interesting. And Maeve, you mentioned this unlikely alliance between lesbians, gays, and transgendered people.

32:35I would just throw this in because some gay friends say this to me. They feel they are historically part of that alliance. Because what the queer label says is that this is a coalition of difference. That there is straight, normal, what people call cisgendered, or heterosexual. So people who have the joy of being born knowing what they are and being heterosexual and being able to enjoy all the fruits of society for which that is the norm. And then there's everyone who's a little bit different. And so that is what LGBTQ plus is. It is a self-conscious umbrella of difference, including people who may have things that are very much not in common.

33:13And if you push that to its logical conclusion, Queers for Palestine doesn't look quite so mad because it's an alliance between I am a sexual minority in my country, you are an oppressed Arab in your country, and okay, we are very different in our worldviews, but the thing we have in common is we're not the norm. But the treatment of queers, as these people just call themselves, I don't necessarily use that word myself, but the treatment of those people in these Arab countries you're describing, I mean, we know what happens to gay men and lesbian women in these countries, don't we? I mean, the phrase turkeys for Christmas has been chucked around a lot and it's not entirely inaccurate.

33:50I'm not saying at the end of the day, I'm not going to stop someone holding up a placard that says quiz for Palestine. Why would I want to do that? And I believe in their freedom of speech and their right to say it. However, you can talk about logical conclusions. There is no logic in somebody homosexual promoting a regime in a nation that categorically rejects homosexuality to the extent that it murders gay people. like that's not logical I totally agree with you that there are many many LGB people who I'm not totally denouncing or discrediting who do feel that they wish to be a part of a community as they often you know will say of the LGBT community they wish for the tea and everything that that can represent to be within that community but there are two problems there one that's great in terms if you want to have a you know do an activity or start a club or whatever but when it comes to legislation and policy, you need to think about LGB people specifically and in their own right, because they have specific issues and things that affect solely them on the basis of their same-sex attraction.

34:53Whereas trans people, a lot of these so-called trans people is such a broad word. A lot of what we're talking about is literally straight men with fetishes or teenage girls who are suffering with body dysmorphia. So it doesn't logically fly to always put them together when you're thinking about stuff like legislation when you're thinking about stuff like policy and also you know trans there's been a lot of retrospective kind of writing in of so-called trans people into history which is really frustrating this thing like trans people have always existed and people trying to claim i have a professor at cambridge who did a reading of something it was about a woman who dressed up as a man to go and join the army and she was like oh you know this trans man i said what are you talking about what are you talking about yeah Because that in itself, that erases the fact that women have been massively oppressed forever.

35:40I played Banquo once at school. Does that make me a man? No, it clearly doesn't. And I mean, another example is I find the way in which drag queens have been turned into an identity very, very strange. A drag queen is a performance. It's good fun. And again, it's part of our culture and our history. When it's not overtly misogynistic. Right. But it's just part of our culture and it's been turned into a political identity. and there is a tension here between trans, which I think is a real experience and it's one which none of us quite understand, but I've always known people who have been fully trans, people who feel they have been born in the wrong body and have changed it and those people have existed throughout history and a cultural moment of gender fluidity and gender fluidity is simply anyone can be anything they like and the problem is that these two things I feel have become conflated such that a lot of people who really are just, and you've listed the many examples of, this example of fetishism, of people who just get off as dressing as a woman, that has become, I think, unhelpfully to trans people that has become conflated.

36:47Do you believe in such thing as true trans then? I don't know what that means because I'm not familiar with that language. No, it's what you're describing, I suppose, in terms of, you know, there are some people who really are trans. I don't know what it means either. I don't know what a homosexual is. I don't know what a lesbian is. Well, you do know that. No, I don't know if it's genetic. I don't know if it's nature. OK, well, then you may not know why they are, but you know what it is that they're experiencing and why. Yes. So therefore, by that definition, I could say of a trans person, I'm a Christian.

37:17I believe in male and female, and I believe that's reflected in chromosomes. But you have decided for your reasons you are that thing, and because you are living out as that thing, to some extent I am willing to respect and engage with you on that basis because I recognise your dignity as a human being. So I am prepared to embrace and accept, of course, someone who presents themselves to me as trans, even if I don't understand what that thing is because I'm trying to engage with them on the level of human dignity because I love them because they're a human being. That's fine. And, you know, there are many trans people in my life who I also love.

37:49But the reason that you can, as, you know, somebody who's extremely intelligent and informed, the reason that you don't understand this is because it is incomprehensible because it's impossible. There is no such thing as somebody changing their sex, which to be fair, I don't think you're going to deny. But I think to truly love someone, you should promote their acceptance of their own body. No surgical intervention, no denial of their own sex, especially in the case of people who are same-sex attracted and who are very, very pressured by sad, depressing, archaic sex-based stereotypes and societal norms and all of this stuff.

38:20It's not necessarily surprising is all I'm saying. It's very, very sad, but it's not necessarily surprising that a lot of women, when given this choice, women who either are same-sex attracted or will likely grow up to be that, It's not surprising that a lot of them, when presented with this supposed opt-out, take it. I think that's really sad. But likewise, and this might get me cancelled, as a Christian, if I meet a gay person, following your logic, I should say to them, you're not actually gay, because it's not the way God created you to be, and it's not what God wants. I don't say that, of course.

38:48And I don't say that in part because the Christian thing to do is to meet people where they are and accompany them through their life, trying to help them to form a better relationship with God. and I apply the same standard to trans. I am not about saying to people, you're wrong. I'm about trying to be a good friend and a companion to them in life. Isn't the kind of crux of this... Sorry, this is important because it's about being a good human being. Don't tell me to be kind, I will kick off. No, it's not about being kind. It's not about politeness. It's about trying to figure out... If you are confronted with someone who says, I really truly believe I am trans to the point where I will kill myself, and people do say that if I'm not allowed to become trans, Whether I agree with them or not, I have to engage with what they're saying to me and I have to be empathetic towards it.

39:35I would agree. I mean, I clearly take an interest in this, don't I? And I speak to trans identifying people all the time, both male and female people. I take an interest in it. I think what the problem here is, though, is that nobody necessarily says why. I think we agree up to this point. I think we'll agree on the fact that there absolutely is such thing as a mental disorder, illness, whatever you want to call it, that can be temporary or lifelong, which we have dubbed gender dysphoria. And, you know, it's pretty clear what we're talking about there is when you have you experience discomfort in your sexed body and that can manifest itself in many different ways.

40:05That is a chunk of people that is a proportion of people who seek to identify their sex body and become what we have labelled trans. There's also a chunk of people under the same umbrella, literally under the same banner, the trans flag and under that same word, which is why it's a very frustrating word. There are people who are fetishists, mostly, you know, straight men, and they have a fetish called autogynephilia, which is they get off on the idea of themselves as a woman, partly because they believe it to be the ultimate form of submission. So it's a misogynistic fetish they wish to live and no longer confined to the bedroom.

40:32So you've got, there are different people who are using this word trans. I think we can both attempt in our lives and strive to be kind. This is the thing. I do believe in trying to be kind and trying to be a good person in society. I'm not religious myself, but we can share that value. But I do not think that it's kind to encourage somebody rejecting their own body, especially when that person in my case is a young woman because show me a young woman that had a great time through puberty show me a young woman who doesn't look in the mirror and feel a bit crap show me a young woman who hasn't been catcalled show me a young woman who is really pleased about the fact that her boobs make it difficult to buy clothes sometimes it's very frustrating and your body can feel like a really really lonely sad place to be sometimes but i believe i'm truly progressive in that i want to alter society insofar as we can to make it easier I don't think the problem is in the body.

41:24I don't think it's kind to affirm an idea that the body is wrong, especially not when that person saying it is a child. It is not kind to lie. To bring the conversation full circle, my only argument was ever thus. If Steve wants to be called Susan, feels he's been born in the wrong body, wants to dress as Susan, have surgery to turn him more into Susan and wants me to call him Susan and respect his pronouns, just as a member of civil society. I'm not going to object to that in the same way that if somebody turns around and says they want to change their name by deed poll, I'll honour it. But don't just ever, ever, ever make me confirm that Steve isn't a bloke and is actually a woman because I'm not going to do that.

42:06So to me, Steve would be a trans woman called Susie. What we've had here is this, but also with regards to Maeve's point and why we're talking about this is, Can we please have open conversations about why Steve wants to be Susie, whether it's appropriate for him to do this and to debate the pronoun issue and to debate name changes and to debate how somebody like Steve going into Susie is treated within the confines of the law and beyond it, without people jumping up and down and shouting and screaming in our faces merely for wanting to discuss this in an open and civilised manner? That was always my argument.

42:46And also, can we not bend legislation, codes of practice and guidelines to something that is biologically impossible? Can we not do that? Otherwise, what does it even mean to be human? That was my whole argument in it all. Maeve, what's next for you? I'm handing in my dissertation in the next couple of weeks. Good luck. Thank you. How many words is that? It's 15 ,000. Nice. Walk in the park for Tim Stanley. He knocks that out in his lump there. Yeah. And are you going to get into politics or campaigning? I hope so, yeah. I'm going to probably take a bit of a rest first and just forget I know anything about trans.

43:26Indeed. You just take a break. And thank you very much indeed for joining us on The Daily Tea. It's been great to speak to you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

43:43Thank you.