People should stop weaponising language in the debate around trans rights

The Labour Party – and anyone else involved in the debate – should understand there is nuance to the discussion

Do you believe in democratic, reasoned debate? Are you a fan of free speech? Then listen up. For behind the scenes, a skullduggerous plot of dastardly dimensions is worming its way into our national consciousness. A conspiracy of the trans rightists and the woke is at work: silencing critics, censoring our words and dictating the very thoughts we are allowed to think.

This is nonsense of course, built on misunderstanding and misrepresentation, aided and abetted by a media that should know better. Still, it’s seductive nonsense, tapping into a strand of increasingly ornery atavistic resentment.

Lots of this debate has found its home in the Labour Party, with the launching of a campaign which requires that party members sign up to a ten point pledge reaffirming trans rights, including the statement that “trans women are women, trans men are men” and “non-binary people are non-binary”, stirring emotions in a not entirely helpful manner. “How dare they!”, came the response in some parts, and “this is thought control” elsewhere.

They have a point, of sorts. The requirement to toe the line looks like overkill and lacking in nuance: and part of the problem right now is that there are debates to be had around trans issues. But these are far more nuanced, than anything you’ll read in the mainstream press.

But let’s start with the key proposition: that you may no longer say “x”, where x happens to be something nasty about transgender people. That is simply untrue.

Hate crime does not exist in the UK – at least not as these complainers would have you believe. It is not a crime to say bad things about trans folk. Or gay folk. Or disabled folk. (Race is another matter.)

However, if you commit a crime against a member of a minority group, including those listed above, then evidence that your motivation was hatred for that minority gets you an add on in terms of sentence. The hate, in hate crime, is not the words used, but an aggravating factor at judgment. Although of course, where the crime itself consists mostly of words – malicious communication or harassment, say – the evidence of a crime being committed may be the words used.

Closely related, but not crime at all, is the hate incident. This is somewhat more vague, taking place where a victim feels their treatment was motivated by hostility or prejudice. You’d think the traditionalists would like this one, since the penalty consists mostly of a talking to from a local police officer.

But there’s no pleasing some folk and the big court case widely misreported last week began with an alleged hate incident against a trans woman. The complainant, Mr Miller, objected to police heavy–handedness in the “having words” bit, and also argued that the link between hate incident and the Vetting and Safeguarding system (DBS) was unfair. The result was something of a score draw: the judge upheld the first part, rejected the second, and then threw in a dollop of victim-blaming, suggesting that the victim could just have walked away.

Mostly a good result. Apart from the victim blaming. And a world away from the headlines, which began with the BBC and rippled out from there, suggesting that transphobic tweets were now legal. Which would be odd: a judge ruling on a question he’d not even been asked. Also misleading, as the same day, someone who had harassed a trans person was well and truly spanked in the magistrates court in St Albans for her online tweeting.

The problem with this debate – and the issues about the Labour campaign guidelines – is the weaponising of everyday language by the anti-trans ideologues, turning ordinary words and phrases into dog whistles.

Sometimes, a banana is just a banana. Except when it is thrown on to a football pitch in front of a black player, by a card carrying racist and then it becomes a token of the vilest racism. And so it has become, with the contrary of the above statements.

I do not personally believe that refusing to accept trans women as women makes you inevitably transphobic. But I do know that the people loudest in pushing that denial on public platforms are, mostly, hostile to trans people. The noun, “woman” is defined by dictionaries as “adult human female”: yet when that phrase is weaponised on T-shirts by people who turn up to disrupt trans events, screaming abuse, it is difficult to accept that those defending this phrase on accuracy grounds are doing so in good faith. After all, it would be “accurate” to remind a victim of sexual assault that someone had violated them. But do so more than once, especially after being asked not to, would be harassment.

Just as turning up at someone’s place of work to have words with them about their online conduct might be judged, as it was last week, to be “heavy-handed policing”.

Words matter.

So, too, does context and intent.

Sometimes a banana is just a banana. Sometimes, someone questioning trans reality is genuinely curious, interested. But over the last couple of years this has so often been the mark of the hater that we should be reluctant, now, to give the benefit of doubt.