Why I joined TERF club

‘You’d be quite surprised at how Iran, following Islamic teachings, is far more liberal when it comes to trans identity,’ wrote Animah Kosai, membership officer of the Global Majority Greens, in a WhatsApp message ahead of the Green Party conference. Unsurprisingly, this prompted considerable mockery when it was leaked to the Daily Telegraph.

But she is right in one narrow sense. The Islamic Republic permits people who undergo sex-reassignment surgery to be legally recognised as the opposite sex. That is not evidence of Iranian liberalism. 

Under the highly conservative mullah-controlled regime, surgery can become an escape route from the persecution of homosexuality. Rather than being allowed to live openly as a gay man, someone may be encouraged to regard himself as a woman and submit to medical intervention as the price of a socially acceptable life. He can enter hospital as an intact male and emerge castrated and ‘female’; a relationship once treated as criminal can then be presented as a faux straight couple.

It is a state-sanctioned route out of the criminal category of homosexuality: not acceptance of gay people, but a way of making them disappear. Iran’s unusually high number of sex-reassignment surgeries is therefore not a sign of tolerance, but one of a barbarous and intolerant regime. 

Thailand also has a booming trade in sex-reassignment surgery. This goes hand-in-hand with sex-tourism, in which the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children, including boys, is well documented. Its entertainment industry includes many ladyboys or kathoey who’ve undergone feminising treatments. Consequently, the country became a destination for medical tourists seeking surgery unavailable, unaffordable or less readily offered at home.

Susie Green, the former head of the child transition charity Mermaids, made a beeline for Bangkok when her son turned 16. Having transed him as much as possible with puberty blockers and hormones, she took him to Thailand and had him castrated. It was the Wild East out there. Clinics advertised castration to under-18 boys for around 4,000–5,000 baht, just over a hundred quid. It was a relatively cheap way of preventing male puberty; the full neo-vagina surgery could come later, once patients or parents had saved up for it.

So far, so sad: a dark reflection of human greed. Where there is poverty, there will be predatory and mercenary people ready to exploit the most vulnerable. Thailand’s medical-tourism market became an industry designed, in part, to fulfil the porny fantasies of sex tourists. In 2008, Thailand imposed an emergency ban on underage surgeries and, in November 2009, the Medical Council’s formal gender-reassignment rules came into force, establishing an adult threshold of 20+ or 18–20 with parental or guardian approval.

When you look closely at where and why these surgeries are performed, a pattern emerges. In Iran, they can offer an escape from the persecution of homosexuality. In Thailand, they became part of a lucrative market in medical tourism and an extension of the sex industry. Neither is a good reason to operate on healthy young people. Worst of all, at the heart of the ideology lies a profound homophobia.

It was about 12 years ago that I started to ask why was this going on without worldwide condemnation? Where were the human-rights organisations, and where the hell was Stonewall? 

Missing in action, it turns out, piddling about with slogans such as ‘trans women are women’ and imposing an order of No Debate on the issue. Those raising concerns were hounded out of jobs, de-platformed and publicly shamed by an ever more threatening and deranged mob.

I began to pay attention to what was happening in this country. Around 2014, the only clinic in the country dedicated to this specialty, the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, began to report what the Cass Review subsequently called an ‘exponential’ increase in referrals of girls with gender-related distress. Referrals of girls more than doubled in a single year.

A very high proportion of these girls presented with other issues. Some were autistic; some were awkward; some did not conform to the almost fetishistic adherence to a feminine aesthetic of the time. Some would grow up to be lesbians. But trans ideology offered them a solution to all their troubles.

This was the high-water mark of the insane claim that a child could be ‘born in the wrong body’ and possess an ‘inner’ gender identity, fully formed and fixed from as young as two. If you became one of these newly identified patients with what was now termed gender dysphoria, the nice doctors could tinker with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones before calling in surgeons to rearrange your genitals and remove your breasts.

I was already angry about the porn industry’s unholy alliance with Big Pharma, the Dr Frankenstein-like creation of the ultra-feminised male that would draw in vulnerable and marginal youngsters, and the horror of surgeons’ knives wielded on gay youth to ‘cure’ homosexuality. But then the activists came for the tomboys, too, and I felt coldly, deeply and lastingly furious.

The battle lines became clearer with each passing year as gender-identity activists grew more strident and insane. I am proud to stand with the individuals and groups who have fought back bravely and won some ground for sanity and safeguarding: the WRN, LGB Alliance, For Women Scotland, Fair Play for Women and Sex Matters.

I am here for the fight, however long it takes. Many of the women and men in it are formidable and fierce. Unlike those on the other side, who ask us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears, we are also right.