Indeed, the House of Commons committee tends to see every voice that is critical of transgenderism as suffering from transphobia, prejudice and misunderstanding. But it is not transphobia that causes people to criticise the medicalisation of transgenderism. Neither is it prejudice that causes people to decry the legal backing for trans-identity politics. It is only those – like the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee – who fail to ask moral and political questions about transgenderism who are misunderstanding.
The constitutional lawyer and thinker of the nineteenth century, AV Dicey, famously said, in defence of parliamentary sovereignty, that ‘parliament can do anything, except make a man into a woman’. Nowadays, parliament can even make a man into a woman. But it’s come not as an exercise in parliamentary sovereignty but as an exercise in parliamentary impotence: the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has outsourced its power to the trans community by allowing ‘I want and therefore must have’ to be the guiding principle of the state’s policy towards transgenderism.
