Transgender activism, and the broader political movement urging society to treat gender identity as more important than biological sex, has certainly encountered one or two PR challenges recently. For some time feminists have argued that gender ideology denies women distinctive rights — for example, to spaces of their own — because it says that some male people share those rights.
Then there’s the Cass report, published this week, into the NHS’s gender identity services for children and young people: a reminder that when taken at face value in a clinical setting, gender ideology has led to the chemical castration of vulnerable children. (Bad press if ever there was any.) When it comes to public policy — from prisons and elite sport to law-making — the assumption that there are male women and female men seems to be a blueprint for dysfunction. To imagine that advocating gender ideology puts one on the right side of history suggests, at the very least, a pessimistic view about the direction of history.
To those by-now familiar indictments, Gareth Roberts — a journalist and former screenwriter (people who share his views are usually “former” something or other) — adds the rarer charge of homophobia. Roberts argues that the trans movement implies that “there is something wrong with camp little boys and butch little girls and they need to be fixed”. He speculates that parents who encourage their children to transition may do so out of squeamishness, because they find it easier to accept cross-sex identification than to contemplate the ins and outs of gay sex. According to a bleak joke that did the rounds among staff at the Tavistock Centre (until recently the NHS’s centralised gender identity clinic), at the rate clinicians were transitioning same-sex-attracted teenagers soon there would be “no gay people left”.
Gay Shame is a boisterous and uncompromising polemic. To anyone who has kept an eye on this theatre of the culture war, the book’s various complaints will be familiar. Roberts is scathing about the cowardice of policymakers and the “cost-free elite beliefs” of grandstanding politicians. He derides the spinelessness of the creative class and book publishers (“cowering in corners from their blue-haired junior staff”). He mocks the ever-expanding LGBTQ alphabet — and the attempt by “affluent heterosexuals” to claim various “oppressed” statuses strikes him as silly. (“Nobody was ever beaten up or fired for being asexual. Hordes of hooligans didn’t advance with baseball bats on secret gatherings of asexuals.”)
Roberts is disturbed by the small-mindedness of gender ideologues, and the chronological chauvinism of, for instance, the 2022 Globe Theatre production predicated on the assumption that “Joan of Arc was really a man” and would “have had her breast removed in our more enlightened age”. The “rewriting of gay history” has warped our understanding of even the recent past. In the UK, for example, Roberts argues that legislation such as Section 28 (“a nasty law which was never actually used in a prosecution”) has been somewhat exaggerated to suit contemporary narratives.
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Roberts is appropriately sensitive to the grotesque and tragicomic features of today’s sexual politics, an era in which “mega arms dealers Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have adopted rainbow branding during Pride month”. Roberts’s diagnosis of how Stonewall lost its way seems fairly plausible. By the mid-2010s Stonewall was a lobby group in search of a cause: with “no active political campaigns left to fight in the UK … [but] a huge staff, and a massive engine room of fundraising and campaigning machinery”.
At times, however, his book’s sprawling agenda seems to distract him from fully developing the specific charge that gender ideology is homophobic. That’s a shame. It’s a more interesting theme than others the book pursues.
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How would the charge of homophobia go? Gender ideology destabilises language and thought about sexuality because it destabilises language and thought about sex itself. If the words “man” and “woman” no longer refer to adult human males and adult human females, then homosexuals don’t have ways of describing their sexual dispositions in plain English. The same goes for heterosexuals, though the need to signal their dispositions to others may be less urgently felt.
Marginalising sex, while attempting to capture its residue in the poorly controlled concept of gender, creates quite specific dangers for gay people. As Roberts points out, gender-led thinking tends to reinforce certain stereotypes about the sexes — traits of masculinity for boys and femininity for girls — while at the same time denying that sex itself is of any independent importance. But once one has taken the unnatural step of recognising only generalisations less fundamental than the sex distinction, a pressing doubt arises about gay people, because they flout one of the most robust generalisations about their sex by not being attracted to the opposite sex.
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Although its adherents may not realise it, gender ideology is less well-placed to explain why gay women count as women, because the obvious fact that they are biologically female no longer settles the question. Dangerously impoverished theory leads to dangerously impoverished practice; at the Tavistock, it did irreversible harm to many gay teenagers and young lesbians.
Roberts’s entertaining but flippant style makes a fully persuasive development of these issues hard to achieve. At times, he even seems to spurn any effort to intellectually engage with advocates of gender-based thinking, such as Judith Butler. He dismisses universities as fallen institutions of merely “lingering respectability” and academics as peddlers of “elite jargon”. This is a disappointing mistake. Butler’s account of gender is pathologically in error, but diagnosing its mistakes is not a trivial exercise. A theory can be obviously wrong without it being obvious what is wrong with it. This is work for (admittedly brave) academics to take on. (In fact, an excellent book — accessible, scholarly and by far the best to date on the subject — Trouble with Gender, by the MIT philosopher Alex Byrne, came out in October. I recommend it.)
Roberts should be commended for his chutzpah, his bold style and his non-concessive commitment to truth-telling. Gay Shame makes an important argument, and it is no cause for any shame that it leaves some of the most fruitful questions it raises to be more fully pursued by others.
Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia by Gareth Roberts (Forum, 224pp; £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
