The Nolan team based in Belfast are a group of BBC journalists well used to asking awkward questions. Nolan looks at the influence Stonewall has in public institutions across the UK. This 18 month investigation has already had significant impact behind the scenes in major public institutions. The podcast is the story of how it all unfolded.
A team of volunteers at Fair Play For Women have transcribed the main content from each of the ten episodes spanning over 6 hours of audio content. You can listen to the full audio here or read the condensed transcript below.
Episode 3: Self-ID and Gender Identity
We look at the issues central to the debates around sex and gender.
In summary, Stonewall is campaigning to make it a societal norm, that rather than just male and female, human beings can have lots more genders, including genderqueer, queer, non-binary, two-spirit, many others. That is controversial territory. And yet Stonewall’s position has infiltrated, guess what? The BBC Children’s Education Department.
Stonewall’s influence potentially goes beyond issues of impartiality in the BBC. Stonewall also has influence in a number of politically neutral public bodies that affect all of our lives. From the people who gather data for the census to our governments across the UK and our civil servants. We will look at that.
Stonewall seems to have been allowed to position itself as the expert body in equality when it comes to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people. It’s as if no other experts on the planet who might disagree with Stonewall exist.
The changes related to sex and gender that Stonewall would lobby for, are not yet, and may never be law in this country. But Stonewall’s advice has resulted in some bodies’ basically operating self-ID
Stonewall are not accountable for any policy changes that public bodies make. Take Stonewall out of this for a second. Forget about whether you agree with them or not. How worrying is it that there is an unaccountable lobby group partly funded by you, the public, which has unparalleled access to your government, to your employer, to your police force, to your BBC. Should that concern you?
[00:03:17.970] – Stephen Nolan
I’m obsessed with this podcast. What is self-ID?
[00:03:26.670] – David Thompson
Self-ID is basically… So at the minute, if you want to change your sex. You have to go through a process. You have to make certain criteria to be accepted and change your sex.
[00:03:37.590] – Stephen Nolan
That’s transgender. Right?
[00:03:39.570] – David Thompson
Well, yes, some transgender people go through that process. If they want to change their sex and be legally recognised as different sex, they go through a process. You don’t have to have medical procedures or anything. You basically have to live in the other sex and then you can get a certificate. So that’s what happens at the moment.
[00:04:02.590] – Stephen Nolan
Right. So, that’s someone who goes to their doctor and they go through a whole process and there’s consultation and all that.
[00:04:08.290] – David Thompson
Yes.
[00:04:08.830] – Stephen Nolan
Right. So how does that compare to the self-ID?
[00:04:13.330] – David Thompson
Okay. So, self-ID is basically the policy that groups like Stonewall would advocate for, which is that it’s really up to that person. That’s how they declare themselves.
[00:05:01.070] – David Thompson
You might have to fill out a declaration or something to say, I’m a different sex to the sex I was born, or a different gender to the gender you were born into, which basically would mean it’s much more down to the individual. It’s about them living in the gender that they feel most comfortable with.
[00:05:19.730] – Stephen Nolan
And what’s wrong with that?
[00:05:21.410] – David Thompson
Well, critics of that would say that it undermines sex-based rights. So, there are protections in the Equality Act and in law, about single-sex spaces, for example. So female changing rooms, or women’s refuges, that type of stuff where…
[00:05:36.590] – Stephen Nolan
… refer to Stonewall? Like, why does everything always come down to changing rooms? Do people think that people are constantly obsessed with seeing nudity? They can go to the Internet for that. I very much doubt that somebody’s going to go through this whole process just to get into a changing room to see somebody’s genitals.
[00:05:55.970] – David Thompson
What the critics would say, is that it’s not about genuine trans people. But if you don’t have that process, then you don’t have anything in place to stop people who want to abuse that system. So they’re worried about sexual predators, for example, or men who are violent towards women using women’s refuges.
[00:06:14.330] – David Thompson
I don’t think the critical groups are saying, “You just shouldn’t do this. It’s not right. You can’t just self ID different gender.” What a lot of the groups like Fair Play For Women are saying is that there needs to be certain protections, and you need to have single-sex spaces that needs to be protected. That’s legally protected already, and that needs to stay the same. And if you change this, that would undermine that.
[00:07:03.290] – Stephen Nolan
So, Thompson, there was a huge row in LA over this, wasn’t there?
[00:07:07.790] – David Thompson
Yeah. There was a social media storm over reports of a man, or maybe a trans-woman who went into a changing room that was reserved for women. And the law in that part of America actually protects people’s gender expression
[00:07:22.670] – Stephen Nolan
So someone who was biologically male went into a female changing room. Is that right?
[00:07:28.070] – David Thompson
Yes. Seemingly they were physically male. They took their clothes off, and some of the women there were angry about this. There were claims that there were children there, and some of the women didn’t think was appropriate. It became this focal point for this huge row over trans rights. And there were police there, protesters for and against trans rights. There were women who were saying this is a space for women, and only women should be allowed here.
[00:08:02.030] – Stephen Nolan
Well, this person would maybe say they are a woman.
[00:08:04.790] – David Thompson
They might. And that’s what this debate all comes down to. Can someone just say, “I’m a woman.”?
[00:08:11.210] – Stephen Nolan
While there’s a big penis hanging there?
[00:08:12.590] – David Thompson
“And this is how I express myself.”
[00:08:27.890] – Stephen Nolan
Since we recorded this section, there’s been a debate over the accuracy of the initial reports. Some news organisations cast doubt on the veracity of the story. The Guardian reported in an article about misinformation around the incident, that the unsubstantiated allegations about Wi Spa, “quickly spread from social media to right wing forums to far right news sites to Fox News, and were distorted by anti-transgender groups across multiple countries.” The Guardian also reported that, “It is unclear whether a trans woman was actually present,” and said that, “a local LGBTQ+ paper reported that a spa employee said there were no trans patrons with appointments that day, leading some to question whether the incident was staged.”
[00:09:20.330] – Stephen Nolan
Then, subsequently, the Guardian reported that, “The LA Police Department announced that it had put out an arrest warrant for an individual who is now facing five felony counts of indecent exposure at Wi Spa.” The Guardian also reported that the LAPD said that five individuals had come forward, and that the police service had conducted interviews of victims and witnesses, reviewed the evidence, and ultimately corroborated the allegations of indecent exposure. They report that the individual’s gender identity was also unclear.
[00:10:43.330] – Stephen Nolan
But self-ID isn’t just about someone that’s a man saying they’re a woman or a woman saying they’re a man. That’s where all this cis stuff and genderqueer… What is it?
[00:10:52.870] – David Thompson
Well, there’s different genders, and how they fit into that, people don’t really know. I mean, we’ve seen the Stonewall lobbying for those gender identities to be recognised by public bodies. So if you’re genderfluid, for example, you might consider yourself a man one day, a woman on a different day, or you might be somewhere in between and say that you’re not either. And they’re asking for public bodies to formally recognise that.
[00:11:18.730] – David Thompson
So self-ID and the discussions in the Scottish Parliament and elsewhere about a self-ID policy is much more related to people that are actually changing their sex or want to be recognised as a different… either male to female or female to male. But quite where those different gender identities that Stonewall lobby on behalf of fit into that nobody knows.
[00:12:05.110] – David Thompson
You could be genderqueer. You can be non-binary. You could be two-spirit.
[00:13:55.570] – Stephen Nolan
Here’s Benjamin Cohen from Pink News again. The identities that people give themselves and identify as, for example, two-spirit. Right? I’m a 48-year-old man. I have no idea what two-spirit means. Is there any control over what these definitions mean? Like what does two-spirit mean and who decides what is two-spirit and what isn’t? And again, without me being facetious, could someone tomorrow say that they’re being three-spirit?
[00:14:23.830] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
I understand your point. I’m ten years younger than you, and this is also difficult for, I guess, us older people, sometimes to navigate because terminology does change. I first heard the term two-spirit when I was at an event with Canada’s High Commissioner and the Canada’s LGBT envoy. And it’s a Canadian term, and it’s actually from the Native American… It has Native American origins in Canada. So, it derives from there.
[00:14:59.590] – Stephen Nolan
But what does it mean?
[00:15:00.560] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
Oh, God. Now you’re testing me. I probably couldn’t give you the dictionary definition.
[00:15:09.470] – Stephen Nolan
But, just, can you give me a sense of what it means? So if someone comes to me and says I’m two-spirit, what does it actually mean?
[00:15:17.870] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
It’s how they’re describing themselves.
[00:15:19.670] – Stephen Nolan
I know, but surely there needs to be a meaning to these things, or it plays into these people who maybe try to be rude and say, “They’re just making this up as they go along.” What does it mean?
[00:15:34.670] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
It relates to things like the third… It’s just a quite complex… I’m no expert in different cultures that I’m not part of, but it’s part of an Indigenous culture in North America.
[00:15:51.450] – David Thompson
Well, if you take something from the UK, which we use quite often, like genderqueer…
[00:15:56.370] – Stephen Nolan
What does genderqueer mean?
[00:15:58.290] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
Genderqueer, I’m more happy to kind of…
[00:16:00.630] – Stephen Nolan
But I will say to you… Maybe I haven’t given you a tough enough time in this interview. But the fact that the person at the very top of Pink News does not know what two-spirit means, and I’m supposed to know and society’s supposed to expect it, is surely extraordinary.
[00:16:14.790] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
We all have a duty to be educating themselves. You have pointed out to me that I can’t give you off the top of my head, a definition of two-spirit that would be considered to be accurate. And I think that accuracy, as we’re all on this call journalists, I believe accuracy is a central part of being…
[00:16:32.970] – Stephen Nolan
Or we should be saying to people, you just can’t categorise yourself as all of these different descriptors.
[00:16:38.370] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
No, I don’t agree with that, because I’m a Jew, but if I’m having a conversation with different Jewish people we’ll talk about the type of Jews we are…
[00:16:47.130] – David Thompson
Well, maybe it comes down to this, Benjamin, is maybe you can express yourself whatever way you want, but it’s a big leap from your personal expression on your personal description of yourself as genderqueer or two-spirit or non-binary, to actually dealing with that practically day to day in law.
[00:17:02.550] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
I think the important point is that none of these identities that you’re talking about are defined in law. So if what you’re saying is there needs to be an official definition of different LGBT+ identities, then that is something for politicians to consider with changes to the Equality Act or things like the Gender Recognition Act, both of which…
[00:17:23.610] – David Thompson
And shouldn’t Stonewall just lobby for that? Shouldn’t they just say, “Let’s change the Equality Act, and let’s protect…
[00:17:29.010] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
No, what I’m saying to you is, you said official definitions. There aren’t official definitions.
[00:17:31.470] – Stephen Nolan
Please, Benjamin, tell me before you go, what genderqueer is. I have no notion.
[00:17:35.790] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
Genderqueer? It means your identity is at variance to the gender that you were defined at birth. And different people use different terminology to describe themselves. So some people who describe themselves as genderqueer, some people may describe their feeling as genderqueer, other people may say non-binary or gender non-binary. But queer is also important because they might also be describing their sexual orientation at the same time. So it’s complex. And in my view, it’s not for an individual who is not part of that community to define themselves. I define myself as a gay man.
[00:18:19.230] – Stephen Nolan
So does that mean you’re genderqueer?
[00:18:21.390] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
No.
[00:18:22.050] – Stephen Nolan
Why not? Why are you not genderqueer?
[00:18:24.210] – Benjamin Cohen – Pink News
Because my gender is not at variance to the gender which I was assigned at birth.
[00:18:36.430] – Stephen Nolan
Who cares what somebody in their own head is thinking they are? Why have they not got the right to think who they are or what they are?
[00:18:46.030] – David Thompson
I don’t know of any of the critics of Stonewall who have an issue with that. I think where the issue comes is how does society legislate for this type of stuff. When those sort of identities change… How can an employer, for example, facilitate that? Obviously, Stonewall would say, “Well, yes, of course they can. They can find different ways of accommodating people with different gender identities.” But at the minute, as things stand, sex is binary in law. There’s male and there’s female, and transgender is recognised. People are protected if they’re going through the process of change from male to female or vice versa. But the law has no capacity to deal with people with different gender identities.
[00:19:27.790] – Stephen Nolan
Do public bodies have to accept the different identities? In other words, say somebody was arrested and the police attempt to define them as a man or a woman. Do public bodies have to accept a suspect who says, “Actually, I’m two-spirit”?
[00:19:44.530] – David Thompson
Trans has become much more than just sort of someone who’s going through a process of transitioning from one sex to another. And by Stonewall’s own definition it includes those various gender identities. It’s kind of like an umbrella term. So there’s two things. Say, for example, a male commits violence against a female, and that male is going through or intending to go through gender reassignment, the formal process. They’re protected on the characteristic of gender reassignment. The old term is transsexual.
[00:20:11.230] – David Thompson
If somebody essentially… And there have been cases where this has arisen. If someone, for example, a male commits a sexual offence or a violent offence against a woman, and that person has self identified as a different sex, the police services have accepted that.
[00:20:28.810] – Stephen Nolan
From the documents we have seen. Self-ID is already effectively in place in many public bodies in the UK. We put it to Labour MP Rosie Duffield that if that’s the case, what’s the problem?
[00:20:42.310] – MP Rosie Duffield
There’s a question of somebody who is having treatment and who really does want to go down the route of gender reassignment surgery, and has been suffering for a long time feeling that they’re in the wrong body biologically. And that must be horrendous. I can’t imagine what that’s like to be a trans person. However, there are also problems if an individual decides that they are male-bodied and yet they identify as a woman, for example–it can obviously go the other way–and therefore they can go into biological women’s spaces.
[00:21:17.290] – MP Rosie Duffield
There’s a lot of women who are incredibly uncomfortable about that, and we haven’t legislated for that whole area because, basically, we haven’t had the time to talk about it in Parliament. It just seems to have gone straight to social media discussions and all about people’s rights. But women are really concerned about their biological sex rights. We have safe spaces and protected biological sex spaces for some very serious reasons, and it’s not saying by any means that anyone with a male body is a potential pervert or rapist. We have those laws to protect us from the few people that are.
[00:21:56.110] – Stephen Nolan
You’re defining a safe space for a woman as being male-free?
[00:22:00.970] – MP Rosie Duffield
Yeah. A lot of women who have had direct experience of men using their bodies for harm, or to harm them, do not want to be anywhere near a male body for some very good reasons. So, for example, domestic abuse is a really obvious one. And you wouldn’t necessarily put your children in a position where they could see adults walking around naked. We have protections and safeguarding for a reason.
[00:22:26.830] – MP Rosie Duffield
But also, many women don’t believe that just because you feel like a woman, if you’ve got a male body, it doesn’t make you one magically. This is a discussion that we haven’t been able to have because we’re automatically labelled bigots or transphobes if we say that, and I think it is much more complicated and needs a lot more discussion.
[00:22:48.130] – Stephen Nolan
And that absolutely needs more discussion. But I just wonder if you should be challenged more on suggesting that a safe space is male-free because it is a different sex of person there. You’re basically saying that men will be attracted to women and therefore they shouldn’t be naked in front of them. How come the country doesn’t fall over when in male changing rooms, gay people, gay males are allowed into the same changing rooms as heterosexual males. There’s attraction there. The world doesn’t stop. And it’s not an unsafe space.
[00:23:22.330] – MP Rosie Duffield
It’s not about attraction. The crime of rape is a violent crime, and men use their bodies as a weapon in that sense. It’s nothing to do with attraction or sexuality, even. It’s a crime of violence. So if we are put in a position where we are vulnerable to male violence or male-bodied people in our space, I think we have absolutely the right to question that, and to say no, actually, and these are our bodies, they’re different to male bodies, and we’re allowed to say that and to say no. And we fought for the right to do that. And we are saying no, a lot of us. And I’ll protect my right to say that. Yeah, some people don’t like that, but we’ve got to have that discussion.
[00:24:11.270] – Stephen Nolan
So you can see the fault lines. This is an important debate which will dictate how society functions in the future. There are people who insist there is only male and female. And then there are those who completely disagree, fundamentally disagree to such an extent that they believe there are hundreds of genders.
[00:24:33.290] – David Thompson
But if you look at the statistics, those numbers are going up.
[00:24:36.530] – Stephen Nolan
But how can there be many many different genders? How can there be? And who is the body that defines what that gender means, rather than just being based on whatever somebody wants it to mean? So who has defined… Like, we know what a male means. A male means you’ve got a penis and testicles, doesn’t it?
[00:25:05.490] – David Thompson
Yeah, and male chromosomes. Well, everyone understands a male to mean.
[00:25:07.710] – Stephen Nolan
No, and I get that, Thompson. And I get what a female means. But who defines what two-spirit is?
[00:25:15.630] – David Thompson
Well, a lot of these things are really about how people define themselves. I take your point. Who defines what that is?
[00:25:24.570] – Stephen Nolan
Does Stonewall define it?
[00:25:24.570] – David Thompson
I don’t think they do, but they would list that as an example of a different gender identity that some people would feel.
[00:26:12.290] – Stephen Nolan
In summary, Stonewall is campaigning to make it a societal norm, that rather than just male and female, human beings can have lots more genders, including genderqueer, queer, non-binary, two-spirit, many others. That is controversial territory. And yet Stonewall’s position has infiltrated, guess what? The BBC Children’s Education Department.
[00:27:00.630] – Stephen Nolan
Stonewall’s influence potentially goes beyond issues of impartiality in the BBC. Stonewall also has influence in a number of politically neutral public bodies that affect all of our lives. From the people who gather data for the census to our governments across the UK and our civil servants. We will look at that.
[00:27:23.250] – Stephen Nolan
Stonewall seems to have been allowed to position itself as the expert body in equality when it comes to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people. It’s as if no other experts on the planet who might disagree with Stonewall exist.
[00:27:43.350] – Stephen Nolan
Certain groups are protected from discrimination in law based on characteristics like your race, sex, or sexual orientation. In other words, you can’t be discriminated against because you’re black. That law is the Equality Act, and it makes employers responsible for ensuring none of those protected groups are treated unfairly.
[00:28:20.910] – Stephen Nolan
And many employers invited Stonewall in to help them, particularly around gay and trans employees. Stonewall don’t think the law goes anywhere near far enough on trans rights. For example, they’re thinking that a biological male could decide without any transition process, that they should be treated in law as a woman is deeply controversial and it’s opposed bitterly by others. And so far it has been rejected by the government.
[00:28:53.430] – Stephen Nolan
So that is just one example of how Stonewall are in very controversial territory. They may be the experts in some people’s view, but in others they may be fundamentally wrong. This is all caught up in the middle of a toxic row over whether your biological sex or how you identify is more important.
[00:29:17.670] – Stephen Nolan
Opponents say Stonewall advise public bodies on the law as they want it to be rather than what the law actually is. But despite all this controversy, many public organisations have been treating Stonewall as the experts. What Stonewall says, goes. Here’s the Conservative MP David T. C. Davies, speaking in a Westminster Hall debate on self-ID in November 2018.
[00:29:47.540] – MP David T.C. Davies
The point that I’m making, is that before any legislation has been passed, we are already seeing organisations such as schools, hospitals, and prisons, allowing people to define themselves by a different gender to the one that they are born with, and in the majority of cases to which their body corresponds. And it does have an impact on others. It has an impact on the rights, particularly of women, to privacy and to sex-segregated spaces.
[00:30:14.790] – Stephen Nolan
The changes related to sex and gender that Stonewall would lobby for, are not yet, and may never be law in this country. But Stonewall’s advice has resulted in some bodies’ basically operating self-ID
[00:30:49.230] – Stephen Nolan
Stonewall are not accountable for any policy changes that public bodies make. Take Stonewall out of this for a second. Forget about whether you agree with them or not. How worrying is it that there is an unaccountable lobby group partly funded by you, the public, which has unparalleled access to your government, to your employer, to your police force, to your BBC. Should that concern you?
[00:32:46.170] – David Thompson
Theoretically, what could happen here, is that any lobby group here representing one of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act, be it on the grounds of religion, of sex, of race, could devise a similar scheme to Stonewall. And you might think, well, why not? But if you were then in a position where you had different religious institutions, marking public sector organisations on how well they felt that they were representing their interests, how do you end up managing the interest of both a religious organisation and Stonewall and all those different religious organisations? And you can see how this could very quickly get out of control. If all of those different lobbies and interests have essentially a seat at the table by being inside these organisations and being able to influence the policies of those organisations.
[00:33:40.510] – Stephen Nolan
In the next episode, we talk to the UK’s first non-binary Mayor.
Want to read more? The transcripts for all 10 episodes are available
Nolan investigates: Stonewall. Episode 2: Stonewall’s Schemes and the BBC
Nolan investigates: Stonewall. Episode 3: Self-ID and Gender Identity
Nolan investigates: Stonewall. Episode 4: Being non-binary in the UK
Nolan investigates: Stonewall. Episode 5 – A gender clinic insider speaks out