Liz Truss’s Bill

The Liz Truss Says Trans Is Bad Bill has been introduced to the House of Commons. A debate on the innocuous-sounding Health and Equality Acts (Amendment) Bill was set for Friday 15 March. A failed prime minister has demanded that childhood transition be made illegal, and all trans women be excluded from all women’s services.

Liz Truss’ Bill has great advantages to the Conservative government. It has the simplicity of extremism. No trans women in women’s services; doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or cross sex hormones may be tried and imprisoned; public authorities must misgender trans children. Public authorities are any person who carries out public functions, and public functions are anything paid for by the State. So schools must misgender. What happens if they don’t is unclear. The maximum prison term for doctors would be six months (link to pdf).

The doctors would be declared criminal for something the GMC would not consider unethical. The criminal offence would apply in Scotland, though Health and social care are devolved matters.

The Bill is roughly drafted. For example, it would have to amend the Gender Recognition Act, and other legislation, and does not. There is no House of Commons research briefing. So it is clear that Truss expects it to fail, on Friday 15th March. But it shifts the Overton window. Though I see a ban on childhood transition as extremist, and wrongful, the wider culture treats it as an acceptable point of view. Loud voices say accepting childhood transition is the wrongful, extremist position. That shows the danger of legally defining “extremism” as particular political positions, rather than calling for violence or justifying violence.

I hope the SNP will oppose it strongly. They might oppose on the grounds that it wrongly interferes with devolution, as well as objecting to the wrongful changes to Equality legislation.

By declaring that they would help women’s services exclude trans women, and would not meaningfully reform gender recognition, Labour spiked the Tory guns. This is the Tory answer: it will show what Labour has to say on these proposals. What MPs, if any, will filibuster the Bill? If filibustered, it will go no further. If Labour opposes, the Tory press will call it “woke”; but if it does not, the Tories will get steadily more extreme.

Labour should stand up for trans rights, bring back the Green energy pledge, stick to its plans for workers’ rights (rumoured to be under threat). Labour moving further and further right only results in the Tories and the Media moving further to the right.

Other MPs are using their Bills, or their debates, on something to benefit people. There was a Bill to ban conversion practices. There’s a Pet Abduction Bill, recognising the emotional effect. There’s a Bill to ban the import of hunting trophies, and a Bill to allow women to succeed to hereditary titles. Then there’s Truss, spreading hate. Shame.

15 March: Parliamentary procedures are arcane. The second reading, a debate on the principles of the Bill, was the third Bill on the Order paper for 15 March. The first Bill was approved unopposed; the second Bill was still being discussed at 2.30, when the time for private members’ Bills ended, and so apparently lost its place in the queue; Truss’s Bill was carried forward to 22 March. However other Bills will come up for debate before hers, so it is practically dead. Tory Sally Anne Hart accused Labour of talking it out because Labour does not want to “protect children from extreme trans ideology”. The Standard published the Press Association report that Kemi Badenoch and Rishi Sunak support the idea of the Bill in order to “protect women and girls”.

The Guardian reports that Tories were filibustering too, and that there is parliamentary time for Badenoch to introduce a government Bill for the same purposes. It deduces that Badenoch can’t, because other cabinet members oppose Truss’s position.

21 March: the second reading is apparently now set for 19 April. The order paper for 22 March does not mention it. I wish they would hurry up and kill it.

19 April: Truss’s Bill is eleventh on the order paper. It was carried forward to 26 April. I still think that means it’s practically dead, it will be carried forward again and again until the session ends.

23 April: Truss is obsessed with trans. In her ridiculous book, she calls for a ban on social transition under 18 and wants the facts of biological sex taught, blaming Foucault for “crazy thinking about gender ideology”. In her speech to the Heritage Foundation, she also blamed Foucault for crazy postmodernism about biological sex. Strange, then, that the Guardian’s long article about Truss after 10 ignored trans.

26 April: the Bill is 16th on the Order paper, so again would not have been debated, but did not come up: in Hansard, it is not mentioned.