A Conservative Party Member of Parliament has called for gender information to be stripped from legal documents including driving licenses and passports, claiming the category to be “not relevant”. As chair of the British Parliament’s Transgender Equalities Inquiry, Maria Miller is taking a leading role in championing transgenderism in the UK, promising “radical” recommendations from the inquiry.
In an astonishingly candid interview with the Times, Ms. Miller details what a world designed around the needs of transgendered people would look like.
“As a society and a government we should be looking at ways of trying to strip back talking about gender, and only do that when it’s absolutely necessary,” she argues. “We need to understand that gender stereotyping can be as damaging for men as it can be for women,” she says.
That means male and female tick boxes on official documents and job applications would be scrapped, and even passports and driving licences should not include a gender category. “For individuals who have decided to transition but haven’t necessarily got the right documentation, it can cause problems. Why do we need gender on our driving licence? Why do we have to have it on our passport if it doesn’t really add to identification? It’s not relevant. Australia has decided to degender their passports.”
In the age of gender fluidity, much more needs to change, she insists. “There is already an understanding that the status quo is not an option.
“I went to the Cambridge Union and saw they found it quite easy to have a gender neutral toilet so that’s something which is straightforward. What’s much more difficult is an employer or the NHS or prisons having the confidence to support people who are trans. The more information we can give, and the more we can say this is something straightforward and normal, the better.”
She wants to see public services working harder to end what she perceives as discrimination against transgender people, saying: “The NHS demonstrates the problems that society at large has, which is a lack of information and confidence. Even when consultants have prescribed interventions — drug treatment — GPs are sometimes quite cautious about following through those recommendations, and in some cases not prescribing . This is an area that needs further work.”
And while she shows marginally less enthusiasm for hormone treatment for ‘transgender’ children under 10 years old, saying: “That’s very much a decision for the medical profession,” she adds: “What is clear to me is that parents want the best for their children. Up to half of young trans people have tried to take their lives and around a third of adults, it’s something that clearly can be a very traumatising experience and the more we can enable people to get the right support at the right time the more likely it is we are going to help.”
She speaks more enthusiastically about the work of her inquiry, a completely uncritical piece of work which looks only at the problems that the transgender community claim to face, and how society can better accommodate them, without exploring the potential for harm that promoting transgenderism can have.
“There’s been so much progress made [on equality] in some areas that it becomes even more important that you identify areas which are hidden and trans issues are very hidden,” she says. “Our committee can shine a light on that.”
Drawing comparisons with the categorisation of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder in the past, she continues: “Our inquiry questioned why such a medicalised approach is taken to this issue. If you pigeonhole people as having a mental health problem simply because they choose to think carefully about their gender you are pigeonholing them into a very difficult place.”
But of the hundreds of pieces of evidence submitted to the inquiry, only seven were only seven were critical of transgender ideology, and not a single person invited to give oral evidence opposed the transgender lobby.
In November, Professor Sheila Jeffreys of the University of Melbourne in Australia, one of few people who did submit contrary evidence, told Breitbart London: “The inquiry starts out with the view that people who are transgender… really are ‘born in the wrong body’, as trans activists claim. There’s obviously no critique of the concept, or the politics, or the practice of transgenderism – that’s simply not involved in this inquiry.”
Moreover, for those willing to counter the narrative put forward by the transgender lobby, “there are very serious penalties for being prepared to speak out,” she said. “People are likely to have their careers ruined.”
Therefore the committee never heard from those who are concerned that 70 to 80 percent of children who report transgender feelings spontaneously lose those feelings as they mature, nor from those who highlight the studies which found suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery far higher than that of the general population.
Nonetheless, Ms Miller is determined not only to press on with her equality crusade, but to broaden its scope. Next on her agenda is feminism. Her next inquiry will examine the alleged gender pay gap.
“Women are playing a seismically different role in society now,” she says. “If we are going to help girls who are coming through our education system not to be hampered by gender stereotypes then we have to look at these things. There’s so much we can do in the job application process to make the playing field level and in university applications as well. We’ve got to tackle the unconscious bias in the system.”
However, her biggest blow to traditional conservatives is her alarming claim that she is undertaking her work in the name of conservatism. As the minister who steered the gay marriage legislation through parliament, she insists that Britain has always pioneered equality.
In this, she follows the example of the Prime Minister David Cameron, who in 2011 told Conservative party members at their annual conference: “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”
Miller echoes his phrase, insisting: “I became a Conservative because I think people should have equal opportunity. Why should there be discrimination because somebody feels that the gender they were assigned at birth isn’t the right gender for them?”
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