Helen Belcher and the fruit salad
Being Gender Critical
The gender critical argument, that you may be familiar with or may have seen referenced in the media, is the belief that biological sex is immutable, gender is socially constructed, and neither men nor women should feel constrained by socially imposed gender expectations. Being gender critical means being critical of “gender”.
If you’ve ever argued the gender critical case on social media, it is likely that you’ve been told that you’re a bigot, or a TERF or a Nazi or that you’re hateful or that you want trans people dead.
The fact that it is made impossible to discuss an issue that until few years ago wasn’t controversial, makes it clear that those who argue against this viewpoint, subscribe to an ideological belief that is impervious to rational challenge.
If we didn’t live in a time of ideological conflict, I would be happy to adapt my language to help put others at ease. I would be “polite”. I would be “kind”. I would refer to a man as ‘she’ if he presented as woman. I would refer to a woman as ‘he’ if she presented as a man.
Part and parcel of living in a society is to make allowances for others belief systems that may not correspond to our own.
We don’t live in such a time.
We live in a time where people are insisting that a man who identifies as a woman is “literally” a woman, a woman who identifies as a man is “literally” a man, and that our laws and organisational policies should reflect that.
This is a problem. It is not true. A person does not become something simply because they identify as something.
It can only be true if we redefine the words “woman” and “man” so that they correspond to socially imposed gender stereotypes rather than biological sex.
Very many people have done just that.
The ideology
Imagine there is such a thing as “woman-ness” – a set of stereotypes of how a woman should be – and such a thing as “man-ness” – a set of stereotypes of how a man should be.
Now if a male individual doesn’t feel comfortable with “man-ness” and more comfortable with “woman-ness”, then he may identify as trans. His “gender identity” can be said to be mismatched with his biological sex.
Similarly, a female who doesn’t feel comfortable with “woman-ness” may also identify as trans. Her “gender identity” can be said to be mismatched with her biological sex.
Male and female individuals who feel comfortable with their “man-ness” and “woman-ness” respectively can be described as “cis”.
Those who don’t identify with either set of stereotypes can be described as “non-binary”.
This is the ideology that is being pushed.
What is extraordinary is that politicians from all political parties, presumably in a misguided attempt to appear ‘inclusive’, have pledged fealty to this ideology by spouting the mantra:
Trans women are women
Trans men are men
Non-binary are valid
Similarly, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) and countless HR departments have urged us all to support this ideology by putting pronouns in our email signature to indicate the set of gender stereotypes that we identify with.
In contrast, those who push the gender critical arguments on social media are targets of considerable hatred.
Partly, this is because those who push the gender critical cause argue for the maintenance of single sex spaces.
Much more fundamentally, for those who rationalise their decision to transition by subscribing to this ideology, the very idea that gender stereotypes are socially constructed, are not fixed, and can be challenged, undermines the premise at the very core of their belief.
It is an existential threat. People who have rationalised their experience in this way, can genuinely feel that they are being erased.
Some people will do what it takes to shut down gender critical views even if their own views compromise the clinical care for children struggling with gender dysphoria.
Helen Belcher
Helen Belcher is a 58-year-old trans identified male who is married and has fathered two children. [1] He transitioned in 2004, the same year that the Gender Recognition Act was passed. [2]
He has a track record of campaigning for a more positive representation of trans people in the media. He was a co-founder of Trans Media Watch – a group set up to campaign for more positive coverage on trans issues and, in 2012, he gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry relating to transphobia in the media.
The inquiry was set up following the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World.
Belcher speaks calmly and in an authoritative manner. In trans jargon, he “passes” - he looks like a woman. Belcher has a finger in many pies and is highly influential.
As of 2019, Belcher was still connected with Hacked Off, the lobbying group that was set up following the phone hacking scandal and that campaigns for a free and accountable press.
Belcher is on the Trans Advisory Board for the well-funded LGBT+ lobby group, Stonewall. [3]
From April 2017 to September 2020, he was chair of the LGBT + Consortium.
He is chair of the Ban Conversion therapy coalition. [4]
Belcher is very active within the Liberal Democrat Party. He was their parliamentary candidate for Chippenham in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections and seems to be influential in the party hierarchy.
Belcher was name-checked by former Liberal Democrat leadership candidate Layla Moran, during a debate on GRA reform held on 21st November 2018. [5]
I want to place on the record my thanks to my Liberal Democrat colleague and friend, Helen Belcher, whom I have worked with closely on this matter.
When Moran was challenged by Conservative MP David T.C. Davies as to whether she would be happy to share a changing room with someone who had a male body, Moran replied.
I believe that trans women are women, so if that person was a trans woman, I absolutely would. I just do not see the issue… I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body.
Presumably, when Moran envisaged that male body, she was thinking of Helen Belcher rather than Karen White or Michelle Winter or Chloe Walker or Darren Merager or any one of numerous trans identified males that have been convicted of sexual offences.
Belcher is employed as a member for staff for the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Barker. [6] As a representative of Baroness Barker, he is occasionally present at meetings of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for LGBT +, a cross party parliamentary group that was, until recently, chaired by Conservative MP for Reigate, Crispin Blunt [7]. He is the only trans individual who attends these meetings.
He is also chair of directors at Trans Actual, an organisation that aims to “educate people” about Trans Lives [8].
1. https://theheroines.blogspot.com/2014/09/interview-with-helen-belcher.html
3. Trans advisory group (stonewall.org.uk)
5. Self-identification of Gender - Hansard - UK Parliament
6. Staff for Baroness Barker - MPs and Lords - UK Parliament
7. Minutes — APPG on Global LGBT+ Rights (appglgbt.org)
8. TransActual
Changing Media – 2016
In a 2016 TED Talk, entitled Changing Media, Belcher explained how he thought people came to understand they were trans. [1]
I was nearly forty when I understood what it meant, for me, to be trans.
With a straight face, he solemnly intoned:
There’s a difference between knowing and understanding
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit which is often used in salads. However, if you understand what a tomato is, you won’t use it in a fruit salad.
Belcher expressed his belief that trans people often needed help to gain the understanding that they are trans:
Even if you know something or are something, it can take quite some length of time before you understand it or at least understand that it applies to you. We often need help to gain that understanding.
Belcher explained the rise in the number of people identifying as trans as being due to increased availability of information:
The last 20 years seems to have seen an explosion in the number of trans people we see around us and even more so in the last five years.
Part of that is down to trans people’s growing confidence. Our society and government policies and law have become more accepting of us; but part is because more people have the information that they need to understand that “trans” might, just might, apply to them.
Belcher doesn’t explain what it was that enabled him to understand what it means to be trans and his speech does raise red flags.
Belcher sounds like an evangelist.
Who does Belcher envisage is the sort of person that can help give someone the understanding of what it is to be trans?
What information does Belcher think helps someone understand that “trans” might apply to them?
Although Belcher places great store on “understanding”, he is extremely censorious about what some people try to say.
1.
Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? – 2017
What Belcher didn’t explain in his talk, is that the last few years have not seen an explosion in the number of people who, like him, transition in middle age.
The last few years have seen an explosion in the number of young people who transition, at an age where their identity is still being formed. Within their numbers are a disproportionately high number of young people who are same sex attracted [1], a disproportionately high number who have autism [2] and a disproportionately high number who live in care [3].
Many people are concerned that these young people are the victims of social contagion.
In 2017, the BBC broadcast a documentary titled Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? [4]
The documentary included an interview with Dr Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s experts on childhood gender dysphoria. Zucker explained his clinical method:
· Let's see if there's any chance that this child could feel comfortable in their biological sex. Let's see if we can teach this girl that there's lots of ways to be a girl. Some girls like Barbies and some do not. Some girls like dresses and some do not. Both are equally acceptable.
Following the broadcast of the programme, the then Trans Media Watch chair, Jennie Kermode, wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC, for which Belcher had provided research information [5]. In the letter, Kermode stated:
WPATH has determined that international best practice is an affirmative model
The affirmative model, developed in the Netherlands in the late 1990s involves the use of puberty blockers to suppress the development of puberty in children struggling with gender dysphoria. Puberty blockers are not licensed for such treatment. Their use is experimental. It is difficult to understand how an experimental treatment can be described as ‘best practice’.
Kermode also stated:
Dr Zucker's views are now widely rejected by the professional and scientific community involved in researching transgender pathology and treatment
The takeaway message of the program was how the treatment of children struggling with gender dysphoria had become highly politicised. The program prompted the question of whether good clinical practice was being sacrificed because of political pressure.
After the program was broadcast, Ruth Hunt, then CEO of Stonewall and the person responsible for appointing Belcher to the Stonewall Trans Advisory Board, accused Zucker of practicing conversion therapy. [6]
3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1359104518791657
4.
5. https://transmediawatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Complaint-about-Transgender-Kids-signed.pdf
Janice Turner – 2018
In 2018, Belcher resigned as a judge from the Comment awards after Times journalist Janice Turner was nominated for Commentator of the Year. Turner had written a number of columns raising concerns about the repercussions of the new ideology being pushed.
In a blog statement, Belcher linked Turner’s columns to an increase in the suicides of trans teenagers: [1]
“Since The Times started printing such pieces, starting with one by Turner in September 2017, I have heard of more trans suicides than at any point since 2012. These have mainly been of trans teenagers. I pointed this out. Despite this, Turner was still shortlisted for Commentator of the Year.
This was an outrageous attack on Turner. More significantly, it sent a message to vulnerable children that taking their own life was an understandable response to the expression of a different opinion.
In response, Turner published a comment piece entitled “Suicides should never be a political weapon”. [2]
The Samaritans’ guidelines for reporting suicide which warn it is dangerous to attribute a death to a single cause: “speculation about the ‘trigger’ . . . should be avoided” as “young people are especially vulnerable to negative suicide coverage”. Yet some trans activists casually breach this code. This week Professor Stephen Whittle of Press for Change, a transgender lobby group, said that any delay to changing the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) would “lead to a flurry of suicides”. Retaining a 14-year-old law to permit further debate, he believes, will literally kill people.
Belcher complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). The complaint was rejected. [3]
1. https://challengingjourneys.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/comment-awards/
2. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suicides-should-never-be-a-political-weapon-w0jlhn5v0
3. https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=07454-18
Hacked off – 2019
In July 2019, Belcher was significantly involved in the drafting of a complaint to IPSO about transphobia in the press [1]. The accompanying report [2] included 24 articles that were deemed to contain transphobic content. The complaint was made via the HackedOff lobby group.
All but two of the articles expressed concern about one or more of the following issues:
the shutting down of free speech
the removal of the word “woman” in communication about health
the indoctrination of children
the transitioning of children
the threat to same sex spaces
There are three quotations on the HackedOff page in support of this complaint – one from Crispin Blunt, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for LGBT+, whose meetings Belcher has attended, one from Baroness Barker, for whom Belcher is employed, and one from Belcher himself
One of the articles in the report, written by Janice Turner, includes this paragraph:
This craze to expedite gender transition in children goes against all clinical advice for “watchful waiting”. The young brain evolves, children change their minds, puberty is troubling for many reasons. Yet the Scottish guidance allows no one to dispute a child’s view, maybe acquired on Reddit and Tumblr, that he or she is in “the wrong body”. Or to suggest that a child may simply be gay. The apparatus of medical transition, a hormone regime causing sterility, plus surgical removal of healthy tissue, is seen as wholly positive. PE teachers must tolerate girls using binders to strap down their hated breasts “which can lead to shortness of breath and can be painful during physical exertion” because they have “a positive impact on a young person’s mental health”.
1. Demand IPSO Protects Against Transphobia In The Press (eaction.org.uk)
2. Media-transphobia-report-final.pdf (hackinginquiry.org)
Maya Forstater – 2020
In 2019, Maya Forstater, a professional researcher, did not have her contract renewed at the Center for Global Development (CGD) after posting a series of tweets, in a personal capacity, questioning government plans to let people declare their own gender.
She claimed that she was discriminated against because of her belief that sex was immutable and should not be conflated with gender identity.
In the initial tribunal hearing, the judge stated that Forstater’s beliefs were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
That decision was overturned on appeal. Mr Justice Choudhury said her “gender-critical beliefs” did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons. [1]
Belcher’s response to the appeal judgement, published in a press release, is indicative of his disdain for gender critical beliefs:
“There are two issues in this case. The first, settled today, is whether a gender critical view of gender may be considered to have the status of ‘philosophical belief’.
“This, the judges confirmed today, was possible. Though it may be that in time those supporting Forstater will come to regret this case, as the ruling today makes clear that pretty much any belief short of outright Nazism or totalitarianism would be afforded the protection of the law (par 111).
Belcher then brackets gender critical beliefs with ‘other philosophical beliefs’. Ironically, his first example is ‘all women should stay at home and have babies’ – which is a prime example of the kind of thinking that gender critical beliefs challenge.
“Advocates of an absolute right to unfettered free speech may celebrate that. The rest of us are left wondering what the implications of this are for those who might be targeted by someone holding other such ‘philosophical beliefs’, such as ‘all women should stay at home and have babies’, or ‘white people are genetically superior to others’.
“And, while the ruling seemed to take the gender critical view as a philosophical debating point, such a view has very real impacts on trans people and how we live our lives which seemed to be totally ignored. [2]
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57426579
2. Press release: Response to the Maya Forstater judgement — TransActual
LGB Alliance – 2021
The LGB Alliance (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance) is a British advocacy group founded in 2019 to defend the interests of people who are same sex attracted. The organisation was set up in response to Stonewall’s redefinition of ‘homosexuality’ to mean attraction to someone of the same gender, the increasing incursion of males into lesbian spaces, and the massive increase in young people seeking gender reassignment. It has many trans supporters.
In April 2021, after spending considerable time investigating complaints about the organisation, the Charity Commission registered the LGB Alliance as a charity. [1]
On the LGB Alliance website, is a mission statement [2] setting out four aims:
To advance lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights
To highlight the dual discrimination faced by lesbians
To protect children who may grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual
To promote free speech on lesbian, gay and bisexual issues
Under the aim of protecting children, there is more detail:
We work to protect children from harmful, unscientific ideologies that may lead them to believe either their personality or their body is in need of changing. Any child growing up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual has the right to be happy and confident about their sexuality and who they are.
In June 2021, TransActual (along with the LGBT+ Consortium) supported Mermaids, a now controversial charity that was originally set up to help gender diverse kids, in their appeal of this decision. [3]
Belcher wrote:
We fully support Mermaids in taking this action. The idea that an organisation which wants trans people to be second class citizens should be recognised as a charity brings the whole system into disrepute. [4]
1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lgb-alliance/lgb-alliance-full-decision
2. https://lgballiance.org.uk/about/
3. https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/lgba-charity-status/
4. Mermaids Appeals LGB Alliance Charity Status - Mermaids (mermaidsuk.org.uk)
EHRC – January 2022
In January 2022, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a response to the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill [1]. The response clarified that possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate did not entitle the holder to bypass the single sex exemptions clause in the Equality Act.
In the same month, the Commission published a response to the UK Government consultation on banning conversion therapy [2]. The response highlighted a significant problem in the consultation document – it did not define the terms “conversion therapy” and “transgender”.
The consultation document contains no clear definition of what will amount to “conversion therapy” caught by its proposals, nor of the meaning of “transgender” – a term which has no clear legal meaning, is potentially wider than the concept of gender reassignment in current UK law and is understood by different people in different ways.
Later in the document it stated:
Given the documented lack of evidence about conversion therapy in relation to being transgender, recent attention and litigation on the implications of medical and surgical transition, and the ongoing NHS-commissioned independent review of gender identity services for children and young people led by Dr Hilary Cass OBE, we consider that these matters require further careful and detailed consideration before legislative proposals are finalised and the implications of them can be fully understood.
In response, Belcher published a blog post where he confessed to feeling psychological stress at the EHRC clarifications. [3]
What this apparently unending narrative does is start to strip away my humanity. It makes me feel unsafe, as if every part of my being is under scrutiny. I need to mentally balance myself every single morning in a way that I never used to have to. In some ways the narrative is designed to do that. It’s designed to make others suspicious of me, afraid of me, further justifying their calls to remove me from their society. It’s tiring at a very fundamental level.
…According to the so-called “gender criticals”, “gender identity” doesn’t exist – one’s gender and identity is solely derived from one’s biology.
Evidently those people who struggle with gender dysphoria do have a “gender identity” that does not align with their biological sex, whilst the claim that “gender criticals” believe that “gender and identity is solely derived from one’s biology” appears to be an intentional misrepresentation of the gender critical argument.
No doubt the stress that Belcher experiences is real but he’s not the only person to consider.
3. https://www.transactual.org.uk/blog/UnendingDebate
The Fruit Salad
In his 2016 TED Talk, Belcher paraphrased an aphorism coined by the late British humourist Miles Kington when he said:
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit which is often used in salads. However, if you understand what a tomato is, you won’t use it in a fruit salad.
It’s easy to understand why Belcher might use this phrase. With a quick word substitution, it can be compared with the trans experience.
Knowledge is knowing that a transwoman is male. However, if you understand what a transwoman is, you won’t put them in a male changing room.
Although male, Belcher believes that he is a woman. The ideology allows him to rationalise that belief.
Inevitably, there are repercussions.
The ideology that allows Belcher, and others like him, to feel more comfortable, is the same ideology that is encouraging those of our young people who may feel a bit different, to rationalise their unhappiness by subscribing to the belief that they were born in the wrong body.
Children have been unnecessarily medicalised, with lifelong consequences, for the sake of adult feelings.
On 22nd April 2022, it was reported in the Times that health secretary Sajid Javid was preparing to launch an urgent inquiry into the treatment of children with gender dysphoria at the Tavistock clinic.
Asked about the issue in the Commons, Javid said the interim findings of the Cass Review had already shown that NHS services “are too narrow … overly affirmative, and in fact … are bordering on ideological”. [1]
To make progress, we need to talk. The ideology has made dialogue impossible. It has politicised the issue of gender dysphoria and compromised the work of clinicians treating children who struggle with it.
We need to ditch the ideology and start anew.
There’s nothing wrong with having tomatoes in a fruit salad. [2]
2. https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1016885-tomato-fruit-salad
" In trans jargon, he “passes” - he looks like a woman."
Ha ha ha has ha, he really doesn't pass, he looks like the bloke he is.
"There’s nothing wrong with having tomatoes in a fruit salad" or cucumbers - why should melons have all the fun.