Differing attitudes to women’s and transgender rights activism are often said to be generational. One poll, published a month on from thesupreme court rulingthat the legal definition of “woman” in the Equality Act is based on biological sex, found63% supportiveof the ruling and 18% opposed. But younger people were far more likely to be in the latter camp, with 53% of 18- to 24-year-olds disagreeing with the judgment. In my age group, 50-64, the figure was just 13%. Such results echoearlier polls.
As with any attempt to link a demographic with a point of view, there are plenty of exceptions. Last monthLady Hale, the octogenarian former president of the supreme court, became one of them when she argued that the ruling had been misinterpreted, telling a literary festival she had met doctors “who said there is no such thing as biological sex”.
The progressive explanation for the age gap is in the name: progress. As the arc of history bends towards justice, younger people are ahead of the curve. Social scientists call this a cohort effect, which basically means that when you are born is one of the influences (along with income, education and so on) on your politics. In relation to transgender rights, the reasoning is that people born since the 1980s are more relaxed about sex and sexuality, and more committed to personal freedoms including the right to define one’s own identity. The obvious catch to this analysis, at the moment, is the way some young men have swungtowards the hard right.
If a cohort effect applies when it comes to gender, and assuming that future cohorts are in agreement, gender identity advocates can look forward to winning this argument eventually. Older, conservative voters (and politicians and judges and journalists such as me), who don’t think someone’s trans identity should take precedence over their biological sex when society decides which sports teams or prisons they belong in, are just causing a delay. This was the view endorsed by David Lammy in 2021 when he said there were“dinosaurs […] in our own party”who want to “hoard rights”. The extinction of such people would, he implied, sort things out in the end.
Along with other middle-aged, gender-critical women, I have got used to dismissals such as Lammy’s. One of us, Victoria Smith, wrote a book about such attitudes and called itHags. But terminology aside, I think those who characterise this struggle as being between young progressives and ageing reactionaries are mistaken. While I fully support transgender people’s right to be protected from discrimination, I don’t regard the erosion of sex-based entitlements – including single-sex sports and spaces – in favour of an ethos of “inclusion” as either liberal or leftwing.
On the contrary, I think valuing inclusion over bodily privacy (in changing rooms) or fairness (in sports) is sexist – since women are more disadvantaged by these changes than men. And while gender identity campaigners claim autonomy and choice as progressive, even socialist, values, I see their emphasis on the individual’s right to self-definition as congruent with consumer capitalism. Multinational corporations, including banks and retailers, embraceStonewall’s Workplace Equality Indexand fly Progress Pride flags from their buildings because the shift away from the class politics of redistribution towards the identity politics of personal expression suits them.
In 2023 the 40th British Social Attitudes survey described the widening age gap in UK politics as “a puzzle”, with changing party loyalties only partly mirrored in answers to questions seeking to place people on a left-right spectrum or a liberal-authoritarian one. To anyone looking for answers to the question of why such age differences exist – in relation to the supreme court or other issues – I would suggest that as well as cohorts (gen X versus Z and so on), they should consider the life cycle. Clearly, some things matter more to people as they get older, pensions being an obvious example. What if biological sex is another?
This rings true with aspects of my own experience. For example, it wasn’t until I had children that I learned about birth injuries, came face to face with pregnancy and maternity discrimination, or understood that the gender pay gap is also amotherhood penalty. It’s not that I hadn’t been aware of my female body before this. But one of the things about having babies is the way that the biological and social become so enmeshed. More recently, I’ve become fascinated by female evolutionary thinkers such asSarah Hrdy, whose life’s work has been to explore this tangle.
Now, at 53, there is menopause and ageing. Most weeks my yoga teacher has something to say about the importance for women of strength-building exercises to ward off osteoporosis; of keeping our femur bones firmly in our hip sockets and using muscles to hold our reproductive organs in place.
That male and female bodies go wrong in different ways is nothing new: themost common cancer for womenworldwide is breast cancer, while in Englandprostate canceris the most frequently diagnosed in men. What has only recently become better known, thanks to advances in medical research and campaigners such asCaroline Criado Perez, is that even when we get the same diseasesthere are differences, with examples including heart disease, Parkinson’s and dementia.
As with reproduction, later-life physiological divergences have social and economic consequences. Social care is a feminist issue due towomen’s greater longevity, as well as the sector’spredominantly female workforce. Most of thepoorest pensioners are single womenas many wives outlive their husbands, but also because of lower average lifetime earnings linked to women taking breaks from employment to care for children.
And what about men? Like women, the older they are, the less likely they are to tell pollsters that gender identity should replace biological sex as a legal and social category. This makes sense to me, since my argument is that consciousness of sexual difference accumulates across the life-course. The fact that men are far less likely to be actively involved in campaigning on this issue than gender-critical women – even when they agree with us – is also easy to understand. Now, as in the past, men need legal protection against sex-based discrimination, abuse or injustice much less often than women.
I don’t presume to predict that today’s gender identity activists will one day change their minds. But it has never seemed clearer to me than it does now that women and men have some different needs and experiences that the law must recognise. Far from an old fogey’s statute, I think the 15-year-old Equality Act, with its staunch protection of sex-based rights, is full of life.
Susanna Rustin is a social affairs journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
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