EDI – where did it all go wrong?

We are pleased to present ideas that “need to be out there”.

This is the first of a continuing series.

John Higgon, a retired clinical neuropsychologist, posts….

 We live in a diverse world.  Each of us is advantaged, or disadvantaged, by circumstances beyond our control.  In recent decades, we have come to realize that it is wrong to disadvantage a person on the basis of an irrelevant aspect of themselves over which they have no control.  This is discrimination, and, whilst there is a proper place for some kinds of discrimination (for example, in selecting the best candidate for a job based on the candidates’ skills, knowledge and experience), there is general agreement that discrimination should not be based on irrelevances such as one’s age or sex or ethnicity.  To counter discrimination of this kind, we have promoted inclusivity both as a value and as the mechanism by which equality can be more closely attained.  These aims are noble and worthwhile, and nobody would want to dispute them, I hope.  Even so, when translated into a legal framework, the perceived rights of one group (trans-identifying people) have in recent years come into sharp contrast with the perceived rights of other groups (women in general and lesbians in particular).  As a society we are in the process of navigating that, and unfortunately, current EDI practice is not helping.

Some history 

Legislation in the UK addressed discrimination on the basis of race (the Race Relations Act 1965), sex (Equal Pay Act 1970) and disability (Disability Discrimination Act 1995), but it was only in 2010 that these were brought under the umbrella of the Equality Act.  This is a landmark piece of legislation that protects nine groups of people.  Specifically, the ‘protected characteristics’ are age, disability, gender reassignment (more on this later), marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.  So far, so good, but there is a fly in the ointment.  The Equality Act has conflated sex and gender, for in the Act gender reassignment is defined as ‘proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign sex’.  The linguistic conflation of the words sex and gender is of course not unique to the Equality Act.  We see it everywhere.  But, to sex realists, sex and gender are different.  Sex refers to biology, gender refers to the expectations that culture places on men and women to behave in particular ways: “boys don’t cry”, and so on.  And, whilst this conflation may not matter much in many day-to-day settings, it becomes very important in a legal context. 

As we know, trans rights activists sought to capitalize on this ambiguity by claiming that the Equality Act offered protection to individuals identifying as trans or non-binary.  Specifically, they claimed that the rallying cry of “trans women are women” had a legal significance, and therefore that the law supported the supposed right of transwomen to, for example, attend single-sex services, use female changing rooms and access lesbian networks.  All of a sudden, the rights of women were pitted against the rights of biological males identifying as women.  How did this play out?

Single-sex services

Here in Scotland we recently witnessed the debacle of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre, run by a transwoman, which refused to offer single sex groups until forced to do so by its parent organisation, Rape Crisis Scotland.  Rape Crisis Scotland noted that “We are extremely concerned that for around 16 months [Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre] did not provide dedicated women-only spaces, as required by the National Service Standards, while declaring to [Rape Crisis Scotland] that they were adhering to the standards” (‘Our statement on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis National Service Standards Report’ (Rape Crisis Scotland, accessed on the internet 02/07/2025)).  If you believe that transwomen are women, then it follows that you were providing a single-sex, women-only space.  Unfortunately for the Edinburgh branch, Rape Crisis Scotland central office clearly did not follow this line of reasoning.

Female changing rooms

Just last month, eight nurses in Darlington won their case against their employer.  They had taken their employer to court for its failure to provide single-sex changing facilities, by allowing a biological male identifying as female to use their facilities.  Meanwhile in Fife, another nurse, Sandie Peggie, is fighting her own battle over the exact same issue.  Interestingly, Fife NHS Trust are still withholding documentation that the court has demanded in an apparent delaying tactic.  You would think that they could see where this legal case is headed, given the success of the Darlington nurses and particularly in light of the April 2025 Supreme Court judgement confirming that ‘sex’ means, and has always meant, ‘biological sex’ in the eyes of the law.  But, as I shall suggest later, public sector bodies seem to find it difficult to envisage any way of approaching the trans issue other than the current, largely affirmative, way.

Lesbians’ right to associate on the basis of sexual orientation

 Finally, we come to the infamous ‘cotton ceiling’, perhaps the most extreme example of perceived trans rights clashing with the rights of same-sex attracted women’s rights.  Just as women face a ‘glass ceiling’ in their career advancement, it’s been suggested that ‘transwomen’ (intact biological men) face a ‘cotton ceiling’ when it comes to trying to have sex with lesbians.  Since the phrase was first coined, there have been attempts to deny the sexual connotations of the term, but the ‘cotton’ in ‘cotton ceiling’ is widely interpreted as referring to cotton underwear.  It’s hard, therefore, to see how there isn’t a sexual element to this.  Any reasonable reader would conclude that some transwomen – biological males identifying as women, if you prefer – feel aggrieved that they are not considered as potential sexual partners by lesbians.  The sense of entitlement is astounding.  Indeed, you could say that there’s something quite male about it.

These cases are all quite well known and there is no need to add to the list, although I could.  The point is that the rights demanded by trans activists obviously and self-evidently clash with rights previously accorded to women and lesbians in particular.  The lawyers who drew up the Equality Act cannot have seen that coming, because, as we have seen, the Equality Act, whilst it talked about gender, really meant ‘sex’, as is clear from the definitions contained within the act.  (In fact, they perhaps should have seen the potential for inconsistencies, given that the act offers protection from discrimination to people who are merely ‘proposing to undergo’ procedures to change sex.)

Culture wars

Rights of various groups often clash, and society has to find a way to balance these opposing rights as best they can be.  This is where we find ourselves now.  Trans-identifying people should of course have rights and should not be subject to unreasonable discrimination.  But it is not self-evident that their rights should trump women’s rights.  Trans activists have responded to challenges by adopting the strategy of avoiding any debate of these issues, as recommended in the Denton Report, and for a long time they have got away with it.  Witness the treatment of Kathleen Stock.  Witness the extreme and unchallengeable assertions – “transwomen are women”.  Witness the attempts to shut down academic study that is anything other than affirming (the refusal of scientific journals to publish Sallie Baxendale’s work on puberty blockers and their potential effects on cognitive development, the expulsion of James Caspian from his psychotherapy course because of his proposed research into the experience of detransitioners, the expulsion of James Esses from his psychotherapy training course for his views on affirmative therapy).  Witness the violent protests at sex realist meetings or attempted viewings of sex realist films such as Adult Human Female.

The reason they have got away with it is that these extreme positions are both tacitly and often explicitly supported by EDI policies put together in the HR departments of institutions, in particular, public sector institutions.  It’s not surprising that these policies have developed as they have.  ‘Co-production’ emphasizes the benefits of the public sector working with marginalized groups (“Nothing about us without us”), and whilst there is a place for this, it is reasonable to ask whether trans activists have become the self-serving tail wagging the compliant dog.  Trans activists have also been very successful in finding their ways into influential positions within organisations.  The BPS is no exception.  Once there, they have a more or less free rein to make whatever pronouncements they see fit, all with the implied backing of the organisation which they represent.  In this way, a culture has gradually come into existence which promotes the incorporation of preferred pronouns into name badges, which accepts uncritically the grafting of the ‘T’ onto the pre-existing ‘LGB’, which actively promotes Pride events whilst doing far less to promote other protected groups, and which promotes Stonewall-inspired narratives about gender identity whilst coming down firmly on sex realist narratives.  The climate that has been created looks like it is very diverse and supportive, but woe betide anyone who challenges it.  

Nothing needs to be stated explicitly.  In the same way that health service employees know always to substitute the word ‘challenge’ for the word ‘problem’, employees ‘just know’ that there are things they can say and other things that they shouldn’t.  Self-censorship sets in.  Why would a young professional embarking on the early stages of their career risk gaining a reputation as ‘difficult’, ‘ideologically suspect’, ‘bigoted’, ‘transphobic’?  In a public sector service that rightly exists to cater for all sections of society, it is wise to avoid having these kinds of terms applied to you – whether they are deserved or not.  (And mud sticks.  Some students at Sussex University happily denounced Kathleen Stock as transphobic, whilst simultaneously cheerfully admitting that they had not read her book!) 

On the one hand, then, we have extreme demands from aggressive activists who are not seeking the same rights as ‘the rest of us’, but who are seeking rights that ‘the rest of us’ don’t have – in particular, the right to identify in the way that they see fit, and for the rest of society to bend around that self-identification in any way that is necessary.  On the other, a culture that has permeated large institutions, but in particular public sector institutions – one which provides the necessary intellectual air cover for the activist activity.  Health, schools, higher education and social work have all taken on board the Stonewall narrative, and it is all too easy to join the dots: children exposed to gender identity ideology at school; adolescents, often same-sex attracted, finding a health culture that is willing and able to provide the medical interventions that will realize their trans identities;  and social workers, teachers and health workers who will sideline the concerns of sceptical but deeply caring parents who never drank the Kool Aid.  

A way out

I asked at the beginning of this piece where it all went wrong.  I suggested that the apparently harmless conflation of sex and gender was seized upon by trans activists and turned to their own advantage.  I suggested that activists used tactics to shut down public debate, whilst simultaneously inserting themselves into key positions in public sector institutions, either as advisors from third sector groups, or as fully paid-up employees.  There, they developed policies that enshrined the rights of trans identifying individuals, even when these came self-evidently at the expense of other groups.

Let’s look now at how we can move on and start to put things right.  First, I think we need to support gender-non-conforming people to live the kinds of gender-non-conforming lives that they wish to.  It has been noted elsewhere that on one analysis, the trans project is in fact deeply gender-conforming: “My son played with dolls from an early age, therefore he must really be a girl”.  Second, we have to abandon the practice of creating narratives based on how we would like things to be, and get back to examining how things actually are.  Biological sex is messy, difficult in some ways to define (do we do so on the basis of chromosomes, or genital development?) but ultimately there are two sexes, each evolved to play a part in the reproduction of the species.  It’s really not that difficult.  Beyond that, we can conform to the stereotypes that attach to our sex, or not, and there should be no penalty for choosing either route.  Clinicians should acknowledge that some people are extremely distressed about their sexed bodies and/or their gender, and we should recognize that these feelings are most likely to surface around adolescence.  We need to establish, through the usual process of clinically-based research, what approaches, if any, help gender-dysphoric individuals feel better about themselves.  To date, the evidence base for hitherto standard approaches has been weak to say the least. Third, public sector institutions need to re-think how they are going to support trans and gender-non-conforming people.  There is more than one way to do this.  We can carry on doing what we have been doing: nodding along with over-valued ideas about innate gender identities numbering in the dozens, and acquiescing to every extreme demand made by ‘the trans community’.  Or we can start to think about how to balance competing rights and how to gently push back on some of the wilder unevidenced claims of gender ideology.  

The problem for public sector organisations is that a whole generation of employees has been exposed to gender ideology and actively dissuaded from critically appraising it.  The challenge now is to re-engage our critical faculties so that we can develop new strategies for supporting gender-non-conforming and gender-dysphoric individuals, ensuring that those strategies are evidence-based and do not lead us into situations where one group’s rights come at the expense of another’s.  Psychologists have a role here.  We are trained to think critically.  If you are not convinced by gender ideology, surely nobody can blame you for asking an innocent question at the next team meeting?