The long-overdue decision by the World Athletics Council to prohibit “trans women” (i.e. men) from participating in female international competitions if they have gone through male puberty is a welcome acknowledgement of reality and a restoration of justice to women athletes. This was immediately followed by the English Schools Athletics Association announcing similar protection for the rights of schoolgirls by restricting competition to those “who were recorded female at birth”.

That is a better definition than the one employed by the World Athletics Council, whose announcement was hedged with several weasel qualifications, such as the male puberty condition and Lord Coe’s announcement of the setting up of a working group to consider evolving scientific evidence, though he must know that scientific evidence is evolving inexorably to highlight the physiological differences between the sexes. There is nothing to consider: men are men, women are women and that personal identity is established not at birth, but earlier, in the womb. We must suppose those unsatisfactory provisions were inserted in an attempt to appease the backlash from noisy, but numerically insignificant, transgender lobby groups.

If so, that was deluded: they are not susceptible of appeasement. Stonewall, the lead organisation in promoting trans nonsense, has denounced World Athletics’ “unilateral ban on trans women in track and field events”. That is typical Stonewall propagandist misrepresentation: so-called trans women are at perfect liberty to compete against their own sex in such events; what they are no longer at liberty to do is to take advantage of their male physique to deprive female athletes of the titles and prizes they deserve.

Cycling, a sport that has not moved to protect female athletes’ interests, demonstrated last weekend in America the unfairness of competitors born as men competing against women. Tiffany Thomas, born male, felt “like a superhero” (should that not be superheroine?) after winning the prestigious women’s amateur Randall’s Island Criterium Race. That same weekend, at the USA Cycling National Cyclocross Championships in Hartford, a transgender cyclist won a medal for third place. The woman who came behind in fourth place, Hannah Arensman, then announced her retirement from the sport, as it had “become increasingly discouraging” to lose to someone with an “unfair advantage”.

Women are progressively being erased from their own sports – a reflection of their general erasure across society by the transgender cult. Cycling needs to put its house in order, as does rowing; swimming and rugby have already dealt with the transgender disruption. In the delinquent sports still disadvantaging women in their own events, the pathetic evasion is to set requirements for low testosterone levels. That is untenable: low testosterone does not eliminate the muscle and other physical advantages male athletes enjoy over women.

The fight to prevent women being marginalised in female sporting events has been led by Olympic medallist Sharron Davies, who has reported receiving horrific online abuse. What is Big Tech doing about “hate speech” of that kind? The woman who has led the charge against trans tyranny in wider society, J K Rowling, has been similarly abused. It is ironic, but typical, that the kind of people who prate about “misogyny” and initiate legislation against that ill-defined concept, are wholly in hock to the trans ideology, with its undisguised loathing of normal women.

When the transgender ideology first manifested itself a short time ago, it was regarded with complacent derision by mainstream society. In an amazingly short time this absurd contention that sex is a “social construct”, which contradicts the fundamental tenets of science, in a supposedly science-based age, has become all-pervasive, from kindergartens to boardrooms. It even has its own flag, clear evidence that it is an ideology rather than a medical condition. Its supporters are as fanatical as they are brain-dead.

It is time to spell out the objective realities. Sex and gender are not two different things: gender is a grammatical term relating to sex as expressed in language, not a defining principle of individual identity. Sex is indeed, in the trans activists’ favourite derogatory term, binary. The biological differences between men and women are not confined to the reproductive organs, but are multifarious and spread throughout the human genome.

An important research project conducted at the Weizmann Institute’s Molecular Genetics Department discovered that the differences between men and women are even more profound than had previously been assumed. Not only do men, uniquely, possess the Y chromosome, but there are more than 6,500 genes that express differently in men and women. Gene expression for muscle building is higher in men, that for fat storage higher in women; a gene active in women’s brains affords them some protection from Parkinson’s Disease, and so on: the differential is wide-ranging and ineradicable.

No amount of bodily mutilation or medication can eradicate that immutable reality dictated by nature. Ideology cannot reverse biology. But irresponsible efforts to do so can inflict terrible harm on people. Already we are hearing the tragic stories of “detransitioners”, of disillusioned women who will never be able to have children, of others whose health has been seriously undermined. Yet still the fanatics who have infiltrated our schools lead children to question their sexual identity, to go on harmful medications, or even persuade girls they need to bind their breasts. The exclusion of parents from knowledge of what is happening marks a further, serious erosion of the family in favour of state control.

This is a cult: it is specifically targeted at children, it enjoys government toleration, if not actual complicity, and it is potentially ruining thousands of lives. The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into Mermaids, the transgender youth support organisation, but Stonewall, the chief champion of the trans tyranny, sails on regardless, awarding its approval to organisations that rush to satisfy its criteria when they should instead be focusing on doing the jobs, public or private, they are supposed to do.

Stonewall has been dictating (Conservative) government policy for years. What is going on here? Why do parliamentarians pay more heed to a lobby group than to the deeply unhappy constituents who elected them? Only recently have politicians started to put on the brakes in their support for the trans imposture. Last month Rishi Sunak committed himself to the statement “Biological sex really matters” and he blocked Nicola Sturgeon’s extreme Gender Recognition Bill. More recently, Keir Starmer has signalled that advancing “trans rights” will not be a priority for his government.

The cause of these Damascene conversions is not far to seek. The spectacular fall of the previously unassailable Nicola Sturgeon has alarmed other members of the political class: it is a law of nature that when members of a particular animal species see one of their own kind dead and staked out as a warning, they retreat in panic. Much credit for Sturgeon’s downfall must go to J K Rowling, who rightly used the influence she commands to block an outrageous law that placed women in danger, as the case of “Isla Bryson” immediately demonstrated. It is disgraceful, though, how much support there is at Westminster for the transgender imposture.

Why? Would we defer to Flat Earthers when devising aerospace policy? Why do we permit a rare medical condition – gender dysphoria – which has a very high success rate in being cured by purely cognitive therapy (which  legislators are trying to ban under a dishonest agenda) to be turned into a synthetic pandemic? The vast majority of “transgender” cases today do not have gender dysphoria. They are schoolchildren brainwashed by social media and complicit teachers into potentially wrecking their entire lives. For schoolgirls, trans has become the new anorexia.

Sex education in schools does not need to be “reviewed”, as Rishi Sunak proposes, but rigorously inspected, controlled and, above all, made open to parents. What sick minds thought “Drag Queen Storytime” was a suitable entertainment for young children? There is very evidently an agenda here to destroy the innocence of children, deprive them of a childhood and exploit them in the interests of the multi-acronym sexual lobbies that roam the country unchallenged.

How many people have lost their livelihoods by refusing to renounce scientific fact and personal integrity by addressing someone by a sexual identity they know to be false? How many more live in uncomfortable apprehension of offending the thought police who have turned Britain into an unfree country? Companies and all other organisations should be prohibited, by law, from forcing anyone to use “pronouns” in correspondence or any other context.

The root cause, the seedbed of the woke tyranny, is the Equality Act 2010, Labour’s toxic legacy which the Tories lacked the courage or conviction to repeal. It created nine categories of “protected characteristics”. For the first time since the Norman Conquest, English people were divided into privileged and non-privileged classes under law. So-called “aggravated offences”, with concomitantly higher sentences, extended that divide into the courts.

Unless and until the Conservative government repeals the Equality Act and all the other oppressive anti-free speech legislation, restoring a level playing field on which the transgender and other woke ideologies would be forced to defend their anti-scientific superstitions in open debate, the growing divide between it and the public will threaten electoral consequences. The whole culture war travesty is an American importation and it is the duty of a British government to tear it up by the roots and throw it on the bonfire.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life