A 54-year-old British transgender woman, Kristina Jayne Harrison, has supported the notion that there are two sexes.
Harrison was giving evidence at an employment tribunal deliberating upon the sacking of tax expert Maya Forstater from her job at an American charity, the Centre for Global Development. She had insisted on Twitter that sex is a biological fact that cannot be changed.
This is an important case in the United Kingdom – a test of whether having "gender critical" beliefs, the view that sex is an immutable biological fact, is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.
Harrison asserted that many transgender people are unable to disagree publicly because they will be "ostracised and shunned".
"It is also fair to say that there are another minority of trans people who agree with me that the terms biological male and biological female are accurate terms but are afraid to speak out because not only is there an extremely toxic debate on Twitter where they are being attacked from both sides, but also, within our community, the idea around gender identity is very intolerant of any dissent".
Born biologically male, Harrison has lived as a transgender woman for two decades. But because she is "gender critical", she has been labelled a "Nazi facilitator" and "scum". She still maintains that biology cannot change.
'"The process of having surgery or hormone treatment cannot ultimately transform your sex … Every cell in my body has male chromosomes. I have a prostate. These things cannot be completely deconstructed. It is not possible to be biologically female."
In her witness statement, Harrison said that attempts to "legally coerce society" into treating males as females in all circumstances are doomed to fail. "As Churchill once said, 'The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is'," she added.
Even trans individuals who disagree must acknowledge that there are two sexes, otherwise they could not make the attempt to transition from one to the other. To claim otherwise would be to make a nonsense of the ideology even on its own terms.
Harrison's intervention in the acrimonious debate confirms suspicions that it is not the tiny number of trans individuals who crave social acceptance who are behind attacks on the idea of male and female. Rather, it is politically motivated activists who are weaponizing their plight not only to silence any mention of male and female, but rather illogically to force society to agree that men can be women and women can be men.
They have tasted success in getting governments and public institutions to accede to their demands and are now drunk with power, leading to even more extreme demands – and in the process, making it appear that all trans individuals are intolerant bullies.
One might surmise that by highlighting attempts to silence transgender persons on transgender issues, this case represents peak madness for Western society.
Not so. There are ever more loopy initiatives on the other side of the peak. The University and College Union (UCU), which represents over 100,000 university lecturers and staff, is now saying that individuals "should be allowed to identify as black no matter what colour they are born". This is the case of white theatre director Anthony Lennon, "who describes himself as an 'African born again'".
A spokesman for the UCU said: "Self-identification is a standard practice in many organisations and the Office for National Statistics says 'there is no consensus on what constitutes an ethnic group and membership is something that is self-defined'."
As time passes, a Ministry of Truth may declare it a hate crime to describe a person as black or white, just as it could be a crime to describe them as male or female. We will be forced to say is that that truth is a lie.