Thanks to trans activism the topic of self-ID, in which a man legally becomes a woman the moment he says he is one, has played a significant role in public discourse in recent years. Few politicians have embraced this policy as eagerly as Scotland’s first minister, who recently announced that her government will introduce a Gender Recognition Reform Bill in the next year. 

It’s thought the bill won’t quite push for full self-ID, where a declaration alone will magically enable men to access women’s sex-based rights; instead, men will legally become women after three months, provided they have a diagnosis for gender dysphoria and swear an oath that they intend to permanently identify as their new gender, a process that currently takes two years.

South of the border, self-ID took a seemingly knockout blow when Liz Truss announced a year ago that the 2004 Gender Recognition Act will not be updated. But are trans activists now moving away from self-ID to something even more ludicrous yet equally pernicious?

Mermaids have published an article which is a masterclass in navel-gazing oppression Olympics

The controversial charity Mermaids, which encourages gender non-conforming children to take drugs and wrong-sex hormones if they think they’re the opposite sex, has published an article about the UK government’s Elections Bill, which, if it becomes law, will require voters to show photo ID at polling stations.

Leaving aside the question of why a children’s charity is talking about voter ID, the article is a masterclass in navel-gazing oppression Olympics. 

“These plans threaten to limit people from the LGBTQIA+ community from participating in the [electoral] process,” says its author, Derwen Fay. “In May 2021 I presented in a way that did not fit the title on my polling card, and received judging looks by the clerks. While I was able to cast my vote, microaggressions like these are a worrying sign.”

(Let’s ignore a few obvious points, such as postal voting would be a solution to this issue, the May 2021 elections were in the past and the bill has not come into law yet, and is giving someone so unstable a public platform really the best way for a charity to help them?)

For genderfluid people like me, there are big concerns. My gender identity moves quite regularly between feeling non-binary, female, and occasionally male, so any form of binary gendered ID will not accurately represent how I identify on that particular day. These proposals feel less about the prevention of voter fraud and more about blocking people like [me] from having a say.

(And let’s ignore the fact that gender identity ideologues argue that children have a sense of their gender identity at an early change and from there on it doesn’t change, which is used to justify medicalising them at a young age — while their charity of choice, Mermaids, is publishing an article by someone who says the exact opposite — their gender identity changes all the time).

It appears that Fay believes identification documents exist to validate the person’s feelings

It appears that Fay believes identification documents exist to validate the person’s feelings rather than, for example, to connect a person to vital information about them, and as those feelings are “fluid”, the logical conclusion is to do away with them altogether.

Is this the future of trans activism — something that the establishment, including big business, the media and politicians panders to — that as our identities are constantly changing, identification documents are effectively literal violence? In the meantime, Scotland will be the testing ground for a new type of politics: the prioritisation of live action role-players (LARPers) over the interests of actual adult human females.