r/unitedkingdom • u/PinkNews Verified Media Outlet • 7d ago
Keir Starmer says he doesn’t want schools teaching young people about transgender identities ...
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/06/25/keir-starmer-trans-education-general-election-2024/
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u/potpan0 Black Country 7d ago
I'm not really sure you're getting what OP is saying here.
Trans people, or people who are gender non-conforming, have existed throughout human history and across human societies. I can look to Ancient Rome, or to pre-1492 Americas, or pre-colonial Africa, and find plenty of examples of people who did not conform to a rigid and biologically determined gender binary. Were they ever a majority? No, but they existed.
However, a small people of transphobes insist that trans people only came into existence in the 1900s, as part of a nefarious ideological attempt to destabilise the traditional family or attack women or some similar guff. They describe this process as 'gender ideology', and insist this 'ideology' was created very recently. It's a dangerous attempt to dehistoriocise trans people, to reject the vast historical evidence of trans and gender non-conforming people existing in human societies and therefore present trans people as dishonest charlatans lying about their identity. And that's why it's so particularly galling to be seeing a leader of a British political party, one who has ostensibly claimed to stand up for minority groups, repeating this.
For what it's worth homophobes and racists have took a similar approach too. Homophobes insisted that homosexuality only came into existence in the 1900s, and a common racist line is that the term 'racism' was invented in the Soviet Union in the early 1900s (and therefore that anyone complaining about racism is an evil communist).