Joanna Cherry: The Stand was wrong to cancel MP

The Stand had invited her, she says, and it wasn’t going to be about her trans views in particular – more of a chat around her career to date, including her role in blocking prorogation of the UK parliament and her views on the SNP and independence – but “key operational staff” apparently refused to work on the event and so now it’s been axed.

Now, it’s hard to take a stand on something you feel strongly about and no doubt these employees feel they are striking a blow for equality.

But are they? Really? Ms Cherry is an uncompromising figure among gender critical feminists and has consistently opposed gender self-ID legislation. She’s been accused of transphobia but says she’s sick of being misrepresented and has herself been the subject of vicious attacks over her views (with a man convicted of threatening her in 2021).

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At root, she believes that a transwoman is not the same as a biological woman. Some people find that opinion offensive, and hurtful to transwomen.

But to prevent her expressing it helps how, exactly? To silence someone you disagree with is not to win the argument, but to avoid it. To the detached observer, it comes off not as moral but intolerant – and how does intolerance help win hearts and minds?

The real question here is this: how are we going to move forward in a way that commands majority support unless a range of views may be aired?

If we are serious about protecting equality and human rights in a world where they are under attack, then suppressing free speech is a very curious way of going about it.

But it keeps happening. Last week at Edinburgh University, a showing of the documentary Adult Human Female, which comes at the subject from the viewpoint that biological sex cannot be changed, had to be cancelled for a second time after protests by a group of trans activists. Those protesters say the film contains content that is “a clear attack on trans people’s identities” and is transphobic, but the filmmakers say “there isn’t an iota of hatred in our film” and that the accusation of transphobia was “designed to shut down debate”.

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Perhaps in a sign of patience running out with this sort of activist behaviour, it prompted the First Minister Humza Yousaf, a big supporter of trans rights, to call on Edinburgh University to protect free speech.

And rightly so. It's one thing to no-platform someone who has sick, toxic views, such as racists trying to whip up antisemitism or hatred against ethnic minorities, but that is not the issue here. In the gender self-ID debate, the accusation of transphobia has been hurled around almost indiscriminately. Many people regard trans women as different to biological women – different but equal, they would argue – and yes, that view is condemned as transphobic by some, but just because someone says something is transphobic doesn’t automatically make it so.

Trans rights activists have criticised those opposed to gender self-id (Image: free)

The law does not say it is. When the Hate Crime and Public Order bill was passed by Holyrood two years ago, the then Justice Secretary Mr Yousaf explicitly reassured the public that those who believe sex, unlike gender, is immutable would not be regarded in law as stirring up hatred, even if they did so in a robust manner. They would simply be stating a belief.

Now Ms Cherry and other leading lawyers have warned that it is The Stand that is at fault, saying that by cancelling Cherry’s event they have acted unlawfully.

How tedious this all is. Why can’t we just discuss these issues respectfully?

Fortunately the public seem to have less entrenched, black-and-white views than the activists do.

If you ask Scottish voters whether it should be easier for people to change gender, a majority respond with sympathy and compassion, saying “yes”.

Equally, if you go into the detail of the Scottish Government’s gender self-ID legislation, as You Gov did in December, people express concerns about the inadvertent impacts it could have on vulnerable young people, and on women and girls. A majority oppose lowering the age to change gender to 16 and cutting the period a person must live in their acquired gender.

Does that mean the public are transphobic? The evidence doesn’t show that; it just suggests that they want to make sure that in easing the path for one group, the rights and safety of another are not compromised.

Frankly a lot of people are confused. Prof Sir John Curtice noted last February that quite a lot of us just don’t know where we stand on transgender issues. No wonder, given the quality of the political debate.

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It had started to look recently as if we might finally be moving past the head-banging phase of this interminable conflict, with some senior politicians starting to discuss the complexities of the issues instead of always taking strident positions.

The Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar spoke of his concerns about the self-ID legislation, saying that “there is still work to do” on it, even though it was passed by Holyrood with Labour’s backing. He says that while supporting the legislation was the right thing to do, the Scottish Government should have accepted further amendments.

We all wish it were simple, but this is one of those issues where there is right on both sides and if we’re ever going to resolve the complexities, we can’t do it by shutting out diverse views. The Stand comedy club has given a platform to many comics over the years whose material offends people, but apparently there are limits to the club’s support for free speech.

That’s a shame. Respectful engagement between the two sides might be too much to hope for at this stage, but cancelling opponents only deepens the divide.