The tangled web of sex and gender
As many of you probably know, I have had to take a break from writing recently because of a broken wrist. But I did manage to write responses to this Twitter thread from Shaun Lawson. I was uncomfortable about responding on Twitter to Shaun's questions, so decided to write them in a Word document and send them to him privately. But on reflection, I believe my views are every bit as worthy of a hearing as those of the trans activists and gender critical people who express themselves loudly all over social media. Twitter is a bear pit, so I'm publishing them here. As the trans rights debate is extremely toxic, comments are moderated. I will delete comments that are personal attacks on me or anyone else or that are grandstanding a personal agenda. I dislike the widespread, and often deliberate, conflating of sex-defined terms (“males”, "females") with socially-defined terms ("men", “woman”, “women’s”). So, throughout this piece, I shall use sex-defined