Dear Sir,
Dr David Mackereth has been discriminated against and denied a job with the Department of Work and Pensions because of his Christian belief that God made mankind male and female. Dr Mackereth believed he should not be compelled to use a preferred specific pronoun to address a transgender patient. I fully agree. Religious belief is also a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, but evidently some protected characteristics are more protected than others.
I met my first transgender patient, male-to-female, in the USA in the 1980s. ‘She’ was called Robin, which in the USA is both a girl’s and a boy’s name, so no problem there. However, I could not in conscience refer to this patient as ‘she’. I decided that no-one, not even Robin, could object to my using ‘her’ first, i.e. Christian, name rather than a pronoun. So I always used ‘her’ name, which led to some rather stilted conversations but provoked no comment, even from Robin. Such choice of address is accurate and insults no one; it may be idiosyncratic, but it is not hate speech. So in disputable matters about gender identity let’s use proper names. We should not be compelled to explain ourselves for our vocabulary, whether our reason is that we believe in a Creator or whether we are sticklers for truth like psychologist Jordan Peterson.
On the other hand, as the government has gutted gender-based personal and reflexive pronouns and possessive adjectives of objective meaning, perhaps they should decree that these grammatical terms, and especially the 50 or more made-up ones, must not be used by anybody. (After all, if Dr Mackereth cannot use a correct pronoun, why should anyone else be allowed to or to make up their own?) That would certainly be ‘Equality’. Logical and consistent. We’d have to speak a convoluted English using just Christian and surnames and other appellations instead. What a pain. But at least no-one would give or take offence. Or lose their job.
We must continue to fight back against such subversive government nonsense.
Yours sincerely,
