‘US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that prevents transgender women from competing in female categories of sports,’ a recent BBC item says.
Trump’s move followed on an earlier order which restated traditional and indeed scientific truths about men and women, declaring: ‘Ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.’
Could the tide similarly turn here? Recently Sonia Sodha wrote on the Guardian / Observer website: ‘Some things are plain common sense. Female employees should not be expected to share changing rooms with male colleagues. They shouldn’t be socially shamed into undressing around them, or being in spaces where male colleagues get undressed in front of them.’
Truth matters
It was of course Pontius Pilate who famously asked: “What is truth?”Many centuries later, Hannah Arendt, in her famous …