Back To Jo Bartosch

Spiked writer Jo Bartosch is someone who I have battled with before — in fact, it was her 10/30/2020 article “The trans war on same-sex attraction” that inspired by 12/6/2020 article “Transphobes, Gay And Straight,” which played an important part in getting me to start debunking transphobia. As such, I had to read her 11/18/2021 article “Trans politics has driven the left insane” when I saw it on my Twitter feed. In it, she criticizes a woman named Ellie Mae O’Hagan who was being interviewed on a BBC show called Politics Live. Specifically, Bartosch focuses on this one point:

The moment of hilarity arrived when Ellie Mae O’Hagan, director of the think-tank CLASS, was asked by presenter Jo Coburn about the definition of ‘woman’. In response she said: “You know, I actually don’t know why some people are women and some people are men.”

Okay, that certainly is a gaffe on O’Hagan’s part, I will not deny that. Even those who believe in pure self-identification know — or, at least, they think they know — what makes some people men and some people women.

Bartosch goes on to write:

After claiming her view was shared by most women (though who knows if they were women), O’Hagan then said that those who claim to be able to tell a person’s sex are “liars.”