Babatunde Onabajo: The rapid spread of gender dysphoria amongst children casts new light on Section 28

Babatunde Onabajo is a programmer from London. He has previously worked for Mark Field MP.

With the news that a toddler has been suspended from a nursery for being “transphobic” for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity”, which has invited indignation from many including JK Rowling, many have been forced to question within themselves: is this really the tipping point when it comes to gender ideology?

Whilst commendable, such introspective people are late to the party: in recent months, we have seen a torrent of absurd and strange stories relating to the fallout from gender ideology.

These include a respected nurse who was suspended from her job for complaining about sharing a changing room with a biological male, a convicted male rapist by the name of “Isla Bryson” who was remanded to a woman’s prison whilst he awaited trial, and a black nurse who was racially abused, and is facing disciplinary action, after she called a male pedophile “mister”.

Such stories, and more, should prompt us to ask a heretical question: what if Section 28 was right all along?

The term ‘Section 28’ is a term that used to – and probably still does to some – send a cold chill down one’s spine. It referred to the part of the Local Government Act 1988 which prohibited local authorities from intentionally promoting homosexuality or publishing material with the purpose of promoting homosexuality. In practice, this meant that many schools and other organisations, so as to not fall foul of the law, simply stopped discussing homosexuality in an educational context.

The intent of that law was never to punish any one group. Rather, the intent of that law was to prevent what sociologists call ‘social contagion’, whose definition we will come to very shortly.

The law being passed witth near universal support from within the Conservative Party. Francis Maude, now Baron Maude, voted for it. David Cameron, both prior to his election to Parliament and for a time afterwards, supported the law, and criticised the Labour Party who opposed it for being “anti-family”.

The law was ultimately repealed in 2003 following successive campaigning efforts by activists. On the back of this success came the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which allowed individuals to change their gender, and from which is the immediate reason for the absurdities we now see when it comes to gender ideology.

For a time, following both its repeal and social trends, it was unfashionable to admit support for Section 28. In 2006, Francis Maude lamented to the LGBT publication PinkNews that he voted for the law; in a strange historical twist, Cameron would go on to be Prime Minister and sounded the clarion call for the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 which is now in legal effect.

Accompanying these developments were slogans along the lines of ‘love is love’, ‘progress’ and ‘marriage equality’. Christians, who in particular were against this law, were demonised and hounded out of their occupations for their opposition. They were deemed “old-fashioned” and living relics of a bygone era. As the saying goes, however, truth is the daughter of time.

Once the rainbow dust and confetti had settled, we have seen and are now seeing the very ill social consequences resulting from the efforts by these activists. They have resulted in girls being slowly excluded from sports, awards being snatched from women, and femininity being erased from the English language.

In the name of “progress”, we have regressed. It is really a case of one step forward, and two steps back. No wonder that even individuals with strongly left-wing views, like Rowling, have come out in opposition.

In 2011, Cameron described the UK as a “Christian country”. This sparked extensive discussion across many segments of society. Whilst still a student at Cardiff University, I wrote in support of Cameron’s comments in the university’s student-run paper Gair Rhydd.

For several decades, it has been fashionable for left-wing agitators to denigrate Christianity and this country’s Christian heritage, using the classroom as their laboratory and treating their students as guinea pigs for their ideology and, more recently, in a more literal way, pumping all kinds of drugs to get children to purportedly change from one gender to another – a practice now proscribed by the courts and has been repeatedly condemned by Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary.

Section 28 was one of the mechanisms designed to prevent this in the first place.

We have a lot to be thankful for when it comes to Christianity: it was Christianity that gave us the concept of child rights, conceived of hospitals, and ensured that the poor were taken of. St Augustine of Hippo, the Christian philosopher and theologian, once boasted that Christianity had eradicated the widespread practice of cousin marriage.

(As a brief aside, should we be surprised that in the slowly expanding vacuum left by the jettisoning of Christianity that banning cousin marriage is now met with some resistance in some quarters? Much the same can be said with efforts to legalise assisted suicide.)

Even when we remove the metaphysical and spiritual component for one moment, Christianity is what economists and sociologists call an ‘institution’ – and as the research by Simon Johnson and the recent Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has shown, institutions matter, even in the context of social and economic development.

Gender ideology is so pernicious because it seeks to strike at the heart of what we know as immutable and biological fact. The perpetually growing list of identities and ‘genders’ is a textbook example of social contagion. And like a virus, leaves its victims seriously ill: the regrets expressed by “detransitioners” like Keira Bell, who was given puberty blockers as a child, are becoming louder day by day.

GK Chesterton once said that when people refuse to believe in God, it is not that they believe in nothing. Rather, they choose to believe in anything. Recognising the difference between male and female is a matter of instinct, as the example of the toddler suspended from the nursery showed.

In pursuit of changing fashions, Maude and Cameron overcorrected: they were right all along. There was nothing, truly, to apologise for. In hindsight, Section 28 was good law, as we are now all witnessing before our very eyes.