On Friday evening, I debated Helen Webberley, who — no longer licensed to practise as a doctor — now calls herself a “gender specialist”. She became known as the front of Gender GP, a private service that states on its website: “Skip the NHS’s 5-10 year wait times. Get compassionate, personalised, gender-affirming medications in just 2-3 weeks.”

In the twilight world of gender orthodoxy, so many extreme things have been said for so long that I have on occasion been guilty of assuming that no-one really believes it. “If you’re the parent of a trans child – I implore you to believe them,” Webberley once tweeted. In the course of our almost two-hour debate, I asked whether we should accept a statement like this from a six-year-old. Yes, came the answer.

Another mantra states that trans women are literal, actual women, and so excluding them from female-only spaces is akin to refusing entry to short women or black women. This was precisely the argument advanced by Webberley on Friday. Taking trans ideology to its logical conclusion would entail the erosion of every single female-only service and space, including hospital wards, rape crisis centres, domestic violence refuges, changing rooms, and sports facilities. It would mean the end of a female sports category, and women’s prisons.

When I asked if Webberley had always been against female-only spaces for victims and survivors of sexual assault, she looked puzzled — even though this is exactly what she is saying whenever she insists that trans women are not men. It was like talking to the proverbial brick wall. When I referred to “trans women” as “men”, she suggested that I may have committed a hate crime.

We must not ignore the effects of swallowing this ideology wholesale. Over the past two decades, it has permeated most of our institutions to a greater or lesser extent. But if trans women are women, it follows that they should not be excluded from any female-only facilities. This means no single-sex spaces of any kind, for any reason.

Of course, this would undo much of the work of the past six decades of feminism in the West. Webberley seemed to think this was no bad thing, even suggesting that if young feminists were setting up rape crisis centres and domestic violence refuges today, they would make them inclusive of “everyone”.

Throughout the debate, Webberley accused me of claiming that all men are dangerous and predatory. In truth, a sizeable minority of men are a danger to women and girls, and because we cannot distinguish between those who are harmless and those who pose a threat, it was for reasons of safety and security that feminists originally set up rape crisis centres and other spaces that men could not enter. Every time I asked her whether she was against the existence of anything specific for women that did not include “trans women”, she would remind me again that “trans women are women”.

In May last year, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre worker Roz Adams won a tribunal against her employer after it was found that she was unfairly dismissed for her gender-critical beliefs. Shockingly, the centre’s CEO at the time, Mridul Wadhwa, is a trans woman who once suggested that “bigoted” rape survivors should be “challenged on [their] prejudices”. Following a report later that year into ERCC’s failures to protect women, Wadhwa was forced to resign.

One would think that cases such as this, as well the legal action taken against the charity Survivors’ Network for including males in support sessions for abuse victims, might persuade Webberley of the ridiculousness of her worldview. Yet there is no benefit in debating key issues such as “What is a woman?” when your opponent thinks the only proof required is to declare that it is so.

The era of “no debate” imposed by Stonewall and other activists over the past few years does seem to be over. But, aside from shining a light on the utter madness of the flat-Earth beliefs to which so many have signed up, I see no point in wasting good time trying to convince them otherwise.

You can watch the debate from 6pm on 20 November

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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