When I was a kid and history was still taught in schools, our world history teacher took a day to talk about England’s Magna Carta. He told us that the document matters because it represents one of the earliest efforts of a people to stand up against unchecked power. He even referred to it as a forerunner to the U.S. Constitution, and his argument for that was sound.
But I suspect that it won’t be long before the Magna Carta will be printed on toilet paper throughout the United Kingdom as the government continues its headlong slide into turning England into Orwell’s Oceania. After all, it’s overdue by almost 40 years. There is some significant catching up to be done.
The latest example of how the UK is throwing human rights along with common sense into the dustbin is new guidance issued by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Under the latest set of rules, if one’s spouse decides that they are now a new gender, refusing to refer to that person by their preferred pronouns or failing to help or pay for their transition surgery may constitute abuse. From The Telegraph:
The CPS has listed nine types of behaviour which could amount to abuse of trans or non-binary people by their partners or members of their family.
These include “withholding money for transitioning,” which would include either spouse refusing to pay for gender surgery, counselling or other treatment in a way that amounted to coercive control or abuse.
Other behaviours could be “criticising the victim for not being ‘a real man/woman’ if they have not undergone reassignment surgery,” or “threatening or sharing pre-transition images,” or refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.
Furthermore, the paper said, “using the process of transitioning or ‘coming out’ as a form of control, body shaming, minimising or disregarding the abuse by blaming the victim’s ‘perception’ on their hormones and physically assaulting surgically or medically altered body parts” can also be considered abuse.
The absurdity of prosecuting spouses or partners for using the wrong pronouns or not helping to pay for a transition has not gone completely unnoticed. The Women’s Rights Network sent a letter to Max Hill, the head of CPS. Network founder Heather Binning told The Telegraph, “How on earth can reluctance to pay for elective, unnecessary surgery from family finances be cited as an example of domestic abuse by anyone, let alone the CPS? The same document states that correctly referring to a family member’s sex is also abuse. This completely ignores the difficulties and emotions many people experience when a family member identifies as something they clearly are not.”
CPS claims that the new guidance has been issued because trans and non-binary people can be subject to unique forms of abuse. It adds that the guidance is meant to protect all genders. But under the CPS rules, refusing to pay for a spouse’s transition could be prosecutable as abuse. In other words, if one’s spouse decides to upend a marriage and a family, one must celebrate and even fund that decision no matter what damage that decision may do to everyone else. One must dry one’s tears and celebrate or pack one’s bags and leave — or maybe even all three.
Like child abuse, spousal abuse is heinous, and the scars it leaves can take years to heal if they ever do at all. I have known women and even men who still cope with the fallout from abuse decades after breaking free of those situations. Abuse is a serious thing. No one should be forced to endure it no matter their gender or orientation. But the new guidance from CPS is nothing more than yet another attempt to force its citizens to bow their heads and bend their knees. It is telling a woman who married a man and who does not want to suddenly find herself married to a woman that she may be subject to criminal charges.
In a speech to Parliament during the Second World War, Winston Churchill said:
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.
If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, ‘this was their finest hour’.
A country that once fought so bravely against totalitarianism now seems to be doing everything it can to embrace it. This is not Britain’s finest hour.
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