I occasionally see people like PZ Myers saying how wonderful it must be to live in a country like the UK where belief is religion in relatively low and politicians don’t have to parade their Christian beliefs in order to have a hope of getting elected. Well, that might be the case, but fundamentalists don’t have to be obviously religious. Some of the characteristics of fundamentalists, which generally distinguishes them from more reasonable religious people, are that they have a firm conviction that their beliefs are true, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that they have the right to force those beliefs on everyone else. We have a fair few people like that.

OK, you guessed it, this is another gender rights rant. But it touches on other feminist issues too.

The person I want to talk about is Julie Bindel. She’s a well known journalist who is often in The Guardian and sometimes on the BBC. She’s a tireless crusader for women’s rights, and a well known lesbian. Just the sort of person you would expect me to support, right?

Except that Ms. Bindel also happens to be probably the most transphobic journalist working in the UK today. Sure there are people in the tabloids who will make tranny jokes given any opportunity, but no one except Ms. Bindel is waging a personal crusade to deny transgender people rights and subject them to torture until they agree to behave as she wants.

Not only does Bindel want to deny transsexuals the right to the (medically and government approved) treatments that allow them to live in their desired gender, she also favors subjecting transgender people to “reparative” therapy (aversion therapy and the like, i.e. torture) of the type recommended by Christian fundamentalists for “curing” gays. She would doubtless fight tooth and nail to save gays and lesbians (but perhaps not bisexuals) from such treatment, but because transgender people have no place in her world view she’ll use any means at her disposal to try to get rid of them. And “any means” includes stooping to the sort of crass negative stereotyping that you would normally expect from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators.

All of this would be of no consequence if Bindel were just some random fanatic but, as I noted above, she is regularly in The Guardian and even on the BBC. She has a platform. And shortly she is going to be named “Journalist of the Year” by Stonewall, an organization that purports to campaign for the entire LGBT community. Yes, really. A supposed LGBT organization is going to give a top award to someone who wants to rid the world of transgender people (under the guise of “curing” them of their “mental illness”). If you don’t believe me, here is The Gender Trust on the subject, and here’s Roz being remarkably restrained.

And that’s not all, because transgender people are not the only people that Bindel has it in for. She also wants to put an end to prostitution. A little while ago Bindel and a colleague produced a report for the government on what to do about the laws on prostitution. This report is apparently going to be used as the basis of new legislation, so it is the sort of thing you would expect to be carried out by sociology professors, not crusading journalists. And when experts in the field did get to see the report, this is what they had to say:

We express some serious concerns about some of the information in the report, the assumptions made and the methods used to gather information for the report. As a group of established academics and researchers, we have grave concerns about the lack of ethical protocols and procedures followed in this study and also the weak methodological rigour through which information was gathered.

In addition, we are worried about the salacious nature of the report and the media ‘hype’ that has been generated regarding safer sexual practices in brothels and the price of sexual services in the UK. Due to considerable media attention and exposure given to the report, there is the danger of simplistic misrepresentations impacting upon very important social and public policy issues.

What does “weak methodological rigour” mean? Well for starters most of the “data” was gathered by getting men to phone up the receptionists at brothels pretending to be clients and asking about what goes on at the establishment. Quite aside from the fact that such “research” methods are ethically dubious for anyone except investigative reporters, they don’t seem likely to produce honest answers, and they certainly don’t get at the views of the actual prostitutes themselves.

Now if you want to point out that the UK has a major problem with sex trafficking, and that something needs to be done about it, I’ll happily agree. Thankfully I’ve never had to sell my body and I certainly don’t ever want to have to. At the same time I am conscious of the fact that women should have the right to use their bodies how they see fit. Bindel doesn’t agree. In the same way that she believes that all transgender people are deluded and need to be “cured”, she also believes that prostitution only every happens as a result of male violence against women. Presented with a woman who claimed that she was happy working as a prostitute, Bindel would probably want her put in for “reparative” therapy as well.

And you know, I have a sneaking suspicion that, given the opportunity, Bindel would probably want to stop women having sex with men altogether, because sleeping with the enemy should not be allowed.

Hopefully I don’t have to make the case about stopping prostitution being about as possible as stopping people taking drugs. The harder you crack down, the more it goes underground, the more dangerous it becomes for those involved, and the more money the criminals make from it.

Anyway, as I said, none of this would matter if Bindel were a random fanatic. But she isn’t, she has a lot of allies amongst “the Left” in the British political establishment, apparently up to and including government ministers. And that makes her a very, very dangerous person indeed.