IT’S NEARLY FIVE YEARS SINCE I MET MAYA Forstater. a researcher on international tax policy. She had just filed an employment claim against the Centre for Global Development, the think tank where she had been doing research on the link between tax policy and economic growth, for discriminating against her for expressing “gender-critical” beliefs — that is, that sex is binary, immutable and important.
We had both become concerned by the government’s plans to introduce gender self-identification: she because sex is one of the most meaningful variables in development economics; I because I’d been asked to write about self-ID and the more I looked, the crazier it seemed.
Afterwards, Maya sent me the draft of an article she was writing. Re-reading my reply, I cringe. I was already in a new world where lunatic invention was social justice and
