It’s often said that debates on transgender issues are polarised and intolerant to a degree that helps no one. Last week, in a Westminster Hall debate on reform of the Gender Recognition Act, the Scottish National MP Mhairi Black showed how it could and should be done. At stake were the difficulties trans people have in getting their identities legally recognised. With this issue come the fears raised by those who oppose simplifying these processes, that dangers to women would arise as a result of people born with male bodies being able to enter lavatories, changing rooms and other single-sex spaces.
Black’s support for reform was clear. The current process, she said, “is deeply invasive, traumatising, unnecessary and dehumanising”, while arguing out that possession of a gender recognition certificate, the end point of it all, is actually irrelevant to access to single-space spaces.
“I am a woman,” she said, and “I don’t feel threatened. If anything, the thing that makes me feel most threatened is quite often the very aggressive and often male anonymous accounts that proclaim to be defending me from something.”
Trenchant though she was, she didn’t seek to diminish her opponents. “I don’t doubt that there are legitimate concerns,” she said, “but the answers are also out there.” Whether or not you agree, her words demanded that you engage with the substance of her arguments, not at the level of a Twitter spat.
Black first made the news in 2015, when she was elected to parliament at the age of 20. Now 27, she continues to show a degree of maturity beyond many of her elders.
Spaced out
St John’s House, a project billed as the UK’s “largest new home for over a hundred years”, has been proposed for a site near Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds. Its floor area of 6,692 square metres would, according to space standards set out by the mayor of London, be enough to make 111 two-bedroom flats. It is a vast cliff of masonry designed by the Winchester-based practice of Adam Architecture, an inverted quarry in a classical style. It is garnished, according to the official computerised images, with a landscape of pink-blossoming blobs, which is their primitive conception of trees.
The project is not quite Putinesque, in that the Russian dictator might want this much space just to store his ice-hockey gear, but it does go to show that an eyesore is an eyesore in any style, classical or modern. It also raises the question: why? What could any person who is not deranged want to do with all this volume? If you are that person, apply to Sotheby’s International Realty, which will happily sell you the site.
Bang on time
In 1997, flush with victory, Tony Blair’s government had a decision to make. Should they proceed with a Tory plan to commemorate the coming millennium with a large dome on the Greenwich peninsula in London? They did, rebranding it as a triumph of New Labour optimism, on one condition: the roof covering proposed for the structure, which had been decried by Greenpeace for its short life expectancy, would be replaced by one lasting 25 years.
Recently, Storm Eunice, like a toddler ripping at wrapping paper, shredded that same covering, on what is now called the O2. It’s not quite a quarter-century since the material was installed in 1998, but by the standards of promises about timing, in both politics and construction, you can only be impressed by the precision with which the one about its lifespan has been kept.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture correspondent
