"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"Transwomen are women" works well on Twitter, when you can mute or block everybody who disagrees or asks what that even means. Less so on TV, when someone's asking you questions you can't answer, a lesson Ed Davey had the opportunity to learn this morning live on the BBC.

Challenged by interviewer Andrew Marr to explain the decision to cast a woman out of the Liberal Democrat party for asserting that women are adult human females, Davey floundered: "Well, we absolutely believe in free speech but we also believe that we need to protect human rights and we believe in equality."

This is a curious talking point that keeps cropping up across the supposed left. Actually powerless people need—have always needed—free speech to advocate for their rights. When you think free speech will hurt your cause or must be weighed against “protect[ing] human rights” and “equality,” you might need to take another look at what you're advocating for.

Gender activists and political parties captured by gender ideology have a tendency to work backwards from their desired conclusion: transwomen are women, which translates to "we should stop acknowledging sex differences and treat some male people as though they were female in all settings."

This is a tricky position to defend because there are settings where sex really does matter. Why should we treat some males as though they were female when it comes to sports? Or rape-crisis centers? Or medical practice? Faced with such a challenge, the temptation to twist the facts and subordinate truth-seeking processes to support the desired conclusion becomes almost overwhelming.

So, if the desired outcome is males competing in women's sports, then those males can't have a competitive advantage or pose a risk to women's safety.

If activists want to remove gatekeeping around medical transition, then detransitioners' experiences are terribly inconvenient. Therefore, the finding must be that nobody or almost nobody detransitions. (Nothing to see here!)

If activists want male people to be treated as female people for any or all purposes, then they can't acknowledge there are any possibly relevant differences between male and female people—even if they sound totally bonkers.

And if someone is hounded or threatened for her speech, she must have said something horrible to deserve it, otherwise the hounds would be in the wrong. The crime and the punishment must match, working backwards from the severity of the punishment.

Because activists want kids to be able to transition at earlier and earlier ages, puberty blockers must be safe and reversible—no matter the evidence that puberty blockers may permanently stunt cognitive development and harm mental and physical health.

There’s a black-and-white thinking at work here that finds a world cast in shades of gray hard to live with. Ideology can tidy up these messy realities. But when black-and-white activists and politicians are forced to deal with the shades-of-gray world, absurdities abound. Activists may truly come to believe that fictions can better serve the cause than inconvenient facts. They tend to speak in an elevating language of “greater truths.” (Don’t look too closely, in other words…)

But ultimately this approach won't serve these causes well, both because dishonesty creates openings for political opponents with much more objectionable agendas than "recognizing that sex matters" and because reality will continue to matter, even if we don't want to look at it and forbid anybody to talk about it.

When it comes to preventing murders of trans people, understanding the factors that led to their deaths matters. The evidence suggests that that nebulous boogeyman ‘transphobia’ is less of a factor than poverty, male violence, and prostitution. So actually saving the lives of these trans people has little to do with policing women’s speech and erasing sex distinctions in the law and a lot to do with extending social supports to help trans people escape abusive relationships and exit prostitution. But while this assessment better fits the facts—and, if put into action, stands a much better chance of saving lives—it doesn't cleave to the chosen narrative. (Let the witch burnings continue!)

It would be wonderfully convenient if puberty blockers were safe and reversible. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Activists can cling to their preferred narratives, but kids will live out the consequences.

What's true, what's actually happening—however unfashionable or inconvenient it may be—will continue to matter. Or as Philip K Dick put it: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Activists, crusaders for 'gender medicine,' and political parties like the Lib Dems appear determined to learn this lesson the hard way. Their causes will suffer for it.