I don’t usually write in the first person like this. But some arguments are better made from inside the experience than at a careful analytical distance. This is one of them.

There’s a phrase that’s been circulating in certain corners of British public life for a few years now. You’ll have heard it. Gender ideology. Sometimes trans ideology. It gets deployed with a specific kind of confidence: the confidence of someone who believes they are simply describing reality, neutrally, accurately, from nowhere in particular.

I am, apparently, an ideology.

I’ve tried to sit with that rather than immediately reaching for the rebuttal. To actually feel what it means to be told that your sense of self (the thing you have lived with, quietly and not always easily, for your entire life) is a belief system. A set of propositions. Something that can be adopted, spread, and ideally resisted. It’s a strange kind of alienation. Not painful in the sharp way that overt hostility is. More like being told that the room you’re standing in doesn’t exist.

But I’m a policy person as well as a trans person, and I can’t leave it at the feeling. Because the feeling is pointing at something real: a genuine category error that matters beyond the personal offence it causes.

An ideology is a systematic set of beliefs about how society should be organised: about who should have power, what values should govern public life, and what kind of world we should be building. It makes prescriptive claims. It tells you what ought to be true, not just what is true about someone’s experience. Ideologies have premises and conclusions. They identify threats. They generate political programmes. Liberalism is an ideology. Conservatism is an ideology. Socialism is an ideology. They are contestable positions in a debate about collective life. Keep that definition in mind, because we are going to apply it to a couple of things.

Do trans people share a political programme? No. What do we share? A characteristic (gender identity that diverges from birth-assigned sex) and a fairly basic desire to live freely with legal recognition of that identity. Wanting not to be discriminated against is not an ideology. It’s a rights claim. Wanting to exist in public without being told you don’t exist is not an ideology. It’s a precondition for ordinary life.

It’s worth being honest about a distinction here. Trans people existing is not an ideology. But the debates about how law and institutions should respond to that existence, on self-identification, on healthcare, on single-sex spaces, those are policy debates involving competing values and contestable claims. Every policy proposal made in our name should be scrutinised like any other. What I’m objecting to is something more fundamental: the move that treats the existence itself as the ideological imposition, before a single policy question has even been raised.

This should sound familiar. The same accusation has been levelled at other groups throughout history. There was a homosexual agenda. There was a feminist ideology. And here’s the thing: those accusations weren’t entirely without foundation, in a narrow sense. Second-wave feminism made systematic claims about patriarchy and power. Gay liberation explicitly challenged sexual norms and the institution of the family. These movements did contain ideological strands. But that didn’t delegitimise the rights at their core. The ideological content was the framework built around the rights claim, not the claim itself.

I want to be scrupulously fair about what follows, and I’d invite anyone reading this to check I’m being so. Gender critical thinking has premises: that sex is binary, biological, and fixed; that gender identity is a social construct; that recognition of trans people’s identities threatens the coherent category of woman. From those premises, it derives conclusions: that trans women are men, that single-sex spaces should exclude trans women, that the Gender Recognition Act should be reformed or repealed, and that gender-affirming healthcare should be severely restricted. It has a perceived in-group, a perceived out-group, an identified existential threat, and a political programme actively pursued through litigation, parliamentary lobbying, and international coordination with similar movements abroad.

I am not saying this to be unkind. I am applying the definition we established. Gender critical thinking is, by that definition, an ideology. The problem is not that gender critical thinkers have one. The problem is the asymmetry: the way their framework gets presented as simply reality, simply biology, simply common sense, while trans existence gets framed as the ideological imposition.

That asymmetry is not accidental. It is one of the oldest moves in the ideological playbook: naturalising your own framework while pathologising everyone else’s. The neutral ground in this debate is not neutral. It is already occupied by assumptions about sex and gender embedded in law, culture, and institutions for centuries. Trans rights advocates are not imposing a new ideological settlement. They are challenging an existing one, which has always had costs for people like me.

Familiarity is not neutrality. Common sense is not the absence of a worldview. It is usually just a worldview that has won.

I am not an ideology. I am a person. And at least let’s be clear about who’s got the belief system here.

EDITORIAL NOTE: readers are advised that all comments on this piece will be moderated. I so wish that it wasn’t necessary…

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.