For much of the past 10 years, transactivist organisations have been directing an immersive theatrical performance across the UK, with participation virtually mandatory. Women have been forced into supporting actress roles, propping up the leading lady fantasies of especially demanding and sometimes dangerous men. And the progressive establishment has mostly nodded along, clapping like seals. But yesterday the Supreme Court brought the final curtain down, rejecting the arguments of Scottish government ministers that possession of a certificate can change someone’s sex. Eschewing the amateur dramatics to which we have all become accustomed, judges went with a famous line of Scots poetry instead: a man’s a man for a’ that.
Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones.
Additionally, no matter what his personal confusion over identity, he does not get to count as a “lesbian”, and nor does he get to gatecrash designated lesbian-only social events or dating pools. (This last finding was of particular delight to me, since the organisation I co-direct with Julie Bindel, The Lesbian Project, was one of a number of “lesbian interveners” in the Supreme Court case.)
This judgement was a humiliating failure for certain members of the Scottish government past and present, not least the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The ministers’ position, that Equality Act protections for sex and sexual orientation pertained to “certificated” sex, rather than biological sex, was said by judges to exhibit “incoherence and absurdity” — a description which, to seasoned observers of SNP-related gender fiascos, seemed altogether too kind. But the result was also a wider defeat for the UK transactivist movement as a whole: the end of a campaign so catastrophically overreaching and self-owning that it has to be up there with Operation Barbarossa.
“This judgement was a humiliating failure for certain members of the Scottish government past and present, not least the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.”
Around 10 years ago, most organisations didn’t think twice about the relation between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, and were prepared to turn a blind eye to both men and women with GRCs using the facilities and services of the opposite sex. Given the small numbers of trans-identified people making use of this privilege, and the fact that many of these people exhibited medically-induced physical changes, the general public was none the wiser, and most wouldn’t have cared if they had been. But then transactivist organisations had the brilliant idea of pushing for a shiny new prize called “self-ID”. Any man with surging feelings of inner girlhood should count as a woman for all legal purposes, and vice versa for any woman in touch with her inner man. All of a sudden, there was supposedly no need for any certificate at all, and certainly no previous encounter with any doctor.
If one of the now-burgeoning numbers of trans-identified people did want a GRC, they should get one automatically, without professional oversight — or so a nationwide transactivist campaign, backed by every major political party, proclaimed. But even if they chose not to get a GRC at all, they still had the right to walk into whichever single-sex space or service they pleased, on the basis of however they felt that day. As a result of this piece of strategic brilliance, widely enacted on the advice of Stonewall by thousands of supine institutions, self-ID is now dead as a political project. What’s more, the complete irrelevance of GRCs in relation to single-sex protections has been legally established with maximum publicity.
Like a military historian reviewing the mistakes of wartime generals, we might ask: where did it all go wrong? One big problem was the abilities of the generals themselves. Under Ruth Hunt, Stonewall unilaterally embraced self-ID while still purporting to advocate for LGB people, ushering in what became known as its “no debate” era (as in: “Transwomen are women, no debate!”). In 2019, Hunt apparently gave the self-interested game away to the Guardian: “It’s about treating people as they want to be treated, and when it causes no disadvantage to me whatsoever, who am I to challenge it?”. Next at the helm was Nancy Kelley, perhaps best remembered for likening lesbians to “sexual racists” for their failure to feel attraction towards men professing womanhood, although there was a notorious Census-related balls-up too.
Meanwhile over at Mermaids, the nation’s foremost charity for transitioning children, then-boss Susie Green was busy falsely telling already anxious young people that Mermaids’ critics hated them and wanted them to die. On her watch, there was a series of scandals and tactical missteps, including a disastrous legal attempt to get the LGB Alliance’s charity status removed. This was immediately followed by an embarrassing Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids itself. Green is now reduced to co-directing an “online telehealth service” selling “gender affirming care” including puberty blockers; while her former close associate Dr Helen Webberley is on TikTok, making videos about the supposed ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of trans-identified people, using footage of Auschwitz as a backdrop.
Aside from these personnel issues at the top, another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.
The result of the first of these was fancy-sounding obfuscation about spectrums, social constructs, and the supposedly close relation between trans-identified and so-called intersex people. But this was only ever likely to work with the young or dull-witted, while cleverer minds watched and learned from the mistakes. Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.
At first, the ludicrous name-calling hurt quite a lot, particularly when it seemed those around you were in danger of believing the hype. But after endless mechanical repetition, the words start to bounce off. At that point, you have removed all the fuel from your opponents’ rhetorical flamethrowers, and no attempt to shame you in public is ever going to work again.
In other words: thanks to opponents’ heavy-handed tactics, an army of highly motivated and competent women emerged. These women could no longer be cowed or controlled by the fear of having their reputations destroyed. And even worse for their opponents, despite all the bullying, many proud inhabitants of Rainy Fascist Terf Island maintained an irreverent sense of humour, something nobody has ever said about British transactivists with a straight face.
After self-ID started to affect the Highgate Women’s Pond in 2018, an intrepid group known as “Man Friday” wore fake moustaches and beards to swim in the Men’s Pond. When David Lammy called us “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights”, activist Kellie-Jay Keen brought dinosaur costumes to protests. The passing of Scotland’s shameful Gender Recognition Reform Bill was met with horror from onlookers in the parliamentary chamber, but campaigner Elaine Miller defiantly highlighted its sponsors’ moral indecency by flashing a fake pubic wig. And while many hilarious placards and posters have been seen at protests over the years, my personal favourites were also Scottish ones: “No laddies in the ladies” and “Yer daw is not yer maw”.
So, while the other side most definitely had all the gender identities, our side had more tangible assets in the shape of brains, guts, and heart. Given the damage done by Sturgeon to the cause of women and girls north of the border, it is fitting that the biggest victory in the gender wars should belong to members of that esteemed company, the women who wouldn’t wheesht. In the former First Minister, we are given a perfect encapsulation of the tongue-clucking, eye-rolling, mostly performative feminist attitude favoured by women in the progressive establishment. But thanks to For Women Scotland and their many grassroots allies, we have been given the real thing.
