Last Wednesday the UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman was an adult human female. It was a unanimous decision that all people of common sense and decency welcomed.
It should not have taken a group of judges to state the obvious but we take the win when it comes. This win was hard fought. It is easy now to think that something so obvious, men cannot become women even by legal fiat, could ever be contested but it was.
I lived in the UK for a decade when the transgender agenda first exploded in the public. It was promoted by the media and became a very nasty debate. Anyone who dared say that men could not become women and invade women’s spaces based on their feelings or indeed a Gender Recognition Certificate were labelled ‘fascists.’
The BBC were pushing propaganda to trans the kids. Their drama Just a Girl glamourised the idea that you could change your sex and promoted the lie that suppressing the real transition – puberty – was perfectly normal and harmless. I spoke out against it on the Today programme here. This was one of countless media appearances I did in the UK on this topic, amongst others.
That was in 2015. For over ten years, then, I and women like me, including the immensely brave ladies of “For Women Scotland” and the invaluable weight of JK Rowling, were fighting this fight. It should never have taken a court to tell you what it did last Wednesday.
In that media outing, my opponent, the person defending the drama said there was nothing wrong with puberty blockers, which are now banned other than in clinical trials.
The usual weapons of choice by the trans activities, emotional blackmail and threats, were wielded with gusto. The rates of self harm, attempted suicide and suicide were much higher for LGBTQ children, we were told, which is why doctors have been “looking for solutions for children who present as transgender” such as hormone blockers. The message in this interview was clear – let the children trans or you will be complicit in their death. This ‘trans or dead’ narrative was pushed relentlessly in the UK. It was wicked and nasty.
And, as the court agreed last Wednesday, it was always based on a lie.
The Court ruled that the legal definition of the word ‘woman’ under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex – not acquired gender. In a unanimous judgment handed down by Lord Hodge, the court concluded that ‘sex is binary’ and that the protected characteristic of sex in equality law applies on the basis of biology, not identity.
The ruling ended a lengthy legal battle between the Scottish government and campaign group For Women Scotland. The group had challenged legislation that effectively included transgender women in quotas for public boards. The court held that the redefinition of the term ‘woman’ to include individuals born male but holding a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) by Scottish Ministers was unlawful.
But let’s not escape the real story: The connivance and conspiracy of the hopeless liberal establishment in pushing this lie onto women, and even more unforgivably, children. That is the real story because it is still happening here.
In the UK, the publicly funded national broadcaster, the BBC, was relentless in pushing the propaganda that transgenderism was the next great civil rights movement and not a clear attack on the rights of women everywhere. They ran a virtual carpet bombing campaign monstering feminists such as Germain Greer for their ‘outdated views’ that the rights of women were more important than the feelings of men.
The feminists were on the “wrong side of history,” that non – argument, argument. This interview by Kirsty Walk on Newsnight where she repeatedly accuses Greer of hurting the feelings of men who play at being women, was a low point.
Greer had been no-platformed by the nitwits at Cardiff University – standard operating procedure at the time.
Walk said to Greer, with a straight face, that she was being “hurtful” to post – operative trans men. Greer replied ‘people are hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.’ At one point Greer exacerbated by Walk’s inane questions, lost it saying ‘you try running with your saggy breasts down the middle of the fucking street – people will throw a blanket over you and grab you and call the police, for fuck sake.’ I felt sorry for Greer at the time but this is what you end up saying when arguing with morons.
The transgender extremists were not just aiming for the destruction of female spaces and sports however. No, what was also pernicious was the transing of the children. The Tavistock clinic were putting thousands of gender confused children on dangerous puberty blockers until the Cass report finally called for this to end.
The eminent biologist Lord Robert Winston had to remind viewers on the flagship BBC’s Question Time that ‘you cannot change your sex. Your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body. You have chromosomal sex, you have genetic sex, you have hormonal sex, you have all sorts of psychological brain sex, they’re all different’.
By then the tide was turning. But not before Kathleen Stock, an academic was hounded out of Sussex University and Maya Forstater was sacked from a think tank for her gender-critical views. There were plenty of other less high-profile men and women who lost their jobs over this. It was bitter. The Supreme Court decision restores sanity to public policy.
The ruling means organisations will have legal backing to protect single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, lavatories and women’s shelters and sports on the basis of biological sex. All organisations, including hospitals, prisons and businesses, will have to review their policies. Campaigners said organisations that allowed biological men into women’s spaces must immediately scrap the policies or face legal action.
The Times of London called the decision an ‘elementary truth.’ How did the Irish media cover it?
Well RTE, our national broadcaster, claimed that there was a ‘mixed reaction’ to the decision. Indeed, men who think they are women and therefore entitled to invade women’s spaces are not happy. The RTE Tweet proclaiming, “The Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) has said it is dismayed by the ruling in the UK, but encouraged by the fact that this narrative has not made its way to Ireland.” First, narrative should be in quotes and second it tells you all you need to know that recognition of biological sex as being the defining reality of the Equality Act, by a unanimous legal decision is dismissed as a ‘narrative.’
RTE have form in this area describing Trump’s reform of the military that expressing a “gender identity” different from an individual’s sex at birth did not meet military standards was taking aim at transgender troops. That phrase was no accident.
Another RTE classic was the headline: “Trump order seeks to ban transgender women and girls from female sports.” Conservative media more accurately reported that Trump signed an order protecting women and girl’s sports.
The ‘narrative’ being pushed by RTE, headlines by headline and programme by programme is the fiction that men can become women and the feelings of men trump the rights of women. This is all funded by Joe public licence fee payer.
Ireland is now an outlier when it comes to transgenderism. RTE again, “In July 2015 Irish citizens were given the right to change their legal gender based on self-identification alone, without medical or state intervention, making Ireland a global leader in trans-rights and one of just five countries in the world that has legislation based on self-determination.” This promoted the programme Mr Trans Life.
The UK never even had self-id and when the Scots attempted to introduce it, it was blocked in Westminster. Now not even a gender recognition certificate will give you access to women’s spaces. But in Ireland any man can self-identify as a woman. This makes a mockery of women’s rights. Indeed, Irish feminists have been much quieter on this issue than their UK sisters with the notable exception of The Countess and Laoise deBrun.
There is nothing progressive about attacking the rights of women, no matter what RTE might tell you.
You can read more from Laura at her substack.