In the Scottish Borders, Earlston Primary School’s newly built campus has no single-sex toilet provision. This astonishing planning decision was reportedly made after undertaking training by LGBT Youth Scotland. It was also based on the Scottish government’s similar guidance, which one can easily assume may well be based on the same advice, so eager have the SNP been to outsource their thinking on policy in this area to activist lobby groups they generously fund to then lobby them.
Yesterday, this illegality was brought to a halt, aided in no small part by the victory of For Women Scotland in the Supreme Court last Wednesday, which reconfirmed that the legal situation all along had been that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 means, well, sex. A week on from this, the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled on Wednesday that Scottish schools must provide single-sex toilets for students in a win for worried parents.
The latest ruling came about after parents Sean Stratford and Leigh Hurley raised a judicial review over the lack of single-sex provision at Earlston primary, which their young son attended. They first raised complaints with the school in 2023, only to be dismissed first by the headteacher, and then by the local authority, Scottish Borders Council (SBC). For Women Scotland claimed schools across Scotland had installed gender-neutral lavatories despite 1967 rules mandating that separate facilities must be provided. At the Edinburgh court, the council finally conceded that they had a legal obligation to provide separate male and female facilities – and Lady Ross KC, presiding over the judicial review, will now issue a court order to compel all schools in Scotland to provide single-sex toilet provision for pupils.
It is the first of many such judgements that will surely be sought to begin to overturn the slow destruction of the rights of many, mostly women – and particularly lesbian women – but also young people, gay people and disabled people’s right to same-sex intimate care, which have all been ripped apart under the auspices of ‘trans rights’ activism. Will jails be next? Daily calls are being made for the often violent male prisoners who continue to be housed in the female prison estate to similarly be moved back to where they should always have been in the male estate.
But healing the deep cultural schisms that have been caused by the divisive ideology that has led us here is another matter entirely. As seen by the protests against women’s rights in the weekend following the Supreme Court ruling, some trans rights activists insinuate they are intent on ignoring the judgment. And for all Sir Keir Starmer’s calls to ‘lower on the temperature’ on discussions about the trans issue, the discourse remains heated. I know I am not the only woman to have been treated to appalling online abuse from many – often otherwise nice people – this last week for celebrating what is a hard-fought for victory to secure women’s rights.
Healing the deep cultural schisms that have been caused by the divisive ideology that has led us here is another matter entirely.
Trans rights activists have experienced the emphatic loss of every single argument they’ve ever come up with to justify continuing to ride roughshod over women’s definition in life and in law. Some of the fury of that defeat, in what should be a moment of reflection on how badly wrong they have been, can be genuinely alarming. In some ways, such histrionics can be brushed off in light of the victory for common sense and women’s rights. The law is as it is, as it should be, and that is what matters. But the fact that the needs and rights of women and girls have been felt to be so contentious and confusing for people is going to take some time to heal from for the countless women whose lives have been upended for speaking and writing about this for over a decade.
Though the Earlston Primary case was focused on provision for primary age pupils, the universality of the judgment will now also help teenage girls. They are teenage girls across Scotland who have had adults telling them, or at least giving them the impression that, even while they’re dealing with puberty, even while they’re starting to learn first-hand about the misogyny outside of the classroom via catcalls and street harassment, they’re just going to have to suck it up in the one place they should surely be free of it: a school toilet.
Following the double-whammy victory for common sense this past week, schools should now be taking stock of the way these young people’s lives may have been damaged by such policies, unlawfully implemented at the behest of both the well-meaning, but also woefully misinformed. They should also assess how to address the moral confusion they have imparted on Scotland’s young people by insisting that such damaging policies were ever ‘kind’ in the first place.
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