April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation.
Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity.
The semantic contortions have already begun. India Willoughby, a biological male who has fathered a child, has tweeted: ‘UK Supreme Court rules butterflies are biological caterpillars and frogs are biological tadpoles. It means butterflies can no longer fly – and frogs are banned from sitting on leaves. Butterflies and frogs say they will ignore the ruling.’ If you can’t make any sense of this point, join the club.
Then there’s Dr Helen Webberley, founder of GenderGP, a ‘clinic’ that is registered in Singapore in an attempt to circumvent UK laws about prescribing children puberty blockers and hormones. She recently told GB News that while the Supreme Court has confirmed ‘the literal interpretation of the Equality Act is that “woman” is biological sex… they haven’t said what biological sex is’. Activists almost succeeded in redefining ‘woman’. Now they have lost that fight, on they move to the definition of ‘biological’.
Predictably, a legal counteroffensive is already under way. The tax-barrister-turned-Twitter-pugilist Jolyon Maugham KC, best known for killing a fox while wearing a kimono, is raising funds to ‘stop the UK’s attack on trans people’. The plan? To argue that the Supreme Court’s ruling violates the Human Rights Act and demand a declaration of incompatibility, because apparently the right to a private life includes the right to access single-sex spaces reserved for the opposite sex. Who knew? It’s hard to say who might win this case. On one hand we have five Supreme Court justices in unanimous agreement. On the other we have Maugham’s Good Law Project; since 2017 its crowdfunded cases have had a success rate of roughly 10 per cent.
On the night of the judgment, Maugham declared his astonishment on the progressive social media platform Bluesky: ‘I’m genuinely stunned. I spoke to KCs at three leading sets of chambers with deep specialisations in equalities law. Each of them told me that For Women Scotland’s position was not even arguable.’ One has to ask from which chambers he is getting his legal advice. Not many ‘unarguable’ cases make it to the Supreme Court.
Should the Human Rights route fail, expect campaigners to become stealthier. Next we will see a flurry of judicial reviews and lobbying efforts. Their latest target is the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, currently in the ping-pong stage between the Lords and the Commons. Tucked within it are proposals to formalise new forms of digital ID. These could allow individuals to self-declare their sex and have that self-identification carry the same legal weight as a passport for some purposes. Self-ID, in short, by the back door.
After a Lords victory last week, Stonewall told its supporters that ‘the government agreed with us that attempts to use this bill to collect or share gender identity or gender history were both disproportionate and unhelpful. We’ve been working closely with parliamentarians and stakeholders to ensure the bill was not hijacked in this way’. This sort of battle will now take place over every piece of legislation.
Victory at the doors of the Supreme Court is not pyrrhic, but it is also not the end of the story. Since 2013, when the battle to legalise gay marriage was won, many organisations switched their attention to ‘trans rights’ at the expense of unfashionable women’s rights. They are well-funded and embedded within the civil service, charity sector and corporate HR complex. We’d be fools to expect the gender ideologues to down tools now.
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