Transgender

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

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, no longer believes that a trans woman is a woman, his official spokesman said at a lobby briefing. He was asked about this six days after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex in equalities law. The justices unanimously allowed an appeal by the campaign group For Women Scotland in a case against the Scottish government. Sex-based protections, notably in the Equality Act 2010, the court found, only apply to people who are born in that sex, not to those whose gender is reassigned. The court emphasised that transgender people still have protections against

Two months ago, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) upheld a complaint against The Spectator for referring to Juno Dawson, a transgender author, as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’. It may have struck some as unfathomable. I was less surprised. As I read the news, it took me back six years to when I was lead author of a report for Ipso, examining how the press treats trans-related issues. I have been a management consultant for more than 30 years so am used to being asked by institutions as varied as the BBC and the Football Association to help shape strategy. For Ipso’s project, it effectively asked

It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatised that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making – a patchwork of Harris/Walz ballot papers, maybe – but I know better than to make a light-hearted enquiry because this is not an ordinary quilt. It is a recovery quilt and part of the healing process. The most popular flavour of post-Trump soup seems to be spiced pumpkin Many unhappy Democrat women have announced that they

Would-be veep Tim Walz has opened Pandora’s box with his use of the W-word to characterise Donald Trump and his running mate (no sniggering at the back: this W is for ‘weird’). Because, let’s face it, a heck of a lot of politicians are way-out weird, aren’t they? It’s practically part of the job description. If we start calling them all out on it, the currency’s going to devalue fast. My thesaurus devotes nearly half a page to synonyms for weird. ‘Freaky. Wacko. Odd. Eccentric. Crazy. Off the wall. Out to lunch…’ Well, sure, that’s pretty much Trump to a T. He is uniquely odd, but those adjectives neatly summarise

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that you can’t change your biological sex, and that the whole notion that some humans are born in the wrong body is not only daft, but catastrophic for our culture and our children. It could soon be a criminal act to try to talk a gay boy out of castrating himself It’s been a half-decade since

The state of our defence Sir: Your article on the etiolated state of European, including Britain’s, defence, is spot on (‘The price of peace’, 27 April). Rishi Sunak’s belated conversion to increasing defence expenditure is welcome but is, frankly, too little, too late. What it most definitively does not do is place the UK on a ‘war-footing’. By contrast, Russia is already in that state. It spends between 6 and 8 per cent of its GDP on defence. It has established strategic alliances with China, Iran and North Korea, and now much of West Africa too. We need a severe dose of realism. To begin, we must stop pretending that Ukraine

The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book groups where someone would insist, ‘We really must do Dostoevsky this year.’ Members of the JCBC, in a co-founder’s words, just wanted to get together to ‘drink champagne and shriek about Jilly’. ‘Book clubs are basically Mean Girls for middle-class women’ For some time, I stalked key members on Twitter before managing to wangle an invitation. My first meeting was at a large townhouse in Clapham to discuss Rivals. There was a lot of champagne and a gaggle of smart, entertaining women. One was wearing a Vivienne Westwood corset dress;

Question time Sir: Your leading article ‘Sense prevails’ (13 April) is a valuable précis of the Cass Review into NHS gender treatment. However, it also raises several questions. How are the actions of these individuals, groups and organisations different from those of others who have been found to have acted unprofessionally, causing harm to patients who were entitled to place trust for their health in them? Where was the ethical and executive management oversight within the NHS? What other unproven ‘treatments’ are being carried out under the ever-growing demands for more money to be allocated to the NHS? Finally, what sanctions are to be meted out – or will we

Anyone still talking about ‘two sides in the transgender debate’ needs to look at the footage from Bristol yesterday. Actually, there was no debate. What happened was one group of people (mainly men) intimidating a second group of people (mainly women). The video is terrifying. If you couldn’t catch what was said through their masks, here is my transcript: Go, get in the sea. Die out. You’re dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Fossils. You’re going to die out (x5). You are ancient history. You are fossils. You are dinosaurs. You have failed (x2). Your ideas have failed. Get in the sea. Get in the sea like Colston. Go home. Get in the sea. The