Trans insanity lives on, despite the Supreme Court ruling

I was in the courtroom when the UK Supreme Court judgment on gender was handed down a year ago today. It felt like witnessing a pivotal moment in history.

After years of politicians, institutions and a vocal minority of the public insisting we go along with the pretence that men could be women, the judges stated something that should never have been in doubt: that in equality law, the term ‘sex’ means biological sex.

Like many people, I assumed that the ruling would settle things – that people would stop pretending not to know what a woman is, and that sanity would return to public life. I imagined the NHS would quietly drop its talk of ‘chest feeding’ and ‘cervix havers’, and that women could object to the intrusion of a bearded man in a dress into their changing room without fear of being labelled a bigot. Having lost my own livelihood for taking issue with the phrase ‘pregnant people’, I also hoped the ruling might mark the end of language policing. Soon, I thought, we’d all be laughing about those absurd times when ‘misgendering’ could get you into trouble at work. Families and friends might even stop falling out over whether humans can or cannot change sex. When some of my own relationships had fractured due to my gender-critical views, it had been a painful affair.

But I was naive. A year on, very little seems to have changed. Britain might have achieved legal clarity on sex, but what it doesn’t yet have is the will to enforce it.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been a few positive developments: puberty blockers have been restricted. The International Olympic Committee has moved to protect female sporting categories. Further to that, a number of high-profile women’s rights violations have cut through. The stories of Sandie Peggie and the Darlington Nurses, who were forced to take legal action over a man using their workplace changing rooms, have appeared in the press and on TV. The experience of nurse Jennifer Melle, who was suspended for ‘misgendering’ a male patient (a convicted paedophile who had racially abused her, no less), went viral. But the pattern has been depressingly similar in every case: the women who raise concerns are routinely accused of being unkind, exclusionary and treated as the problem. All in an era when we’re told we ought to ‘believe women’.

I was reminded of how little the ruling actually registered on a freezing January morning, when I covered a protest outside a gym in Southwark. A woman had been banned from the premises for raising complaints about a man in the women’s changing room. A counter-protest of masked trans activists was present, who shouted and swore at us female journalists for having the audacity to cover the event.

Even some apparent victories have not felt as such. When Girlguiding and the Women’s Institute announced last December, just one day apart, that they would no longer accept males into their ranks, it seemed like progress. But having covered what happened next for the Telegraph, it soon became clear that both organisations were more focussed on managing their own public image than in implementing the ruling – or protecting the girls and women they exist to serve.

Astonishingly, Girlguiding set up a 500-strong ‘taskforce’ to support the biological men and boys who were no longer able to take part. At the same time, dissatisfied activists within its own ranks have created a splinter group, Guiders Against Trans Exclusion (GATE), and have encouraged children to attend its protests. Several such protests took place across the UK at the weekend, with photos emerging of very young children holding political placards and chalking ‘Trans girls are girls’ on pavements.

The Women’s Institute is not much different. It continues to push ‘sisterhood’ groups – open to biological men as well as women – while CEO Melissa Green openly insists that ‘transwomen are women’. This position, of course, sits rather awkwardly with the organisation’s own constitution.

But what exactly is holding these institutions back from implementing what is now the law? Officially, it’s a lack of guidance. The long-awaited update from the Equality and Human Rights Commission has left organisations in a convenient holding pattern. Though the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, is on record saying the government intends to uphold the Supreme Court ruling (including that organisations need not wait for the updated guidance to do so), many continue to take their sweet time.

It seems that admitting gender ideology went too far is profoundly difficult for those who played along. More than just a policy shift, this is a reckoning. It will mean acknowledging ideas once presented as ‘progressive’ now seem confused at best, and deeply harmful at worst.

For individuals – parents, friends, family – it means holding their hands up and saying they got it wrong. For institutions, the road will be far more difficult. Hence the stalemate we now find ourselves in. While we may have legal clarity on the surface, denial still pervades everywhere else.

Janet Murray is a journalist writing on women, culture and public policy. Follow her on X: @jan_murray.