Days before the election, Sir Keir Starmer declared to The Times that “biological women” had the right to single-sex spaces, separate from biological men. He had, he claimed, “always said” that women’s spaces needed to be protected. Women and gender-critical campaigners were hugely relieved. A party that for years had failed to recognise how women’s rights, privacy and safety were being eroded by the self-identification of men into their spaces had at last woken up to what women had been losing. Many of them voted accordingly, giving the party the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps Labour could be trusted with women’s interests after all.
The recent national and international experiment of letting people declare they are the opposite sex has been devastating for women. Allowing any man, no matter what his motivation, and with no need to lose his genitals or modify his body, to claim to be a woman has allowed sexual predators and voyeurs into women’s loos, changing rooms, hostels and refuges.
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The House of Lords heard in 2022 that a trans woman in a hospital had raped a fellow patient — but the hospital spent a year denying the attack had taken place, claiming the attacker was female. It’s events like these that have turned liberal women like me, once supporters of trans rights, into alarmed sceptics.
Trans women are ousting women from women’s professional prizes and awards. Male sportsmen who become trans women overnight are seizing titles, careers and sports scholarships from women, who cannot match the strength and speed that male bodies possess.
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Gatekeeping is impossible once it’s accepted that an innate sense of gender is all it takes to change sex. Trans women are forcing their way into lesbian events, shutting them down if refused. In a key case in Australia, a lesbian dating app is being sued for excluding a male.
Some trans women are posting gleeful videos of themselves masturbating in women’s loos, or in women’s changing rooms soiling the shop’s knickers before putting them back — and boasting of how they can’t be stopped. These postings are stomach-churning — but this is why woman are so frightened about what has been unleashed by allowing men effectively free access to women’s spaces.
In Britain, after a fightback led by brave women like Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, JK Rowling and The Times’s Janice Turner, the Tory government began at last to recognise the damage and danger to women and started to roll a little of the gender revolution back.
It belatedly recognised that the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act together had created an almighty legal muddle so that organisations didn’t know, and sometimes didn’t care, whether single-sex protections referred to biological, legal or self-identified sex. The Conservatives promised clarification. Sex would mean biology. It was in response to the Tory position that Starmer committed himself.
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Two weeks later, confidence in that commitment has been shaken. Starmer has made key appointments that look startlingly at odds with his promise. The women and equalities minister, Anneliese Dodds, wants to make the process for officially changing sex faster and simpler, with the support of just one sympathetic doctor.
The new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, responsible for what children will be taught about gender, sexuality and whether people can change their biological sex, has previously said men can use women’s loos as long as they have legally become women — a process her government intends to make easier.
Lisa Nandy, the woman now running arts and culture policy, is another cabinet supporter of the gender faith. Trans women are women, she said in 2020, and yes, she affirmed, that meant rapists should self-identify into women’s jails if they chose.
The ideological slant may be about to become even worse. Harriet Harman is in line to chair the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the body that protects everyone’s interests. Harman is so committed to gender ideology she refuses to see a conflict between trans and women’s rights.
Last month she claimed, alarmingly, to be “baffled” by women who felt abandoned. She is wilfully blind to the evidence of how trans rights have eroded women’s security and opportunity. If men can be women, women no longer exist as an identifiable group. All women’s spaces and categories become, de facto, mixed-sex.
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The fundamental truth of the trans rights experiment is that it is not, as its champions claim, only about “protecting a vulnerable minority”. Two very different trends are happening under the trans umbrella. Among teenagers, as the Cass report said, the majority of transitioners are indeed vulnerable: most are same-sex-attracted girls. Many are trying to escape society’s sexual objectification of them.
Longitudinal studies cited by Cass indicate that, left alone, the majority desist and most grow up as gay. Telling them they can solve their problems by changing sex is a cruelty, not a liberation.
Among adults, most are grown men, some genuinely dysphoric. Some claiming to be trans are opportunistic predators. Forcing females to be unwilling subservient supporters of a small group of males is a cruelty to women.
What trans rights mean in practice is male dominance. The record of the past decade demonstrates that. Men rarely lose out when women identify as men. They aren’t being assaulted or intimidated by trans men, or losing their places on football or athletics teams to them, or seeing biological women take their promotions or professional awards.
The fear and displacement go only one way. Men can use their power, socially, physically and psychologically, to identify as women and seize their positions. Women, it turns out, cannot identify their way into male power. Trans rights, whatever their virtuous intention, are largely entrenching and enhancing the millennia-old greater rights of men. That is what dismays or disturbs many women.
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This is an early test of Starmer’s credibility. He has no excuse for ignoring the evidence; it is his first big test in office. He promised to protect women’s rights but his activists are pushing to extend trans privileges instead.
The country doesn’t want it; support for the trans right to misrepresent reality has been falling sharply. In 2019, 53 per cent of Britons thought trans people should be allowed to change sex on their birth certificates; by 2022 only 30 per cent did. Trans people should live as they please but not at the cost of women’s identity and security.
Will Starmer wobble, fudge and sell women down the river, or will he take command of his party and prove that he is a man of his word?
