Trans ideology is at least good for one thing. It cleaves the thinkers from the stinkers, the brave ’uns from the craven, the right from the wrong. Bridget Phillipson, the UK’s women and equalities minister, has now helpfully removed any doubt as to which side she’s on. By obstructing guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) designed to help public bodies implement the UK Supreme Court ruling on the biological definition of sex, she has sided with the trans lunatics.
Yesterday, it emerged that Phillipson had lent her weight to a High Court case, brought by trans-activist lawyer Jolyon Maugham, challenging an interim version of the EHRC guidance. Maugham thinks the Supreme Court ruling violates the Human Rights Act, claiming that the right to a private life includes the right to access single-sex spaces reserved for the opposite sex.
The Supreme Court ruling certainly does restrict access to single-sex spaces. It states plainly that sex under the Equality Act refers to the material reality of being female or male. It determines how single-sex spaces function in a mixed-sex society, from women’s changing rooms to prisons. It justifies excluding men where doing so is necessary and proportionate.
This, unsurprisingly, has proven intolerable to the melodramatic teenagers of the trans-rights movement. And so Maugham’s Good Law Project is attempting to overturn the guidance on the grounds that it was ‘rushed, legally flawed and overly simplistic’. There is a grim, almost farcical symmetry to the timing. On the same day that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips vowed to tackle male violence against women and girls, her cabinet colleague, Phillipson, was quietly working to eradicate the very spaces and services that make female safety possible.
The job of the EHRC was straightforward: to translate the judgement into statutory guidance so that employers, schools, hospitals and local authorities could comply with the law without fear of litigation. That 300-page guidance was duly drafted and landed on Phillipson’s desk on 4 September, accompanied by a request to ‘act at speed’. Eight months after the Supreme Court ruling, and over three months since the guidance was passed to her, she has still not signed it. Why? Because Phillipson doesn’t like the answer the court gave about the law.
In her submission to the High Court as part of Maugham’s case, Phillipson dismissed the EHRC’s draft guidance as ‘trans exclusive’ and ‘discriminatory’. To make her argument, she reached not for logic but for anecdote. If women’s spaces are allowed to exclude men, she suggested, mothers would be barred from accompanying infant sons into changing rooms; pregnant women would be forbidden from slipping into men’s loos to beat a theatre queue; female therapists who work exclusively with women would be unable to make informal exceptions for male clients they already know.
This argument relies on the pretence that recognising sex as real somehow criminalises ordinary human discretion, as though a mother taking her infant son swimming is comparable to granting adult males access to women’s spaces as a matter of policy. It is a misdirection. As the eagle-eyed Wings Over Scotland blog points out, the EHRC itself addressed this in its Supreme Court intervention. It explicitly noted that it would be lawful for mothers to take boys up to the age of 10 into women’s changing rooms, precisely because young boys do not pose a threat.
The law is not there to police manners or queue management. It exists because some men are predators, and because women and girls need boundaries that do not evaporate on demand.
Whatever Phillipson may think, there are real victims of ‘trans inclusion’ policies. Take Katie (also known as Lennon) Dolatowski. A six-foot-five male who identifies as a woman, he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a supermarket lavatory. Later, after being released from a women’s prison for assaulting a fellow inmate at the young-offender institution where he was on remand, Dolatowski was housed in a women’s refuge. This is not an aberration; it is the grisly outcome of trans inclusion.
Phillipson’s claim that the Supreme Court ruling was really about maternity rights is equally disingenuous. The court was explicit: sex means biological sex. Everything else follows from that foundational fact. What Phillipson is objecting to is not legal uncertainty but legal clarity, because clarity forces choices, and choices upset her activist friends.
The consequences of this obstruction are already visible. In the absence of clear statutory guidance, hospitals, leisure centres, businesses and public institutions are paralysed. Men continue to use women’s changing rooms and toilets because managers are terrified of getting it wrong. Women are told, once again, to be kind, to be inclusive, to swallow their discomfort or fear for the greater good.
Phillipson insists she is merely ensuring the guidance is ‘legally watertight’. This is nonsense. The law has not changed; it has been authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court. The delay in publishing the guidance serves no legal purpose, though it may serve a political one.
A Supreme Court judgement is not a consultation exercise for activists who didn’t get the answer they wanted. It is the law. By stymying its implementation, Bridget Phillipson is institutionalising a lie that demands women and girls surrender their rights to appease angry trans activists. When the minister charged with protecting equality treats reality as negotiable, she makes clear whose interests truly count.
Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.
