Despite some major victories on TERF Island, gender ideology is far from defeated.
Around this time last year, I ended my spiked review-of-the-year piece with an optimistic flourish: ‘For the first time ever, I can say that 2025 will be the year the trans trend crashes.’ Twelve months on and I can’t decide whether I should feel smug or a total chump. To misquote the fox-bashing trans activist, Jolyon Maugham: ‘At a deeply technical level we won. At every substantive level we lost.’
At the start of the year, those of us pushing back against trans lunacy were still stuck in legal limbo. The UK Supreme Court was mulling over the case brought by the gender-critical campaign group, For Women Scotland (FWS), against the Scottish government. FWS argued that sex-based protections for women should only apply to those who are born female, whereas the Scottish government was promoting gender self-ID. At that point, few dared hope the Supreme Court might rule in favour of biological reality. It could have decided that women can have willies, thereby destroying every single-sex space and service going.
But finally, in April this year, the Supreme Court published its judgement. Five judges ruled unanimously in favour of the biological definition of sex in the Equality Act. When the Supreme Court ruling came out, campaigners who had spent years being vilified for challenging the divine right of trans thumbed anxiously through it, hunting for the inevitable catch. There wasn’t one, and a collective cheer rippled across TERF Island. It seemed as if we had won.
Suddenly, trans activists – long accustomed to having smoke blown up their arses by politicians, journalists and policy wonks – were confronted with something entirely new: the word ‘No’. No, biological males don’t have a legal right to be in female-only changing rooms. No, biological males aren’t allowed to sit in group therapy for women rape survivors.
Some trans activists got their pasty moobs out in protest, some paraded through London with fake coffins to symbolise the non-existent ‘trans genocide’, and some simply reverted to form by smashing windows and picketing women’s meetings. In the warm glow cast by the Supreme Court judgement, these tantrums were easy to dismiss as the trans movement’s death throes.
But then, just as we started to wonder whether the world might finally be righting itself, the trans blob changed tack and a new challenge emerged.
