No man, whether it’s a 6’5” bloke called Dave or a genderfluid lad who’s taken estrogen, will be legally treated as a woman in the UK. I’m glad this ruling has been made, but I’m bemused – and kind of scared – that we needed it.
Why did we need a court of law to tell us what a woman is?
There was a time when every babbling toddler knew there were men and women and that they were different.
Even our Neanderthal forebears understood sex difference. They didn’t know much but they knew half the tribe was made up of grunting blokes who were good with spears, and the other half of females who might get pregnant.
Ever since our kind came down from the trees we’ve known we are sexually dimorphic – even if we didn’t use words like that for a few more million years.
And yet in 2025 we apparently need five judges to explain what a woman is.
Ours is an age of such dazzling tech that you can ask an app on your phone to explain the War of the Roses and traverse entire continents in mere hours.
And yet when it comes to that simplest of queries – “What is a woman?” – people erm and ahh and say: “I don’t know. Shall we defer to the courts?”
That has been my overriding emotion following the UK Supreme Court’s ruling this week that essentially says trans women are not women. I’m glad the ruling has been made but I’m bemused – and kind of scared – that we needed it.
The judges at the highest court in our land were asked to settle a long-running spat between the Scottish government and a band of brilliant troublemaking feminists called For Women Scotland.
Scotland’s arrogant ruling class, who’ve been drunk on wokeness for years, argued that the women’s rights outlined in the UK Equality Act extend to trans women, too.
If you have a gender recognition certificate saying you’re a woman, then you’re entitled to the sex-based protections provided in law, they said.
In layman’s terms, this meant that dudes who claim to be ladies could potentially waltz into any women-only space that took their fancy.
All these fellas would require is a piece of paper from the government and – boom – they could demand entry to women’s bathrooms, women’s refuges, women’s rape-crisis centres.
For those of us who think a government document no more makes a man a woman than Rachel Dolezal’s fake tan makes her black, it was an untenable situation.
It is a death blow to women’s freedom of association, to their hard-won rights of privacy and dignity, when males are given dominion in the spaces they’ve carved out for themselves.
And so women fought back. For Women Scotland is part of Britain’s burgeoning movement of freethinking feminists who flat-out reject the idea a man can become a woman. They locked horns with the Scottish government.
They argued that the protections promised to women in the Equality Act are for biological women only. Or what we used to just call “women”, for thousands of years, before the unhinged, post-truth left decided any Tom, Dick or Harry could become a woman simply by declaring himself to be one.
And they won. The judges came down on their side, hugely. The ruling says that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, woman means woman. The End. No man, regardless of how he identifies, is entitled to women’s rights.
“The concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man,” it says. And this means that legal protections for women “necessarily exclude men”.
It’s a stirring defence not only of women’s rights but of scientific truth itself.
The repercussions will be huge. And they’ll be good. Women’s bathrooms, sports, clinics and every other zone they want for themselves alone might soon be male-free.
No man, whether it’s a 6’5” bloke called Dave or a genderfluid lad who’s taken estrogen, will be legally treated as a woman. And that’s how it should be. It is not “transphobia” to exclude males from female spaces – it’s women’s rights.
Men who identify as women should wear whatever they like and call themselves whatever they please and be as free as everyone else to pursue happiness.
Indeed, the ruling makes it crystal clear that trans people must be protected from discrimination. No institution, it says, is permitted to mistreat a trans person. Quite right.
But – and it’s an essential but – trans women cannot go into women’s spaces. Just as I can’t.
If that makes them feel bad, then I’m sorry but that’s life. Women’s freedom matters more than men’s feelings. And we now have that written in law.
All the ruling does is restate what we knew for centuries. Sex is binary. Men are not women. This was common sense about 15 years ago. Now it’s “bigotry”.
We now have the extraordinary spectacle of newspaper front pages saying “Trans women are not women”.
Imagine trying to explain to your 2010 self that it would one day be breaking news that men are not women.
It is a testament to the lunacy of our times, to the wild contagion of woke nonsense, that the truth of sex can be emblazoned across the papers as if it were some new and shocking discovery.
For me, that’s the most telling thing about the Supreme Court ruling: it confirms how close Britain got to the cliff edge of moral derangement before these five judges pulled us back.
That we needed a court to remind us that sex is real and women don’t have penises tells us a bigger story about the march of unreason.
It reminds us how speedily mania can spread. For years now we’ve been ruled by politicians who chanted the slogan “Trans women are women” like a neo-religious mantra. And by leaders like Keir Starmer who insisted some women have penises. And by cultural influencers who damned women like JK Rowling as bigots simply for saying men are men.
Truth itself became tantamount to a crime under this woke tyranny. Dissent was demonised. Even stating scientific facts was a risky business. Women literally lost their jobs for the thoughtcrime of saying people with penises are male.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, dissenters are compelled upon pain of torture to say: “2+2=5”. In our world we were compelled upon pain of cancellation to say: “Men are women.”
And the consequences were dire. Rapists were put in women’s prisons in Scotland. Girls lost sporting medals to boys who identified as female. Women who dissented from the trans ideology were shamed online, threatened with violence, sacked.
“The sleep of reason produces monsters,” said Goya. Our sleep of reason certainly did that. It brought forth the monster of post-scientific delirium and the ruthless censure of anyone who dared to question it.
We now know what happens when the powerful uncritically imbibe fashionable nonsense and the powerless are prevented from speaking out – we end up in a world where unreason rules and it takes judges to jolt us back to reality.
That’s the lesson here: no good ever comes from conformism or censorship. As the “TERFs” say: “Let women speak.” If we’d done that sooner, we might not be in this mess.
Source: The Australian
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/why-did-we-need-a-court-of-law-to-tell-us-what-a-woman-is/news-story/68485464102238101e5b5adc6a2421c1?amp&nk=277a487b39c274b2de44a57536f7d322-1745140076