Mick Hartley

Good news – though it was expected. Liz Truss, Minister for Women and Equalities, has confirmed to Parliament that the Government will not amend the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow people to change their legal gender without the approval of doctors and officials. So 'self-ID', which Theresa May had effectively promised as a GRA reform, will not happen. Men can't just say they're women and access women-only safe spaces or get sent to women's prisons.

Woman's Place UK

Three years ago today, we formed Woman’s Place UK with the specific aim of supporting women to respond to the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) and to ensure that single sex exemptions were upheld. Despite the fact that this was a public consultation, and the government said it particularly wanted to hear from women with concerns, our views have been dismissed and derided from across the political spectrum.

Over the last three years, many other women (and some men) as well as several other organisations have joined the campaign. That the government has been forced to listen is down to the work of thousands of women speaking up and making themselves heard in the face of threat and intimidation.

Our demands have always been reasonable and yet were dismissed as bigotry. We have always supported the rights of trans people to live their lives free from discrimination and harassment. We also understood that a conflict of rights would need to be addressed.

Today the Government’s announcement is broadly in line with what we were calling for…

James Kirkup has some thoughts:

This decision is a significant reversal in government thinking. In 2017, when the May government announced a consultation on GRA reform, a system of self-ID was effectively the default option. Most politicians paid no attention to the detail, instead outsourcing their judgement on a complex and seemingly obscure issue to officials who were often very (too?) close to highly-effective professional advocacy groups such as Stonewall, which has led the push for self-ID.

Today’s announcement is a product of remarkable grassroots political organisation. Even though a great many politicians privately came to see the flaws and risks of the self-ID proposal, very few of them engaged with this topic publicly. The real political opposition to self-ID came from 'ordinary' women who saw the proposal as a potential threat to their legal rights and standing. Some of them came to the issue via Mumsnet . Others attended townhall meetings of A Woman’s Place UK, a group set up by women with their roots in the trade union movement.

This grassroots movement deserves a lot of attention and study. It shows how, even when politicians aren’t doing their job properly and listening to all sides, people with determination and organisation can make themselves heard. They can also go head-to-head with the professional advocacy groups. In the consultation on GRA reform, there were around 102,000 responses. 39 per cent of them came from an online form set up by Stonewall, a professional and well-funded charity. But 18 per cent came via Fair Play for Women, a feminist group opposed to self-ID which has almost no formal resources and largely rests on the tireless work of one woman, Dr Nicola Williams. This was a fight between big organisations and small groups of women. And the women won.

As Kirkup goes on to say, the government is not making a big deal of this. It doesn't want to set off a round of public gender wars – for the moment. The Labour position is different, with some prominent Labour politicians being vocal advocates of self-ID. This could prove another tricky test for Keir Starmer, just as he's trying to regain the trust and support of Labour's traditional "red wall" voters.