Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd on How women won the gender wars:

For much of the past 10 years, transactivist organisations have been directing an immersive theatrical performance across the UK, with participation virtually mandatory. Women have been forced into supporting actress roles, propping up the leading lady fantasies of especially demanding and sometimes dangerous men. And the progressive establishment has mostly nodded along, clapping like seals. But yesterday the Supreme Court brought the final curtain down, rejecting the arguments of Scottish government ministers that possession of a certificate can change someone’s sex. Eschewing the amateur dramatics to which we have all become accustomed, judges went with a famous line of Scots poetry instead: a man’s a man for a’ that.

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones….

A particularly pleasing vindication for her, I imagine, after the abuse she suffered at Sussex University for her support for the idea that, yes, sex matters. She was right, of course.