Mick Hartley

Janice Turner struggles not to be triumphalist over the Supreme Court decision. Still, she can't quite forget the pusillanimous many who embraced trans dogma when it seemed like the fashionable cause, despite its manifest absurdities. And she's kept the receipts.

So yes, we will move on. Gladly! But before the memory hole sucks away a time of collective madness, when lesbians had penises, rapists were banged up in women’s jails, disabled women were bigots for wanting same-sex intimate care, when we were expected to applaud men who stole our sports and welcome bearded dudes “expanding the bandwidth of womanhood” into our changing rooms, let’s set the record straight.

First, the cowards. After the Supreme Court ruled that “sex” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 were biological terms, up pops Harriet Harman, architect of that very law to say, of course, that’s what she always meant. Well, Harriet, why didn’t you say so before, when Stonewall, having failed to rewrite the law, tried to change the meaning of words? But I suppose you risked being branded a “Terf”. Best wait until the dust settles, and you’re safely Baroness Harman of Peckham, chair of the Fawcett Society, that meltiest chocolate teapot.

Yes, Yvette Cooper, I recall your frozen terror when I suggested, years ago, you make public your concerns about child medical transition. Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy, we can’t forget — whatever you say now — that in 2020 you signed a 12-point pledge promising to boot out Labour members who believed sex is real. As for the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sanwar, who has “always” supported single-sex spaces, you whipped your party to support self-ID in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have erased every one.

Then there are the pontificating men who, never listening much to women, naturally sympathised with the male-born and relished our witch trials. Men who had nothing — nothing! — to lose yet never once tried to understand our plight. Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, David Lammy, James O’Brien, Billy Bragg, David Tennant, John Oliver, or those who, watching the Paris Olympics, thought a male boxer punching women was less hurtful than calling him a man.

It was always about male feelings. Women had to keep quiet, be kind, and make way for the men. That it was billed as a progressive movement, the next step on the great liberation march, was always a matter of grim irony.

Women aren’t expecting apologies, though many are deserved, or gratitude for saving basic rights for our granddaughters. Yes, we’ll be kind — we always were — but, cheers! We won — deal with it.