Mick Hartley

The Labour government say they’re right behind the Supreme Court ruling on single sex spaces – that “women” means real actual biological women, not men-who-say-they’re-women – but they don’t seem to mean it. At this latest Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project case at the High Court, where the obsessive trans champion is attempting to overturn the legality of the interim guidelines issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and show it’s all transphobic and horrible and mean, the government seems to be back-tracking. Tom Harris in the Telegraph:

Until yesterday’s proceedings at the High Court in London, we all assumed that ministers were wholly on board with the Supreme Court’s ruling. The Equality Act is, after all, the law of the land. It has been in force since 2010, even if its provisions were not fully understood or followed until the Supreme Court’s intervention. And, as Rebecca Paul has pointed out, not even then. But ministers have no choice but to respect and implement the law as it stands, or seek to change the law through primary legislation.

So why is Phillipson’s legal representative now advancing a wholly unnecessary and impractical practice of a “case-by-case” assessment of which men get to use women’s toilets? The Supreme Court says that if even one “trans woman” uses such a facility, it is then no longer a single-sex space. Is that what the Government wants? The answer seems to be yes.…

Clearly Zoe Leventhal KC is representing Phillipson’s view accurately; that, after all, is her job. So when was the minister going to tell the country that she no longer believes that the “clarity” provided by the Supreme Court on single-sex spaces was clear enough? And will she explain how, in practical terms, the “case-by-case” process she now advocates will be practically implemented to allow certain men who identify as women to use public toilets? Who makes that assessment? Who enforces it?

Phillipson was right back in April when she welcomed the Supreme Court’s “clarity”. To maintain women’s safety and privacy, all men, however they identify, must refrain from using women’s facilities. That is clear, it is simple and it is easily explained. But now the ironically-titled women and equalities minister has muddied the waters in an entirely unnecessary and damaging way. And as always, it is women, not men, who risk paying the price in lost security and lost privacy.

The answer to the riddle, surely, is that Phillipson didn’t mean what she said about welcoming the clarity of the Supreme Court judgement: that in fact she doesn’t welcome it at all – either through conviction or, more likely, because she doesn’t want to upset the Labour backbenchers who still believe in the gender nonsense.

This looks very much like political cowardice.