Mick Hartley

Me the other day, on toilets and single-sex spaces:

It should all be quite straightforward – no men in women’s spaces, and particularly no men in women’s toilets. Trans women – transified men – should use the Gents. If they insist on wearing short skirts and high hells, in a pornified caricature of a woman, well – men have to be kind now, just like women have been instructed to be kind for the past decade or so. It’s their fetish – so live with it.

If a man has genuinely transified – and no, I’m not sure what that means exactly, but there are rare cases – then I doubt any woman is going to be too horrified to see them in the Ladies. See how it goes. 

Today, Janice Turner in the Times:

A decade ago I interviewed a trans woman for a magazine. Hers was a story of lifelong dysphoria, alleviated only by total medical transition. I liked this gentle, low-key person whose sole desire was to go about her business. Did she “pass” as female? A matter of opinion. But she tried her best and I bet women who clocked her in the ladies’ back in those ambiguous, unpolarised times understood.

We met again at a party in 2017, when Theresa May had just declared she would implement Stonewall’s policy of self-ID. Feminists were growing troubled: you mean literally any bloke who says he’s a woman “is” one, and can walk right into our showers? “Self-ID,” I said that night, “is going to be terrible for people like you.”

And so it came to pass. Stonewall corralled people like her under a “trans umbrella”, along with bearded “gender-fluid” fellas and heterosexual men who get aroused by cross-dressing. It campaigned under slogans — “Acceptance without exception”, “I am who I say I am” and “No debate” — then rained fury on everyone who raised concerns.

For eight years, women offered compromises like “third spaces” or open sports categories. No dice. Just total intransigence. So women had to engage in hand-to-hand combat all the way to the Supreme Court, which in April delivered its unanimous ruling that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biology. Therefore single-sex female provisions must exclude all men, meaning trans women, too. It is a stone-cold judgment, with no ambiguity or wriggle room. And that is entirely Stonewall’s fault.

So why the government delay now in publishing the EHRC guidance?

The government’s position is — surprise! — incoherent. This week the prime minister said the Supreme Court judgment must be applied “in full”, while over in the High Court an equalities ministry lawyer repudiated it, supporting a challenge to the EHRC code by the Good Law Project. Phillipson says the code first needs an impact assessment, which could take a year. Why? This is existing, fully tested law. And I’ll tell you what was never impact-assessed: putting rapists in women’s jails.

Phillipson claims it’s complicated — it isn’t — or that businesses are confused: 50 small outlets, including Etsy traders, complained to business secretary Peter Kyle, while major firms crack on with applying the judgment. The truth is that Phillipson, whose known views are “soft gender-critical”, is a sheep not a goat: she is terrified of confronting Labour trans-activist MPs.

In summary:

A decade ago, when the lines in the gender wars were blurry, trans women knew they were biological males dependent on the goodwill of women. But Stonewall bulldozed that delicate ecosystem. It demanded women hand over every service or sport they’d fought for, that we suppress our instincts and fears. Perhaps trans women, like the one I interviewed back then, can still live within the ambiguities. But not until women are back in charge of the rules.

In the old days, “be nice” was a compromise that (some) women were prepared to make when confronted with a transified man in the Ladies. After Stonewall the door was open for all manner of chancers and AGP types, getting off on their fetish. No debate, they said. Whoever says he’s a woman is a woman. So now those “be nice” days are over.