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The Supreme Court spoke plainly. Sex in law means biological sex. Single-sex spaces exist to protect privacy, dignity, and safety. That ruling was unanimous, deliberate, and designed to end a decade of institutional confusion. It was not ambiguous. It did not invite reinterpretation. It settled the matter. And yet, months on, women are still waiting for the law to be applied. Not because Parliament has overturned it. Not because the judges were unclear. But because a Cabinet minister – Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Women and Equalities – has decided she does not like the outcome.
The task of turning judgments into practice falls to the state. That is why the Equality and Human Rights Commission drafted guidance spelling out what the ruling requires of hospitals, councils, gyms, schools and businesses. It did exactly what it exists to do: interpret the law as declared by the court and urge ministers to act at speed. Instead, the guidance has been sat on, stalled, and quietly attacked from within government.
While women wait, the minister responsible has gone further. In court filings, she has described the guidance as “trans-exclusive,” as though enforcing sex-based law were an act of discrimination rather than compliance. She has offered bad-faith hypotheticals about infant boys and pregnant women in queues to muddy a judgment that was written precisely to prevent such games. She has demanded extra process where none is required. And she has aligned herself with a legal challenge brought by the Good Law Project, whose purpose is not to clarify the ruling, but to blunt it.
The effect is not academic. Because the guidance is blocked, institutions do nothing. Hospitals continue to tell women to accept males in wards and changing rooms. Employers continue to discipline women who object. Public bodies continue to pretend the law is unsettled when it is not. The chaos the court sought to end is being prolonged by design. This is how rights are hollowed out in practice while being praised in principle.
The contradiction at the heart of government is now stark. Keir Starmer told Parliament the ruling must be implemented “in full and at all levels.” Yet his own minister is arguing, in court, for a “case-by-case” approach that would reintroduce the very incoherence the judges rejected. If a women’s toilet must admit a male based on appearance or attitude, it ceases to be a women’s space. There is no middle ground. There never was. The law does not bend because a minister finds it awkward.
What we are watching is not caution. It is sabotage by procedure. No vote. No Bill. No open argument in Parliament. Just delay, reframing, and obstruction until the ruling is drained of force. That is not how a democracy treats its highest court. It is how an executive evades it.
The irony is bitter. For years, women were told to be patient while clarity was sought. The court has now provided that clarity. And still they are told to wait – not for the law to be written, but for a minister to accept it. This is not about complexity. It is about will.
A government that accepts a judgment only in words, while resisting it in action, is not governing under the rule of law. It is testing how long it can get away with ignoring it. And the price of that test is being paid by women who were promised protection and are instead given process.
The court has done its job. The law is settled. What remains is a simple question of integrity. Will ministers carry out the law as it stands, or continue to stall until it means nothing at all?
“While women wait, the minister responsible has gone further. In court filings, she has described the guidance as “trans-exclusive,” as though enforcing sex-based law were an act of discrimination rather than compliance.”
Mick Hartley 
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