Mick Hartley

“The campaign to reduce the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC Code to a debate about lavatories is not confusion. It is strategy. Behind the toilet door lies the systematic dismantling of women’s rights, funded, organised and prosecuted against women who should have been defended years ago.” Paul Knaggs at Labour Heartlands.

The toilet is not the argument. The toilet is the frame.

It has been chosen with great care, because it achieves three things at once. It makes women’s objections appear mean, petty, almost obsessive. It reduces a broad legal settlement about women’s fundamental rights to a single, intimate, emotionally charged doorway. And it places women permanently on the defensive, forever justifying the existence of the boundary rather than those demanding its removal. The question is always “why are you so obsessed with where people go to the toilet?”, never “why is your campaign not about building new facilities for transgender use, but specifically about access to women’s existing ones?”

That last question answers itself.

Yes, trans people’s rights matter. But this isn’t a question of rights.

But rights are not the same thing as demands. And the demand that half the population, fifty-one per cent of the people in this country, surrender sex-based protections won through generations of organised political struggle, is not a rights claim. It is a power claim. It is the assertion that the rights of one in two hundred must take legal and moral precedence over the rights of one in two, and that any woman who objects is not exercising her own right but committing a prejudice.

Anyone who will not submit to that ideology, man or woman, is branded a bigot, a transphobe, a hater. The accusation is the weapon. And like all weapons discharged without discrimination, it has destroyed its own utility: words that once carried genuine moral weight, attached to genuine hatred of genuine people, have been debased into instruments of political enforcement and fired at nurses, mothers, lesbians, gay men, scientists and any person, of either sex, who are attacked with malice for the sole offence of stating material reality.

A movement that commands this volume of institutional deference, generates this degree of political pressure, and extracts this level of ideological compliance from political parties, trade unions and public bodies, does not look like a vulnerable minority fighting for its survival. It looks like a well-funded political operation that has mastered the language of vulnerability while wielding considerable institutional power.

On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers. Note that word. Unanimous. Not a narrow majority. Not a contested finding. Every justice on the bench reached the same conclusion.

The ruling was not a revolution in law. It was a clarification of what the Equality Act 2010 had always meant. The terms “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Act refer to biological sex. Pregnancy protections. Maternity provisions. Single-sex services. Communal accommodation. Competitive sport. The Act is a coherent whole. It cannot function coherently if its central terms shift meaning depending on context. The Court saw this clearly and said so plainly.

The judgment also confirmed, and this is the part the campaign has worked hardest to obscure, that trans people retain full legal protection from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. The ruling did not strip anyone of rights. It confirmed that women’s rights and trans rights are both protected in law, and that the former cannot be rendered meaningless by the latter.

That is an intolerable outcome for a campaign that requires the category “woman” to remain infinitely expandable. So the campaign does what any campaign does when it loses in court. It shifts the battlefield to public opinion. It narrows the argument to its most emotionally charged symbol. It manufactures a narrative in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruling is an act of persecution, and the women who fought for it are its perpetrators.

The toilet became the front line. The conjuring trick began….