Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times interviews the three For Women Scotland campaigners whose case led to the Supreme Court judgment, on biological sex as the criterion for women-only spaces. We won the Supreme Court sex ruling. The PM is subverting it:
Susan Smith, 53, a former financial adviser and one of FWS’s three founding members, says: “Both the Scottish government and the UK government claim they accept the Supreme Court ruling, but they have done nothing to implement it. Rather, they have gone out of their way to thwart it. Bridget Phillipson [the secretary for women and equalities] in particular is trying to fudge the law by sitting on the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC] guidance, and it is having a serious impact on women.”
After the ruling, the EHRC drafted a code of practice advising businesses and public bodies how to maintain single-sex spaces, including hospital wards and prisons, in order to comply with the ruling, and urged the government to bring it to parliament “at speed”.
More than three months later, however, Phillipson is still refusing to sign it, saying she is concerned the guidance is “trans exclusive” — and if she means that it excludes males from women’s-only spaces, she is correct, because that is what flows from the court’s ruling.
“If Bridget Phillipson and Keir Starmer don’t like what the Supreme Court did, they have the power to change it. But they’re not going to do that, because they know it would be incredibly unpopular and stupid and they’d lose support. So instead they’re playing silly buggers and trying to change the law by stealth,” says Smith.
Phillipson claims that banning males from women’s single-sex spaces would mean a mother would not be able to bring her toddler son into a changing room. It’s an argument that is in equal parts fatuous and desperate, suggesting that a small child with his mother is analogous to a grown man who believes he is a woman.
Marion Calder, 54, an NHS worker and single mother, another of FWS’s founders, says: “Why should we ever listen to Phillipson again if she cannot make a decision about something as simple as this? She needs to ‘woman up’ and face down these men’s rights activists. It’s very simple: things are either single sex or they’re not. But if I had a penny for every time someone said, ‘Oh it’s terribly complicated’ I’d be richer than JK Rowling.”
Trina Budge, 54, a farmer from Caithness and FWS’s third founder, adds: “You know, we asked to meet with Phillipson just before the verdict last April, and she said no.”
Did Starmer contact them? They all burst out laughing at the thought.
But it’s not just the government. It’s “the blob”.
But the real problem, Calder adds, isn’t the government: “It’s the civil service, and [gender ideology] is so deeply embedded there. So it doesn’t matter who the heck you’re voting in because they remain in post and a lot of the bills are going through them.” FWS saw this for themselves when they met civil servants at a time when Nicola Sturgeon, as first minister, was trying to jam through gender recognition reform in 2022. The proposal said a man could become a woman by saying he was, better known as “self-ID”.
“We met this one extremely senior civil servant who was putting the bill together. I was trying to talk to him about self-ID, and he responded with, ‘I have met trans people and they were super nice and I have shaken their hand.’ I said, ‘And what’s that got to do with the price of cheese?’,” says Calder.
But FWS are optimistic. They know there’s a “definite quiet majority” in Scotland who agree with them, many of whom whisper thanks to them when they see them in the street. “I’m rural with no neighbours, but even I’ve had people come up to me in my local café to say, ‘Well done,’” says Budge.
They still receive “lots and lots” of abusive emails, but they’re not threatened in the street. “I know there’s an activist who lives near me who sends us threatening messages. I just pass him in the street, and he doesn’t even see me,” says Calder. “There’s a lot to be said for being a woman of a certain age, you know. You’re invisible. And then you’re not.”
Mick Hartley 