A year on from the landmark Supreme Court ruling, there's little cause for celebration

It’s the eve of an historic anniversary. I am looking at a photograph taken on my phone on 16 April last year of a room full of women jumping to their feet in unfettered joy when the unequivocal judgment from the Supreme Court was read out. The image is a bit fuzzy round the edges, not neatly centered, and I’ve managed to cut someone in half. You can blame the shaking of my hand for the lack of focus and if you could still see the tears, they would be there too, blurring the picture and reminding me of how much was riding on what was being said down the line, live from the court in London.

Every woman in that room bore the physical and mental scars of a battle that not one of us had wanted to be in. But when it came to the material reality of biological sex framed against an ideology that is based on a desire for someone to be something that they are not, and when the harmful consequences of that belief across women’s legal rights to safety, dignity and fairness could all clearly be seen by us, what choice did we have other than to take up arms?

For years we had been attacked, belittled, threatened with our jobs, our reputations and our safety, and this was a moment we hoped would bring some sanity back into our lives and across politics with the full backing of the clarity of the law. 

In the days leading up to this point, many of us had privately expressed fears that the final judgment in the For Women Scotland vs Scottish ministers case would be a fudge that would leave us in no better a place than we already were. 

The atmosphere was intense, there was a collective holding of breath and in the pause, a tangible anticipation before the impact of the judge’s words ricocheted off the walls. The room erupted. We were on our feet. Women were hugging, tears were flowing, and we were still asking each other had we heard it right. 

But there was no room for doubt. In the Equality Act the definition of woman is based on biological sex. We’d won. The mood in that moment was one of simple elation. For the sisters who had kept that morning’s meeting place secret for fear of protest, this was a moment of solidarity and one that I will never forget. We were part of something much bigger than ourselves. We had stood up for the truth. But we had been on trial.

And while you hear the argument that this has been an ugly battle with aggression on both sides, don’t believe it. The anger, the vitriol and yes, the violence, came from one side and one side only and was powerfully endorsed by political leaders too cowardly to stand up for women even in the face of the clear misogyny of men, some in balaclavas, empowered enough to publicly spit on, swear at, and abuse women they demeaned as “witches”.

It’s a year on from that historic judgment. And the law is still to be properly followed, the activists are angrier than before, and politicians are still running scared. The former first minister of Scotland has suggested that if people don’t like the law (which she clearly doesn’t) it is up to politicians to change it. The leader of the Lib Dems, Ed Davey, has explicitly said the Equality Act is under review and the law will now be “almost impossible” to implement, which is interesting when you consider how easy it was to simply trample over women’s legal rights in the first place.

Meanwhile, UK equalities minister Bridget Phillipson has been accused of dragging her feet while reportedly expressing concerns about the lack of inclusivity in the tone of the statutory guidance on the law which is preposterous when single-sex spaces are by design, virtue and now fully backed by the law, not inclusive – and for a reason. 

A year on, we are still fighting the same battles hijacked by those who still believe the Supreme Court was wrong and that trans-identifying men are indeed women. 

We have experienced nothing short of state-sponsored affirmation of a lie. And when you stop believing in truth; when you accept without question who someone says they are without acknowledging the risks; when you stray from interrogation of facts, dismiss the need for transparency and pander to a loose set of self-proscribed values and rules that ignore good governance, structures and safeguarding, on the premise of acceptance without exception; you get to a pretty dark place. 

And I could talk about the multitude of women’s charities and advocacy organisations that receive government funding for the explicit purpose of providing services for women only, and yet have strayed so far from that original purpose they could be challenged under the Trade Descriptions Act. I could rail about the government going to court to defend men being placed in women’s jails.

Or point to the multi-million pound Scottish Government funded charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which seemingly operates in such isolation of scrutiny even after the exposure that a paedophile was operating within its ranks that it can somehow evade ministerial attention and ignore the normal checks and balances of good governance to make a senior appointment of a clearly fraudulent candidate with an AI-generated profile who was only forced out by the tenacity of the media and interested onlookers.

The ‘trans issue’ has effectively thrown a cloak of silence over so many areas of policy, the operation of public bodies, and the delivery of services. And yet the most common refrain of politicians in this debate is, ‘I’m not going there’ when it is literally their job to ‘go there’. 
I have always believed that there is a genuine desire to make things better for trans people. I think there’s a place for us all in this world.

But you simply cannot allow the demands of one group to usurp the existing rights of another and not expect legitimate pushback. One year on, the law is clear and needs to be followed. We should be thanking the three Scottish women who bravely took one for the team: Marion, Susan and Trina.

And not having to listen with incredulity as Alan Cumming bleats on that his feminism has been ruined by women like them, or equally despair at younger women (I’m looking at you Grace Campbell) who have the temerity to call themselves feminists while punching down with outdated tropes on women who have fought on their behalf but who they dismiss as “freaks”, “ugly”, and with “bad hair”. But when you have boxed yourself so far into a corner of believing that men can now be women, it is perhaps only inevitable that misogyny is the new-found feminism.