Despite victory in the Supreme Court, women are still fighting for single-sex spaces

Putting aside the implicit direction on the use of preferred pronouns in classrooms and the acceptance of chest binders in schools, the four most telling words in the Scottish Government’s recently published, and much anticipated 64-page guidance for schools on supporting transgender pupils, are: “As the law stands”.  

It’s revealing because repeatedly on this subject, politicians tacitly, or not so tacitly in terms of the Greens, demonstrate a grudging acceptance of the clear and unequivocal law of the land but appear determined to see it overturned, never mind implemented. 

From Lisa Nandy to Lucy Powell to Jenny Gilruth to Ross Greer – and of course Scotland’s former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, because she is still an elected MSP – the reluctance to fully embrace both the letter, and the spirit of a law which is, after all, largely about protecting women, is obvious. They are so boxed into a corner by the rhetoric that trans women are women, they seem almost unable to comprehend the risks posed by believing that men can simply be women and what that opens the door to. 

On her much publicised book tour, Sturgeon has repeatedly claimed there is no conflict between women’s rights and trans rights and yet refuses to explain how that position can be true when it is clear that women have legal rights rooted in their biology and those can quite obviously be compromised by a counter belief that biology is not a determinant in defining what a woman is, i.e. biological men can be deemed to be one. 

It’s now seven months since the Supreme Court made it crystal clear that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex and that the word ‘woman’ refers to a biological female. The world did not change; it simply re-embraced reality and the existing law, and there should have been no prevarication or escalating debate about what that should mean in terms of compliance and practice.  

And so, for the BBC to headline a story on the back of the Scottish Government guidance, that schools must now provide separate toilets for boys and girls – as if that should not have previously been the case and consider that newsworthy – would have been laughable if it weren’t so utterly contemptible. 

Once again, this is not about being anti-trans; it is about being pro-women and girls and recognising that men are a risk to women which is why we have, by long-standing law, spaces that men as a sex group are simply excluded from because how do you separate the good from the bad, the genuine from the fraudulent? The answer is, of course, that you cannot. And while social convention, and the largesse of women, allowed for much latitude when it came to trans-identifying males using facilities and services designed solely for women, that was never a legal right nor should it have been assumed to be so. 

We fell down the rabbit hole so long ago that that which should be shocking, no longer is. Feminist books being banned from libraries, words being described as violence, women-only meetings disrupted by masked trans activists and men in dresses taking pictures of themselves in women’s toilets boasting about flouting the law. 

But it takes the biscuit when Scotland’s so-called feminist organisations object to the Scottish Government belatedly including ‘sex’ as a characteristic to the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 because defining woman by her biology is, in their words, ‘reductive’.  

Engender, the Scottish Government-funded body that describes itself as Scotland’s foremost feminist organisation, says it is “deeply concerned” by the fact that sex is to be defined by biology. It even argues that including ‘sex’ in the legislation could harm women. And it is joined in its critique by Zero Tolerance – another Scottish Government-funded body designed to protect women and girls from endemic male violence – and shockingly also by the NASUWT teaching union. 

As a reminder, the hate crime law was implemented by the Scottish Government with the glaring omission of women albeit with the caveat that while the legislation offered more protection for men that cross-dressed as women, than for women themselves, the female of the species would get her own specific legislation.

However, that separate misogyny law has now been abandoned because creating a law to counter the hate experienced by women apparently became too complex for the Scottish Government to navigate once the Supreme Court had clarified what a woman was. 

Imagine for one moment, a so-called feminist organisation arguing against women being included in legislation designed to deal with hate because a) you think the definition of women by dint of their biology is too reductive and b) you think men can be women and therefore you can’t stomach supporting this small step to addressing the entrenched societal antipathy that women encounter every day, simply for being women, because not to include trans women [who are, by the way, already included in the legislation] would, heaven forbid, run the risk of trans-identifying males who have been mistaken for biological women experiencing misogyny but not then be covered by the ‘sex’ element of the legislation because, well, they are not women.  

Bloody hell, that’s one convoluted argument for demonstrating your feminist credentials.  

But further mental gymnastics are being displayed in the various employment tribunals currently taking place the length and breadth of the country as ideology hits the buffers of the law.

In Fife, the ins and outs of the Sandie Peggie case continue to reverberate even as the judgment is awaited.

In the north of England, the case of the Darlington nurses forced to change in front of a trans-identifying male nurse proves again the institutionalised disdain that there is for women, and the fast and loose approach by employers and trade unions to preserving their dignity and privacy.

In Edinburgh, there’s the case between Maria Kelly, an engineer with the defence and security company, Leonardo UK, who suffers heavy periods and had started using a ‘secret toilet’ at work after encountering a trans colleague using the female facilities which Kelly had previously used as a ‘place of refuge’. In all these cases, it was women that were told to modify their behaviour and consider other options. 

Seven months ago, when the Supreme Court found against the Scottish Government, it felt like a battle had been won, instead we are back to where we began, arguing about why women need single-sex spaces rather than from the position that we are legally entitled to them.