Supreme Court: ‘Labour women were shut down. But we won’t concede rights won in a century of feminist struggle’

Women are used to our voices being ignored, our concerns dismissed and to being generally ridiculed as hysterical, shrill or irrational.

Exactly this behaviour has been visible from the very start of the concerted campaign to remove women’s protections and dignity under the cover of extending the rights of trans people.

Campaigners – generally men – told us that there could be no debate; that the matter was settled: trans women are women and there was nothing we could do about it and to even question this assertion was adjacent to fascism. As a strategy it carried the day for years, even inside the Labour Party. Every major political party was at one point captured by this approach.

READ MORE: ‘The Supreme Court Equality Act ruling raises more questions than it answers’

But we are not living in the 1950s anymore and women being told to shut up tend not to take that advice too well. The feminists of the 1960s and 1970s did not labour in vain and gradually the voices raised in objection became louder, more numerous and growing in confidence.

The more men’s rights campaigners pushed their claims of access by right to women’s spaces and protections, the more women pushed back.

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I am particularly proud that it was Scottish women who pushed back hardest. Of course, part of the reason for this was because it was Scottish men who went furthest in promoting gender ideology: the idea we all have some sort of gendered soul divorced from physical reality.

All of this came to a crashing halt on Wednesday when the UK’s Supreme Court ruled, in clear and absolute terms, that, as far as the law was concerned, sex was determined by biology.  Gender ideology met with material reality and of course it was the ideology that crumbled.

Maybe a few more people could have listened to us from the start and we could have reached an accommodation that reflected shared values and opposition to bigotry? That would have been better than the years wasted trying to shut women up.

Maybe we could have worked together to effectively fight the homophobia that makes vulnerable young people feel like they should ‘trans away the gay’, even at the expense of long-term and irreparable damage to their bodies?

READ MORE: Government welcomes ‘clarity’ but Labour tensions flare

Maybe we could have jointly challenged the multitude of voices in society that promote dangerous body dysphoria and make so many women spend their lives locked in a struggle with food and body shape? Maybe we could even have worked together to ensure that notions of gender conformity became a thing of the past, instead of trying to elevate them into something protected by law?

But the well organised and effective campaigners who drove this agenda so hard and effectively for so long were never interested in any of that. They were winning and they found it too easy to dismiss objections. They posed and they preened fake credentials of progressivism even while often actively promoting bigotry and passively endorsing violence.

Angry young men donned masks and went to women’s medical conferences to scream hatred. Women were threatened and demeaned and told they should be punched or even decapitated for daring to have opinions that those who proclaimed themselves to be on the right side of history didn’t like.

It is indeed quite remarkable how much leeway this men’s rights movement has been given. Normally anyone with any claim to be a progressive would shun any advocate of violence against women but gender-critical feminists were accorded no such solidarity.

The truth is almost all feminists recognise that a good society is one where men and women live together in a climate of mutual tolerance and respect. We are still ready and willing to sit down to discuss how to eliminate discrimination and intolerance and we also understand that gender dysphoria is a real thing.

But we are not going to concede our rights won in a century of feminist struggle.

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