by Lauren Smith, spiked
The Supreme Court ruling has forced our captured institutions to respond.
This month’s UK Supreme Court ruling on gender has already set in motion a number of victories for women and for common sense. Women will be able to use the ladies’ bathrooms without fear of bumping into men. Lesbians will no longer be forced to include men in lesbian groups. Young girls will be able to play on sports teams that are filled with other young girls, not boys.
One unexpected knock-on effect of the Supreme Court judgement is that it may also force the BBC into admitting that transwomen are not, in fact, women. In light of the ruling that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act should be understood as ‘biological sex’, rather than self-identified gender, the state broadcaster is purportedly considering changing its editorial style guide. At the moment, BBC News refers to all transgender people by their preferred pronouns and however they ‘identify themselves’. But if reports in the Telegraph are to be believed, then this could be about to change.
Should the BBC start taking biology into account, it would be a major u-turn. For many years, BBC News has gaslit its audience whenever a transwoman is the subject of a major news story. Last year, it gave viewers the false impression that ‘cat killer’ Scarlet Blake was female. This was the man who put his neighbour’s cat through a blender and later killed a random stranger in cold blood. Criminals from the ‘Halifax woman’, who was jailed for stabbing and tying up ‘her’ victim, to the ‘predatory woman’, who ‘incited a man to abuse… a child’, are described as women, even as their menacing mug shots tell us otherwise.