by Joan Smith, UnHerd
The backlash has begun. It’s happening up and down the country, where thousands of trans activists raged at the weekend against last week’s Supreme Court judgment. In London, they carried placards threatening to kill “terfs”, urinated on a statue of the suffragette, Millicent Fawcett, and daubed it with the slogan “fag rights”. In Sheffield, a small group of women had to be protected by police from an angry mob of trans activists.
But there’s also something going on behind the scenes. Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday has revealed that government ministers secretly condemned the ruling in a WhatsApp group and plotted to challenge it. Labour MPs specifically attacked Baroness Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is due to issue new guidance this summer on the court’s common-sense ruling that “sex” means biological sex.
Falkner has correctly interpreted the judgment to mean that men who claim to be women cannot use single-sex spaces or compete against female athletes at sporting events. But when a Labour MP in the WhatsApp group described Falkner’s response as “pretty appalling”, Culture minister Sir Chris Bryant replied that he “agreeed [sic]”. A Home Office minister, Dame Angela Eagle, suggested that they should seek a meeting “ASAP” with the “relevant Equality Minister”.
This high-level attempt to defy a definitive legal judgment casts new light on Keir Starmer’s silence. Bryant and Eagle are patrons of LGBT+ Labour, which now lists more than 50 MPs and 10 Labour peers as patrons. Four years ago, the group began to harass the then Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, demanding an apology and “reparations” after she liked a tweet stating that only women have a cervix.