by Janet Murray, spiked
One year on from that momentous judgement, women’s spaces remain unprotected.
I was in the courtroom when the UK Supreme Court judgment on gender was handed down a year ago today. It felt like witnessing a pivotal moment in history.
After years of politicians, institutions and a vocal minority of the public insisting we go along with the pretence that men could be women, the judges stated something that should never have been in doubt: that in equality law, the term ‘sex’ means biological sex.
Like many people, I assumed that the ruling would settle things – that people would stop pretending not to know what a woman is, and that sanity would return to public life. I imagined the NHS would quietly drop its talk of ‘chest feeding’ and ‘cervix havers’, and that women could object to the intrusion of a bearded man in a dress into their changing room without fear of being labelled a bigot. Having lost my own livelihood for taking issue with the phrase ‘pregnant people’, I also hoped the ruling might mark the end of language policing. Soon, I thought, we’d all be laughing about those absurd times when ‘misgendering’ could get you into trouble at work. Families and friends might even stop falling out over whether humans can or cannot change sex. When some of my own relationships had fractured due to my gender-critical views, it had been a painful affair.
But I was naive. A year on, very little seems to have changed. Britain might have achieved legal clarity on sex, but what it doesn’t yet have is the will to enforce it.