by Sean Walsh, TCW
IT’S HARD to say which view is the more jarring: that a man can become a woman because a piece of paper says he can, or that he can’t because a court says he can’t. Perhaps out of respect for the ‘non-binary’ zeitgeist we should go with both/and rather than either/or and conclude that each is rubbish in its own way.
The Supreme Court’s ruling that the category ‘women’ as used by the Equality Act (2010) refers necessarily to biological sex has been welcomed by many. To some extent this is fair. The application of the 2010 Act has been retroactively complicated by later legislation in ways its architects could not have predicted. Of particular relevance is the legislative mischief-making of the Scottish Parliament and its 2018 Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, the proximate cause of the latest pushback against the lunacy of ‘gender self-identification’.
You must have some sympathy for the judges who were tasked with the holistic interpretation of a sequence of statutes, instituted at a time when the ambient culture was nearly sane. It can’t be easy to do so from the perspective of the bizarre Bosch universe that has come to enclose all of us since then.
That said, those who celebrate that the curtain might be coming down on the theatre of the absurd are being too optimistic. This was, if I may mix my metaphors, an exercise in legal housekeeping – the lawyers have tidied the desk and if the result is pleasing on the eye now, it’s only a matter of (very little) time before the vested interests of progressive activism try to mess it up again.
See also: Biological sex erased from official data on health, crime and education by Geraldine Scott, The Times