Written April 2025
This is good news of course though more importantly it is beyond depressing that our institutions have been so thoroughly captured by nonsense beloved of bad faith activists running rings around people educated beyond their intelligence. It is right that people are celebrating, and we should congratulate the brave women leading the campaigns, but the fact remains that the Law in nearly all important senses does not define what a woman is: we do. The legal ruling’s important political consequence is that it makes monkeys of large numbers of our credentialed class: we should never underestimate how stupid and bovine people with letters after their name can be. The sense of being gaslit in a power play by not very bright and cowardly conformists is palpable, and the power of just saying “no” is wonderful to behold. Of course one amendment to the Equality Act means it’s back to square one (though I do hope this would prove to be very difficult: this nonsense has vampiric tendencies, it thrives in the shadows and is allergic to daylight, it’s anti-democratic in that sense). And this whole mess is likely to open the gates to lots more expensive litigation, but if you play stupid games you win stupid prizes.
A postscript is that the Observer today has an editorial on the issue. With a few exceptions (e.g. Sonia Sodha) the Observer/Graun stable has been a bastion of bad faith gaslighting over recent years on this issue. The editorial is welcome I suppose, but a period of reflection amongst many of those working for these publications might be more in order.