How should the women who wouldn’t wheesht vote?

JK Rowling knows who she won’t be supporting on July 4th

“I've been Labour all my life”, tweeted JK Rowling last night. “I wanted a clear statement from Starmer because I really want an end to this long stretch of Tory insanity, but here I am, voting independent for the first time in my life.”

So, JK Rowling has made her choice and it isn’t Labour. Keir Starmer’s equivocation on in the final TV debate with Rishi Sunak was enough for the world’s most prominent critic of gender ideology to finally reject the party to which she has donated a small fortune.

But not for the Conservatives - that is evidently a step too far. Not even Rishi Sunak’s promise to change the Equality Act to make clear that “sex means biological sex” was enough for Ms Rowling to overcome her antipathy to the Tories. Yet that is precisely what so called “gender critical” women,  like the Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha, have been calling for.

Sunak is surely right that to protect women’s spaces it needs to be made crystal clear in law that transwomen are not legally female. At present, under most interpretations of the law on gender,  they are.

This was confirmed by the ruling in the High Court of Scotland in December 2022 on gender recogntion in public boards. The judge, Lady Haldane, said that the definition of sex was "not limited to biological or birth sex". She said it could also include people with a gender recognition certificate after changing their legally recognised gender.

"I conclude that in this context” she wrote “which is the meaning of sex for the purposes of the 2010 Act, 'sex' is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC obtained in accordance with the 2004 Act stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex." That vexatious phrase “transwomen are women” really dates from Labour’s original Gender Recognition Act twenty years ago, not Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to reform it.

Now, Keir Starmer is right that the guidance on the 2010 Equality Act does permit the exclusion of transwomen from single sex groups in certain circumstances, “as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate end”.  But that has not altered the legal definition of a woman. Indeed, that very formulation is regarded as offensive by many LGBT advocates, like the Good Law Project’s ,Jolyon Maugham since it implies that even transwomen with a gender recognition certificate are still biological men. Else how could they be excluded?

Until this is cleared up, and it can only really be achieved by changing the law, then people like the former Labour Shadow Equalities Secretary, Dawn Butler, will continue to intone that transwomen are women and that it is transphobic to deny them access to single sex spaces.

It was Butler who  famously told the BBC in 2020 that “babies aren’t born with a sex”. Many Labour MPs also ascribe to this quasi-religious belief. A majority of the massively enlarged parliamentary Labour Party after polling day believe that this whole issue is just a “Tory culture war” and support Starmer’s apparently benign claim that transgender people should be “recognised and affirmed”.

So, women have a difficult choice to make in this election. Women, that is, who are concerned about a return of any version of the infamous Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and the policy of allowing transgender people to self identify as another sex. It looks very much as if only the Conservative Party are serious about abandoning Self ID, protecting women’s rights and asserting the primacy of biological sex not least in what is taught in schools. Yet, very few Scottish women, and even fewer feminists, are natural Tory voters. Indeed Scots of all genders tend to shun the Conservatives.

It was this policy of Self-ID that led to a double rapist, Isla Bryson, being placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. Other male-bodied sex offenders had already been incarcerated there. Most women probably thought they had seen the end of all this reckless policy after that scandal. Allowing 16 year olds to change rheir legal sex without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been hugely unpopular in Scotland and across the UK .

Indeed, most women probably thought JK Rowling had been vindicated in her insistence that biological sex matters and that Self ID is an invitation to for predatory males to threaten women and girls. Surely no one would again try to frame in statute the quasi religious belief that people can be born in the wrong body?  But the law has not caught up with public opinion and Labour is clearly intending to reform gender recognition.

Starmer’s promise  to “modernise, simplify and reform” the “intrusive and outdated” gender recognition system is regarded by feminists like Julie Blindel as a rehearsal or the Stonewall-inspired arguments that led to the Scottish gender bill in the first place. The UK Labour manifesto does retain some form of medical intervention in the process of gender reassignment, though the medical panel that currently assesses the diagnosis of gender dysphoria has gone. But in Scotland there appears to be no medical intervention required at all. Anas Sarwar says he is determined to simplify and “demedicalise” the process of gender transition. This looks very like Self-ID 2.0. Indeed, we  could be back to having a gender border at Carlisle.

Nor is the battle over the so called “transing” of children in school resolved.  The Shadow Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, intends to “review” the current Tory-inspired guidelines on the teaching of gender ideology in schools. These require teachers to state clearly that there are only two sexes and removes from them the requirement to address children by their preferred pronouns. Phillipson believe this is “partisan language” and doesn’t show care for transgender children. Parents clearly do not get a look in here.

As with the abandonment of so called “spousal consent” by Labour, it is the interest of the trans person rather than his bewildered and betrayed wife (or husband) that seems to take precedence. Nor do children apparently have any rights when they face the humiliation and psychological stress of losing a father and acquiring two legal mothers.

It is true that Labour has made some  progress in recent years. After being lectured on human biology by Tony Blair, Keir Starmer now accepts that men have penises and women have vaginas. That I need to write that sentence shows how far politics has strayed from reason in the last two decades. Yet from July, ministers like Lisa Nandy will be framing policy on gender. She is on record as saying that trans sex offenders should be placed in women’s prisons.   It looks like back to square one for women who wouldn’t wheesht.