Starmer: "A woman is an adult human female"

The dictionary definition used to be regarded as transphobic bigotry - how did that even happen?

Hate crime according to Thames Valley Police

“A woman is an adult female”, said Sir Keir Starmer this week. That may seem a statement of the bleedin’ obvious but to the UK and American left it has, for most of the last decade, been almost unsayable. That sentence, which is of course the dictionary definition of a woman, was interpreted even by some police forces as a statement of bigoted transphobia and classed as hate speech. It is still all but unsayable in universities and on social media. In April, the screening of a film called “Adult Human Female” was halted twice at Edinburgh University by transactivists backed by the lecturer’s union the UCU.

It has been a long and winding road back to reality for the UK and American left. They adopted uncritically one of the strangest, and arguably cruellest, intellectual conceits in modern history: that men can change sex merely by an act of the imagination, by “self-identifying” as women. Sex is fluid, we were told by academics and LGBT campaigners. In 2019, Labour’s equality spokeswoman, Dawn Butler, announced on BBC radio that “babies aren’t born with a sex” and are “assigned” male or female at birth, presumably by transphobic obstetricians.

The post-millennial academic community largely subscribed to this belief, led by gender theorists like Judith Butler (no relation). Others just went along because they didn’t want to be targeted as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) or even, as Butler suggested, fascists. Those who questioned the dogma that “transwomen are women” were accused of allying with bigoted right wing and homophobic “tropes”. This false equation of gender criticism with hatred of sexual minorities led to a moratorium on trans issues in much of the media. Liberal newspapers and the BBC just didn’t want to touch it, except for puff pieces about trans icons like Caitlyn Jenner and Monroe Bergdorf.

The world- renowned fertility expert, Lord Winston, caused outrage on BBC Question Time when he stated that people are born with a biological sex and cannot cannot change it,'because it is embedded in genes in every cell in the body'. The presenter, Fiona Bruce, had to intervene to point out that this was most definitely not a view shared by everyone – as if human biology was a matter of opinion. Lord Winston said he would be accused of hate speech.

Not long ago, women like the development researcher, Maya Forstater, were liable to lose their jobs if they held this “opinion”. Insisting on defining women by their sex could also lead to your name being recorded on a police hate crime register as a “hate incident”. The NHS started abolishing the very language of womanhood, talking about “people with cervixes”, “menstruators, and “chest feeders” so as not to exclude men who have self-identified as women. Male and female toilets were scrapped in theatres and even some schools in favour of gender neutral facilities.

This toilet issue defied logic since, if transwomen really are women, as the Stonewall dogma puts it, then surely there is no need for different loos: they should just use the women's. But common sense had very little to do with this strange passion which turned civil servants, academics and politicians into proselytiser for what is in reality a quasi religious belief: that some people had female (or male) souls that had entered the wrong body. And moreover, that people could retrofit their bodies by removing their genitals and consuming drugs. Children as young as nine were, and probably still are, being given puberty blockers to halt the natural development of their bodies at gender clinics like the Sandyford in Glasgow.

Politicians embraced the new religion fearing they would be left “on the wrong side of history” if they did not. Many now regret it. The biggest political casualty of the trans war was the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. She made self-ID for trans people the defining policy of her later years in government, forcing the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill through the Scottish Parliament after an acrimonious debate and the resignation of her community safety minister, Ash Regan. When the UK government blocked the bill on the grounds that it clashed with women’s rights under the UK Equality Act she called this a “full frontal assault on devolution” by bigoted Tories.

In January, when it emerged that the Scottish Prison Service had been placing trans sex offenders in women’s prisons, she still could not bring herself to admit that trans rapists are male. She refused to “misgender” the double rapist, Isla Bryson (Adam Graham) even after she ordered the Scottish Prison Service to move him, and other trans sex offenders, to male jails. Sturgeon told journalists she “didn’t have enough information” to determine Bryson’s sex. It was suggested that an inspection of his trousers might help provide it. The chaos of the GRR Bill formed the backdrop to Sturgeon’s decision to resign without warning in February. She said it was impossible to have a “rational” debate about the trans issue, ignoring the want of rationality in her own contradictory policy.

Why did sensible people go down this route? Why were feminists like Nicola Sturgeon so eager to dilute women’s sex-based rights and even endanger them by insisting that prisons, hospitals and schools allow natal men in women’s spaces? She insisted that there was no evidence that “predatory males” could take advantage of these arrangements, despite the glaring evidence that they already were. Politicians lined up to endorse the dogma partly because of fears, spread by the trans charity, Stonewall, that disputing “trans rights” was actually illegal.

The courts had willy nilly become trans “allies”. In 2019, the judge in researcher Maya Forstater’s industrial tribunal, James Taylor, ruled that her view that women are defined by biological sex was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Three years later, on appeal, this was shown to be a misrepresentation of equality and human rights legislation. Of course people are free to “believe” that sex is immutable, and no one should be discriminated for holding such a view. Some clearly have been.

Self-styled “progressives” like Nicola Sturgeon were eager to bolster their progressive image by supporting Self-ID. Yet, history may judge that Nicola Sturgeon inadvertently destroyed the entire edifice of trans ideology with her GRR Bill. The scandal of a male rapist, Isla Bryson, being held on remand in the women’s estate at Cornton Vale prison, was a defining moment both for her and for the transgender debate as a whole.

It emerged that the Scottish Prison Service, like other state bodies, had been anticipating a change in the law by voluntarily introducing the policy of self ID. This allows people to change their legal sex by declaration, from age 16, without any diagnosis of gender dysphoria and after only three months living in their “social gender” as the SPS put it. Again, it seemed the progressive thing to do. There was, pre-Bryson, a political consensus behind the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill encompassing Labour, SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

After Bryson, UK politicians began to row back from their uncritical support for gender reform. Rishi Sunak called for a clarification of the law to ensure that biological sex takes precedence over assumed gender. Ministers ordered schools to stop allowing children to change sex without parental knowledge. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, insisted that, under the 2010 Equality Act, women’s groups and sports clubs had the right to exclude people who were born male.

The original guidance on the Act stated that women-only spaces, such as domestic abuse refuges, had always had the right to exclude transwomen as “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. Though somehow this had been forgotten in the rush to affirm that transwomen are women full stop. After the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Kishwer Falkner, set the record straight in parliament she ignited a rebellion from her own civil servants that nearly cost her her job. Stonewall and other charities have condemned her for promoting a “regressive” interpretation of the law.

The left originally sided with trans activists partly because it instinctively supports minorities and also because the issue was, for many years, really only discussed in right wing newspapers and on message boards like Mumsnet. It seemed an easy hit to attack the Tories for being transphobic since many Conservatives had in the past questioned homosexual law reform and same sex marriage. However, the Tories were initially pretty much on side with reform of the gender recognition laws. The leader of the house, Penny Mordaunt, believed that “transwomen are women” as did the former PM Boris Johnson, at least before he became prime minister. He had led Pride marches in London when he was mayor, and like many Conservatives thought trans Self-ID was just the next stage in the liberalisation of sexual conduct.It wasn’t.

The attempt to erase biological sex ignored the views of half the population: women. They were never properly consulted on, for example, the inclusion of people with male bodies in women’s sporting events or dressing rooms. Feminists who did raise questions about the assault on women’s sexual identity, like Germaine Greer, were cancelled and rarely heard from again. Academics like the philosophy professor, Kathleen Stock, were driven out of university life - even though she fought back. Countless others stayed silent so as not to be ostracised. Ruth Serwotka’s Women’s Place UK, which challenged Stonewall’s capture of the civil service and the educational establishment, was labelled as a “transphobic hate group” by a number of Labour MPs including Lisa Sandy MP and the now deputy leader, Angela Rayner. Not any more presumably.

It was largely left to women who were too big to be cancelled, like the author JK Rowling, to lead the questioning of trans ideology. And of course to strong-willed Scottish feminists like Marion Calder, who formed the lobby group For Women Scotland in 2018. She and the legal cooperative, Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, founded the same year, successfully challenged the omertà on discussion of Self-ID in Scotland where the battle over gender legislation was largely fought. They have been vindicated.

There is now a broad reaction against trans ideology and a consensus emerging across the political parties that women’s sex-based rights must be taken seriously. Human biology has made a belated fight back. Until recently, Sir Keir Starmer couldn’t bring himself to say that women were adult human females and the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, still seems to be in the dark. Others like the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, still insist that “women can have penises”. He is of course fully entitled under the law to hold and express this belief - just so long as he doesn’t mind being laughed at.