𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

A year after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of sex, I didn’t think we’d need to see our public institutions dragged kicking and screaming into compliance. But nothing surprises me anymore, so I’ll take the small wins we get. You may be wondering why such a basic, common-sense issue has become one of the defining struggles of our time. After all, since when was reality decided upon by the assertions of individuals? And since when was declining to join in treated as a punishable offence? Self-identification, believe it or not, is not a royal decree.

It’s because misogyny still runs deep in our societies, even when it’s being repackaged and espoused by misguided women and their gender-bending allies. Seriously, does it get much worse than the concerted pushback to women saying they want spaces reserved only for them, regardless of how men feel about it? What could possibly justify telling women to suck it up and “reframe” their trauma, as the transgender chief executive of Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre suggested not so long ago?

At the risk of sounding callous, men not wanting to be reminded that they aren’t women should never be the basis of public policy. Ever.

And neither should the constant howling that transwomen pose little to no threat to women in public spaces. Transwomen, contrary to bizarrely popular belief, are still biological men, and their trans-identifying status has little bearing on their propensity to engage in assault or violence against women.

The rates of transwomen offending are similar to those of biological men, and that is all we need to know. It isn’t just me saying it. A 2011 study, cited by three academics in evidence to a recent parliamentary committee, found that male-to-female transitioners retained a male pattern of criminality.

And in criminology it’s widely accepted that men commit vastly more crime than women. Ministry of Justice figures from 2020 to 2022 put men at 99% of rapes, more than 90% of sexual and weapons offences, and more than 80% of violent crime. So spare me the hurt feelings of people who think their “lived experience” should trump the data and how women relate to it.

The other objection I’ve heard is that the conviction of an individual trans person doesn’t constitute evidence of a wider social trend. Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? The trouble is that the number of transwomen in this country is so vanishingly small, and the policing data so scant as a result, that a single conviction shifts the figures.

Are women supposed to ignore the male status of these individuals because campaigners don’t like the way the numbers stack up? In what other area of public life would we be asked to disregard the available data to spare the feelings of a group?

I don’t hear the same crowing over urban youth crime statistics, where young black men are heavily overrepresented. Where’s the campaign to neuter policing there, to spare a group demonstrably more likely to engage in certain kinds of criminality?

Besides, true allies would never ask women to compromise their own security so that men can avoid being reminded of their biology.

All of which makes today feel bigger than it is. The new code runs to 342 pages and doesn’t rewrite a single line of the Equality Act. Self-identification was never the law, and a case back in 2022 said so plainly.

Yet hospitals carried on asking female nurses to change alongside male colleagues, and men who found a female identity somewhere between the dock and the cell carried on being housed with women.

Kishwer Falkner, who chaired the equalities watchdog while the code was drafted, puts it simply. These organisations were acting unlawfully all along, and most hid behind the line that they were waiting for government guidance. Well now they have it.

The only thing left is meaningful enforcement. Falkner has warned that the commission doesn’t have the money to take these cases up, which leaves women to enforce the law themselves and at their own expense. Green-led Lambeth council has already backed a motion refusing to implement the code, and Hackney councillors joined a rally against it.

The government, meanwhile, sat on the finished document from September until May before troubling Parliament with it.

So yes, a win. At least now a woman told to undress next to a man has something to point at in court. But nobody should mistake a code of practice for a rescue, and the women who dragged this to the Supreme Court will likely be funding the next round too.