Transgender issues in the law, politics, sport, and the impact on children
The plot of Transaction, a six-part comedy currently showing on ITV2, is simple. A supermarket accused of transphobia hires a transgender night shift worker to protect themselves from an activist mob hammering on the doors. The problem for manager Simon (played by Nick Frost) is that he employs a transwoman on a mission to be outrageous, vulgar and crude, and to lecture the audience on trans rights. Promoted as humour, there’s a big problem: it just isn’t funny.
The Supreme Court judgment on the definition of a woman on 16 April restored a degree of sanity to a world that was in danger of going mad. Even Keir Starmer now knows that a woman is a matter of biology rather than ideology. Can somebody please tell the Americans? Or, more precisely, those progressive types over the pond who like to concern themselves with other people’s business.
What is a woman? That once-simple but now-controversial question divided opinion in the 2024 Paris Olympics, where boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting both won gold medals. The International Boxing Federation had previously excluded them from women’s boxing, reportedly because they have XY chromosomes, denoting them as males. But the International Olympic Committee saw things differently. IOC spokesman Mark Adams claimed that, “They are women in their passports and it’s stated that this is the case, that they are female.”
The Supreme Court judgment on sex and gender was a welcome return to common sense. As far as the Equality Act is concerned, even Keir Starmer now knows that a woman is a biological female and a man is a biological male.
When will Keir Starmer finally show some leadership over the most fundamental distinction in human society: the difference between men and women? The Prime Minister’s silence after the Supreme Court judgement last week* had been deafening. The ruling – which stated that sex is binary – brought clarity and restored sanity; it’s a pity the same could not be said about the PM’s thinking when it comes to defining what a woman is.
Debbie Hayton