The trans blob is still waging war on women

Around this time last year, I ended my spiked review-of-the-year piece with an optimistic flourish: ‘For the first time ever, I can say that 2025 will be the year the trans trend crashes.’ Twelve months on and I can’t decide whether I should feel smug or a total chump. To misquote the fox-bashing trans activist, Jolyon Maugham: ‘At a deeply technical level we won. At every substantive level we lost.’

At the start of the year, those of us pushing back against trans lunacy were still stuck in legal limbo. The UK Supreme Court was mulling over the case brought by the gender-critical campaign group, For Women Scotland (FWS), against the Scottish government. FWS argued that sex-based protections for women should only apply to those who are born female, whereas the Scottish government was promoting gender self-ID. At that point, few dared hope the Supreme Court might rule in favour of biological reality. It could have decided that women can have willies, thereby destroying every single-sex space and service going.

But finally, in April this year, the Supreme Court published its judgement. Five judges ruled unanimously in favour of the biological definition of sex in the Equality Act. When the Supreme Court ruling came out, campaigners who had spent years being vilified for challenging the divine right of trans thumbed anxiously through it, hunting for the inevitable catch. There wasn’t one, and a collective cheer rippled across TERF Island. It seemed as if we had won.

Suddenly, trans activists – long accustomed to having smoke blown up their arses by politicians, journalists and policy wonks – were confronted with something entirely new: the word ‘No’. No, biological males don’t have a legal right to be in female-only changing rooms. No, biological males aren’t allowed to sit in group therapy for women rape survivors.

Some trans activists got their pasty moobs out in protest, some paraded through London with fake coffins to symbolise the non-existent ‘trans genocide’, and some simply reverted to form by smashing windows and picketing women’s meetings. In the warm glow cast by the Supreme Court judgement, these tantrums were easy to dismiss as the trans movement’s death throes.

But then, just as we started to wonder whether the world might finally be righting itself, the trans blob changed tack and a new challenge emerged. There was no shouting or screaming. Instead, gatekeeping senior officials in public institutions, businesses and other organisations looked at the ruling, and if they didn’t like what it said, simply decided to ignore it.

Baroness Falkner, the outgoing chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), drew attention to this elite-level obstruction earlier this month. ‘The law is the law’, she told the The Times in December. ‘[Institutions and other organisations] don’t need to wait for our guidance’, she continued, referencing the much-delayed EHRC guidance on gender. ‘Our guidance is a navigational tool. If they do nothing… and say, “we’re waiting, we’re not going to follow the law of the land”, that is potentially unlawful.’

Nowhere is this institutional ‘up yours’ more evident than in the NHS. Sandie Peggie, Jennifer Melle and the Darlington Eight are all nurses who’ve faced harassment, discrimination or formal censure for the simple act of recognising a man as a man. Peggie, a Scottish nurse, was found by a tribunal to have been harassed by NHS Fife after objecting to a man in the women’s changing room. Melle was racially abused by a male paedophile patient who identified as trans, and yet she ended up disciplined for addressing him as ‘Mr’. And at Darlington NHS Trust, nurses were told to re-educate themselves after objecting to a fully intact male colleague who called himself ‘Rose’ and insisted on using their changing facilities.

These women were not only mistreated by their employers, they were also shat on by their unions. The Royal College of Nursing, in particular, has behaved less like a professional body and more like a branch of Stonewall. When a nurse can be racially abused by a male sex offender and still be treated as the problem, it becomes impossible to pretend unions are on women’s side.

What makes the current situation so sinister and tricky to navigate is that it’s impossible to know who is infected with the trans mind virus. When staff finally lose patience, give up on their unions and take their cases to tribunal, their chances of success are little more than a lottery. Sandie Peggie’s is a case in point; the tribunal agreed she had been harassed by NHS Fife, yet still chastised her for challenging the presence of Dr Upton, a man, in the women’s changing room, in what it called an ‘intrusive and confrontational’ manner. Meanwhile, in a judgement released just days before, a female engineer challenging a trans-inclusive toilet policy was told she hadn’t complained hard enough or quickly enough about men using the women’s facilities. The lesson here seems to be: if you speak up, you’re the problem; if you don’t speak up, you’ve waived your rights.

Of course, the most grisly resurgence of trans ideology, the Carrie-style hand reaching out of the grave, is the UK government’s approval of a new puberty-blockers trial.

You might have thought that after the Cass Review had exposed the scandalous ‘treatment’ being dished out to confused and troubled kids at the now defunct Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock clinic in London, the NHS would reflect, and stop using children as test subjects in the service of a transgender ideology. But it seems not. Instead, health secretary Wes ‘Weathercock’ Streeting has pressed ahead with the Pathways trial – a £10.7million scheme to put up to 226 distressed children on powerful puberty-suppressing drugs to see what happens. Drugs that previous research shows offers no overall clinical benefit to distressed kids, and in some cases, leaves them significantly worse off. The whole rationale for puberty blockers even rests on a claim that the Cass Review explicitly rejected – namely, that they ‘buy time to think’. In fact, the vast majority of children given puberty blockers in previous studies went straight on to sterilising hormones.

Worst of all, the NHS still hasn’t bothered to find out what happened to the thousands of children already put on the trans production line. This is because adult gender clinics blocked the data-linkage study the Cass Review requested. Rather than learning from those patients who have already been given puberty blockers, the system is simply recruiting a fresh cohort to experiment on. It’s Gender Groundhog Day.

Yet, despite the entrenched opposition and setbacks, April’s Supreme Court ruling matters. Truth was reestablished as a fundamental principle in law. But until it is restored in practice, women will still be fighting for their dignity, their right to privacy and for the freedom to speak the truth.

And as for my bold claim that 2025 would be the year the trans trend crashes, it did, in its way. I just failed to foresee how many people would end up buried in the rubble. Perhaps in 2026 we can finally start to clear the wreckage away and set ourselves back on the road to reality.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.