A Fresh Fight

“You have gender dysphoria,” I used to think, and even say. “I have depression, but that doesn’t mean the doctor should give me something to kill myself, never mind suggest it to me.” Part of resisting the second atrocity, against which Bridget Phillipson voted, is reversing the first. Yet, as Geraldine Scott writes:

It should have been simple.

When the Supreme Court ruled in April that sex, in terms of the Equality Act, meant biological sex, ministers hoped that would draw a line under years of internal warfare in Labour over gender identity.

Instead, more than seven months later, councils, NHS trusts and even government departments are still unsure how to apply the judgment.

And Labour is again being accused of failing to grasp the nettle — this time not because of a lack of legal clarity, but of political will.

The road to this point has been long.

As recently as 2022, Sir Keir Starmer told The Times that “trans women are women”, and had insisted that was what the law said. In 2020 he was praised as a “good ally” by trans rights groups.

Labour policy at the time still backed self-identification for obtaining a gender recognition certificate. Starmer had publicly rebuked Rosie Duffield, then a Labour MP, after she said only women could have a cervix, in a row that dragged on for years.

Pressed repeatedly in interviews on whether a woman could have a penis, he had replied that the “vast majority” of women “of course don’t” and that “for 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and, of course, they haven’t got a penis.”

By the election campaign, however, Starmer had shifted. “Biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis,” he said. The line reflected what Labour strategists believed most of the public thought and what focus groups had been reflecting.

And the Supreme Court ruling gave Starmer cover among Labour members and MPs who tended to prize transgender rights. Ministers welcomed the judgment, repeatedly stressing that it must now be “implemented in full”.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) ran a consultation with 50,000 responses on how to update its code of practice — essentially advice on how to implement the law for any organisation providing services to the public — and the 300-page updated code has been sitting in Whitehall for 11 weeks with no sign of publication.

The guidance is highly sensitive. It says service providers, from hospital wards to gyms, domestic violence refuges and communal changing rooms, could ban transgender people from single-sex spaces and it confirmed that no official document reliably proved a person’s sex.

In effect, it codified the consequences of the Supreme Court judgment, but it has not yet been laid in parliament.

Ministers have said this is because it is vital to get it right. They stress it is a complex piece of statutory guidance and the impact of it must be fully assessed.

But the politics is hard to ignore, and the hold-up is increasingly seen in Westminster not as a technical matter but as a symptom of political fragility.

The Times previously revealed concerns that Bridget Phillipson, who is the women and equalities minister as well as the education secretary, was delaying publication in the midst of her deputy leadership campaign, which she denied. During that contest, Lucy Powell, who ultimately won, repeatedly emphasised her support for transgender rights and suggested the EHRC guidance was flawed.

With the race now over, attention has shifted to Starmer’s standing among MPs and the Labour membership.

Several unions remain furious about the party’s retreat from self-identification. Younger activists and parts of the parliamentary party believed publishing the code would amount to endorsing discrimination. MPs have written to ministers over the issue.

Some ministers fear that an already fractious parliamentary Labour Party could use the guidance as another proxy battle over the party’s direction. Women’s groups, meanwhile, said the delay left public bodies in limbo.

Now, those in Whitehall have become so frustrated at the lack of action that a copy of the code has been passed to The Times due to fears that it is being delayed over concern of a political backlash.

Arguably for the government, a fresh fight over gender identity could not come at a worse time.

Phillipson wants to be Leader of the Labour Party, and thus Prime Minister. Yet without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first.

Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it. What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Phillipson knows this. She needs to act on it.