Turning the tide on gender

When Sandie Peggie pushed open the door to the female changing rooms in Kirkcaldy Hospital, around midnight on Christmas Eve 2023, she had no idea that she was stepping into a Kafkaesque nightmare — one that has still to end. 

Her encounter with Dr Beth Upton, born male but who adopted a female persona several years ago, is now the subject of an employment tribunal, the first two weeks of which has filled the headlines and fuelled astonishment in Scotland and beyond. Prime Minister Starmer may have claimed last weekend not to be aware of the details of the case but Peggie’s ordeal has exposed the clash at the heart of the gender identity debate that has raged for a decade. The demands of some men to be treated as if they were women are in direct conflict with women’s right to single-sex spaces. A right that Sandie Peggie, who was experiencing a heavy menstrual flow that fateful night, was clearly denied.

And the allegation that Peggie’s employer NHS Fife had failed to meet its legal obligations to carry out an equality impact assessment on its decision to open up female changing rooms to Dr Upton has exposed the nature of the collusion between public bodies and trans activists. Mediocre public servants have eagerly traded women’s hard-won protections in the workplace, and elsewhere, for praise from state-funded equalities charities. Schools have led young people into believing that they can change their sex as easily as picking out a new t-shirt.  Men masquerading as women, including ones guilty of severe violence, have been placed in female prisons — and senior politicians, perhaps most notably Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, have stubbornly refused to acknowledge the harm their support for self-ID has done to individual women and young people, as well as the damage to women’s rights and trust in public servants and the political process. 

But could this shameful coalition be coming to its overdue end?

Labour’s health secretary Wes Streeting, once a staff member of Stonewall, has shown his colleagues that a sensible approach is possible, and popular. While trans activists may seethe, a politician’s standing is not harmed for standing up for material reality. Indeed, conversations with those inside and outside his party suggest that for Streeting it has been enhanced. His unequivocal acceptance of the Cass Review, which led to an indefinite ban on puberty blockers for under 18s, has done nothing to damage his popularity. Neither has his response to the GMC’s decision to obscure the public disciplinary record of doctors who change their gender identity. “This is extremely concerning and should not have been allowed to happen,” he said to the relief of a citizenry reassured that someone on the left was at last talking sense. Little wonder that Streeting is being touted as a future Labour leader.

Welcome as Streeting’s interventions have been, there is still much to do across the UK to clear up the mess created by the lobbyists and their allies in the public sector. First, there must be clarity that sex under the Equality Act is a lifelong physical state, not a mere matter of government paperwork. The Supreme Court is currently considering For Women Scotland’s challenge to the Scottish Government’s claim that a man who has obtains a Gender Recognition Certificate becomes female under that Act. The chairperson of the EHRC, Baroness Falkner, has already said that the Scottish Government’s interpretation impairs “the proper functioning of the Equality Act and jeopardise[s] the rights and interests of women and same-sex attracted people”. In a clear call for legal reform if FWS lose, she said: “As the equality regulator, we deem this to be a wholly unsatisfactory situation, which Parliament should address with urgency.” 

Perhaps most urgently of all, there must be an apology to all those whose lives have been damaged by the gender identity industry

Next on the to-do list must be a concerted effort to rid the public sector of its obsession with gender identity which has permeated almost every aspect of life, from rape crisis services to toilets in primary schools. It is not enough for politicians to pass the buck to middle managers and head teachers to ensure that they comply with the Equality Act, as Scotland’s social justice secretary tried to only a few days ago. Governments must take responsibility for the mess they created, or supported while in opposition. As Dr Claire Methven O’Brien, a commissioner on the Scottish Human Rights Commission, wrote in Holyrood magazine recently, “The wider institutional and cultural pathologies that have found their most recent expression in the Peggie case and responses to it must be urgently addressed – or belief in the value of democratic institutions may be the last casualty.”

Perhaps most urgently of all, there must be an apology to all those whose lives have been damaged by the gender identity industry. The families torn apart as their children were confused and misled. The women left bereft as their husband of decades found his “true self” in what Sandie Peggie’s lawyer has called the “immersive role play” of his idea of a woman. The young people, many struggling with their sexuality or autistic, whose bodies were needlessly, permanently damaged in the name of progress. Women like Sandie Peggie whose life has been turned upside down because she objected to sharing an intimate space with a male-born colleague. The list is as long as it is depressing.

Finally, our prime minister, whose record as a human rights lawyer stands for itself, must make it clear that his government will stand up for women’s sex-based rights on the international stage. There are attempts to redefine key international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to widen the definition of women to include men who identify as such. This must not be allowed to happen. 

As the world enters one of the most uncertain periods since World War 2, it may seem a distraction to focus on the definition of a woman and the organisational capture of public bodies by lobbyists, but the demands of gender identity theory are based on the big lie that humans can change sex. If the truth is negotiable on something as basic as sex, then how can we as citizens believe anything those in power tell us?