Women should not have to apologise for their rights

The battle has been won, now let the shaming of the victors begin. Over a year after the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex, the EHRC’s guidance on single-sex spaces has finally been updated to make it clear that “sex” means “biological sex”. Feminists — or indeed anyone who thinks women are people, too — can rejoice! Only don’t rejoice too much. Actually, don’t rejoice at all. Maybe mutter something about the law being the law, and what can you do about it, perhaps throwing in some platitudes about kindness and empathy, and how women having rights shouldn’t be an excuse to lord it over the people who really deserve them. 

It says much about the status of adult human females that news that we get to have anything of our own has come with a massive side order of admonishments not to get above ourselves. Rather than, say, thank the grass roots campaigners who did her job for her, a source close to Bridget Philipson claims that the minister for women and equalities “has ignored the frothing on both sides of the culture war and encouraged EHRC to focus on what matters: the dignity of everyone in our country. She will take no lectures on the rights of women just as she will never punch down on any minority”. Rather than apologise for his 2022 dismissal of “supposed feminists” who had the temerity to want single-sex spaces, Andy Burnham has decided not to object to the current guidance on the basis that to do so would be inconvenient, rather than out of any new-found respect for women. Burnham has also taken the opportunity to call for a “live-and-let-live approach to life”, asking that things are done in “the fairest and most compassionate way possible”. It would appear that respecting women’s rights and boundaries is not in and of itself fair and compassionate. On the contrary, you could be forgiven for thinking we are meant to feel guilty about our apparently ill-gotten gains. 

Is it enough to admit that women have rights — that we exist in law, and that we have particular needs and require particular protections — if you are also seeking to temper this admission with a hefty dose of moral shaming? I don’t think it is. The history of feminism is littered with women fighting hard to reclaim things men appropriated from them, only to be remembered as selfish, problematic, entitled, self-interested, in ways that the original appropriators rarely are (men just “had” the vote; it was the suffragettes who were middle-class white supremacist bitches. Women just “happened” to be excluded from high-ranking careers; it was the shoulder-padded, ball-breaking girlbosses who trampled on the women at the bottom). It is a way of qualifying and undermining feminist gains. You have it, but you don’t really deserve it. Look at what your rights-having has done to others! Even if the awarding of rights is related to a broader condition of disempowerment — female-only refuges exist because men hurt and kill women, not because women are nasty, exclusionary bullies — simply the possession of something you didn’t have before, or were perceived not to be entitled to, is considered grounds to tell a woman she is now the privileged party. 

Over the past few days, I have been outraged at calls for women to be sad-faced and apologetic about having our own toilets. I refuse to be sorry or sad, not least because the status of rights, and how much they are respected, relates to how morally justified they are perceived to be. Contrary to the fantasies of certain “progressive” men, access to female-only spaces will not be policed by genital inspections. This is not because we think the law alone is enough. The law is not enough to preserve women’s safety and dignity in private spaces, either. Laws prohibiting domestic abuse do not stop men from getting away with it, but few would argue that such laws might as well not exist on the basis some men will do it anyways, or even that some will be unhappy if they can’t. We rely on a shared awareness of right and wrong, and an understanding that making potential transgressors feel emboldened or aggrieved puts women at greater risk. By stoking a sense of grievance in those “excluded” from women’s spaces, politicians imply that even if legally one should respect women’s boundaries, morally one doesn’t have to. So some men just won’t. 

When, in the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling, Judge Hogg stated that this should not be seen as the triumph of one group over another, this was not interpreted to mean that trans people should not consider themselves victims of some great injustice. The broad interpretation was that women should not feel happy at having their existing rights confirmed, with widespread condemnation of corks popping and feminists “gleefully celebrating in the streets”. Indeed, there was far more condemnation of this than of self-styled victims taking to these same streets to make explicit threats of male violence against women. In this way, the rights of women and girls’ to single-sex spaces was twisted from being an absolute bare minimum in a world where male violence is rife to being an act of aggression on the part of women themselves — even when the distinction between the sex class who “aggressively” drinks champagne and the sex class who “passively” threatens to rape you could not have been made plainer. 

If anyone needs to say sorry and tone down their rhetoric, it’s not feminists

It is possible to feel enormous sympathy for young people whose rejection of sex role stereotypes has been exploited by others. No one should ever have been told that it was possible to be born in the wrong body, or that beloved children’s authors wanted them dead. The way to ensure these people feel better is not by demanding gender critical feminists empathise with them — we already do. It’s by encouraging them to empathise with us. Only then can they see that the world is not out to get them and that gender non-conformity is welcomed more, not less, by the women they’ve been taught to hate and fear. How can this happen when papers such as the Guardian misrepresent the EHRC guidance as stating “single-sex toilets must exclude transgender people” and offer up mawkish cartoons of those apparently confined to a lifetime of isolation due to women existing as a class with definable rights? This is not about helping trans-identified people; it is about terrifying them because you think it’s a price worth paying to make the terfs look bad. If anyone needs to say sorry and tone down their rhetoric, it’s not feminists. 

If women’s rights matter, they are not a thing to be apologised for. If the likes of Andy Burnham and Bridget Philipson are really, truly weary of that which they pompously call “the culture wars”, then they would not perpetuate them by implying For Women Scotland, Kishwer Faulkner and others might have been technically right, but remain guilty of some terrible moral wrong. Yes, they can tell themselves they are being moderate and balanced by “letting” the feminists win while portraying them as heartless bullies in need of re-education, but this is not moderation or balance. It’s just misogyny, offering up the feminists for a consolation kicking from those who didn’t want women to have rights at all. No “culture war” is finished this way.