Tribune Magazine explains why the supposed “clarity” of the Supreme Court ruling is anything but.
This sleight-of-hand has been demonstrated by Keir Starmer himself, who has repeatedly praised the ‘real clarity’ provided by the judgment, but only given one example of that supposed clarity: the idea that the judgment says ‘a woman is an adult female’. These words occur nowhere in the judgment; the judgment explicitly says that its role is ‘not to define the meaning of the word “woman”’ beyond a specific interpretation of the Equality Act.
Yet this invented ‘clarification’ of how gender works has resulted in an onslaught of institutions falling over themselves to drop any pretence of trans inclusivity, from the British Transport Police announcing trans women will be exclusively strip-searched by male officers, to the FA and ECB banning trans women — who were already subject to heavy testing and surveillance — from their women’s football and cricket events.
What’s clear here is that the verdict is being used to push the right-wing narrative of “luxury beliefs” – something that’s been corroborated by Labour MPs chortling sarcastically on social media this week about how working class people won’t be interested in trans people’s rights and safety, as if no working class people are trans people, or don’t have trans family members, friends or colleagues.
A “luxury belief” is whatever real thing right-wingers want to delegitimise and demonise. It’s just a slightly smarter-sounding way of saying “woke”, and comes with the same dismissive sneer. Luxury beliefs include feminism, LGBTQ+ equality and anti-racism.
This is more than an assertion that trans people are ‘really’ our birth sex: it’s a call to punish trans people for looking and acting in ways that have sustained the ‘luxury belief’ that people can, in fact, change their sex and gender.
Those who cannot pass as their birth sex are supposedly obfuscating the ‘truth’ that sex change is not real, and must therefore be pushed out of public life. This farcical move is clear in the Supreme Court judgment’s discussion that trans people of any gender may be reasonably excluded from both men’s and women’s facilities and services, from one because of their birth sex, and from the other because their changed appearance makes their inclusion unworkable.