For all the negative stereotypes, many politicians are thoughtful, diligent and caring. But they are also human, and it is their more self-serving instincts that may have caused some to breathe a sigh of relief at the supreme court ruling on gender recognition.
After a challenge by the gender-critical group For Women Scotland – which started out as a dispute over Scottish government legislation about female representation on public boards – judges ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological women and biological sex.
The verdict will be heavily contested, and could bring serious and perhaps unforeseen repercussions for transgender women. But such an unexpectedly definitive view allows leaders in Scotland and Westminster to (and there is no gentle way of putting this) dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age.
The Scottish government’s response was particularly eloquent. While stressing that no one should see the ruling as cause to triumph, it otherwise talked blandly about “engaging with the UK government to understand the full implication of this ruling”.
There is logic to this. The Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, the legislative focus of the deliberations, are both UK-wide and thus not something the Holyrood administration can decide unilaterally.
But beneath this reassuring constitutional hum lurks the sound of quiet footsteps, as the SNP’s first minister, John Swinney, shuffles his party away from an era when Nicola Sturgeon’s government was very proudly at the vanguard of transgender rights.
It was little more than two years ago that Sturgeon’s government was openly seeking a battle with Westminster over a plan to make it easier for transgender people in Scotland to get gender recognition certificates – a move blocked by Rishi Sunak.
We are in a very different political climate now, and not just with the open prejudice of the Donald Trump administration, which is purging transgender people from the military on the stated basis that their very identity makes them unfit to serve.
Scotland’s government has been on the receiving end of pushback from other controversies, for example the decision to send Isla Bryson, a transgender woman convicted of double rape, to a women’s prison. To again frame it in slightly unpalatable political terms, this is no longer seen as a vote-winner for the SNP.
For Keir Starmer and the Westminster administration, there had been an unspoken worry about a fudged or unclear court ruling, one that placed the impetus on politicians to decide.
Instead, as a UK government spokesperson said, it gave “clarity and confidence”, both for women and for those who run single-sex spaces. Clarity and confidence, perhaps. Political cover? Most definitely.
Starmer has spent his five years as Labour leader having TV and radio interviewers intermittently asking him to declare, yes or no, whether a woman can have a penis. Starmer’s standard dual response – under the law, a tiny number of trans people are recognised as women but might not have completed gender reassignment surgery – prompted an inevitable and arguably damaging wave of attacks from political opponents.
Kemi Badenoch has been particularly relentless in this, despite having served as equalities minister in a government that did not amend or clarify the Equality Act to reflect her view that, as she put it in a celebratory tweet on Wednesday, “saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact”.
This was not just a Conservative obsession. Starmer faced criticism from some inside Labour – notably from the now independent MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield – for, as they saw it, failing to stand up for women. Others condemned him in the belief he was edging away from trans rights.
From a nakedly political-management perspective, the supreme court decision was ideal, making the decision judicial rather than political. No 10 officials believe there will be no need to tweak the Equality Act, leaving their role as little more than a neutral voice in helping organisations adjust to the new reality.
Starmer’s aides deny he has been on a political journey from a few years ago, when as a Labour leadership candidate he signed up to a pledge from the LGBT Labour group “that trans women are women, that trans men are men” – or 18 months later when he criticised Duffield for saying only women could have a cervix.
This is perhaps disingenuous. But in a debate where niceties and nuance are so often trampled on, the prime minister is very much not the first politician to try to fudge things.
