No, you're right, it's not a question of the majority. It's not like Strictly Come Dancing, or Brexit where every Tom, Dick and Harry over the age of 18 got to vote, no matter how strong or weak their grasp of the issues might have been.
This was five Supreme Court judges, the most senior lawyers in the country, deciding on a matter of law. The law in question was a groundbreaking piece of equality legislation introduced by the last Labour government. The same party which was convincingly returned to power less than a year ago.
The Equality Act was the first piece of legislation of its type in the world which gave trans people comprehensive rights to protection from discrimination on grounds of their gender reassignment status. At the same time, it gave other groups, including gay people, disabled people, religious minorities and female people the same rights and protections.
If, during the Gordon Brown years when this legislation was being debated and drafted, parliament had intended for trans people's rights to trump women's sex based rights, I'm pretty sure it would have actually written that in the legislation. And then perhaps Gordon Brown and JK Rowling would not have been such good friends.
Where we are today is that the Supreme Court has examined the law, heard the arguments on both sides, and concluded that parliament intended to draft legislation that recognises female people as a distinct category in law and affords us rights and protections on that basis. Rights and protections which are not undermined by the existence of members of the opposite sex who wish to live as though they are women. (Those people have their own protected category, they do not get to take ours and use it to their own advantage as well.)
If you think the law needs to change, there are only two possibilities.
- You have not understood the law.
- You actually think that parliament should repeal or amend the Equality Act to erase the female sex from legal existence, remove all our sex based rights, require us to share our communal showers, prison cells and rape crisis groups with any male person who has decided that they identify as one of us. You want them to legislate to remove our right to exist as a distinct category in law, as well as our right to say no to people in the other category, who will also no longer exist in law, even if in reality we all still know who is not allowed to say no to whom. Do you really think this is a progressive viewpoint?