Brilliant from James Kirkup in The spectator:
"The debate about sex and gender is complicated and often fraught, not least when it reaches the courts. But there are two, fairly simple, points that I think everyone should draw from that court ruling.
The first is that the High Court has confirmed that accommodating the interests of transwomen and women leads, in some circumstances, to 'competing rights'. Sometimes, giving something to transwomen means taking something away from women. There is nothing transphobic or otherwise hateful about saying so. It is, as the court ruling shows, a simple statement of fact.
That leads to the second point. In this case, the state has given to some transwomen offenders the right to be imprisoned in the female prison estate. That decision, made to accommodate the interests of those transwomen, comes at the expense of women in the female estate. The court found that those women are exposed to an increased risk of sexual assault and to anxiety and fear of such sexual assault.
The court further found that, under the law as it stands, it is legal for ministers to implement a policy that exposes women prisoners to that increased risk and to 'understandable' fear, because – assuming proper mitigation is in place – that risk and that fear are an acceptable price to pay to accommodate the interests of transwomen prisoners."
Read more:
www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-court-judgement-that-confirms-women-pay-for-trans-rights