I find this disappointing from Lady Hale

[theDudesmummy]

Part-way down the piece: “I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex,” she said.

What in earth is that supposed to mean? Sex is a biological descriptor. Does she believe this nonsense? Surely not? Am I misunderstanding something?

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/may/22/court-ruling-legal-definition-of-a-woman-misinterpreted-lady-hale?CMP=share_btn_url

Well, she's made herself look a right twerp, hasn't she.

Just further confirms my understanding that however clever, well-educated and elevated they might be, some people are deluded enough to believe any old nonsense, however ridiculous, if they think it’s in their interest/makes them look like a good person/is socially acceptable in the circles they move in.

If biological sex doesn't exist, then doesn't that mean that trans people don't exist either, since they want to be (or think they are) the opposite sex? You can't transition from one sex to the other if neither sex exists in the first place.

Lady Hale seems a bit transphobic with her denial of the existence of trans people.

This.

People like India Willoughby know who they want to share changing rooms with and who they don't want to share changing rooms with, don't they?

Well thank heavens she’s retired and isn’t sitting in judgment on these issues any more.

I'm glad she's a retired judge.

An old one (that's always being wheeled out) but a good one:

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. -George Orwell.

I read that and wondered whether the Guardian has been desperately searching for someone to support this view seeing as they haven’t said a lot in support of the SC ruling. Sad that once again she’s focussed on shared toilet facilities as if that is the only problem.

It does seem disappointing - assuming she is being correctly reported. There is a bit more in what she is reported to have said about the reaction to the SC ruling being disappointing and binary, which is perhaps a fairer assessment. She’s right that the ruling doesn’t mean organisers have to provide single sex facilities, just that if they do provide single sex facilities they actually have to be single sex. And some of the TRA reactions to the judgment have been hyperbolic in the extreme rather than pragmatic (I have not seen the same from the sex realist side of the “debate”).

As for the quote ascribed to her daughter, FFS! I despair at the non sequiturs and lack of critical thinking.

I'm also disappointed that the spider brooch she wore when giving judgment on Boris Johnson's attempt to prorogue parliament wasn't actually a reference to The Who's Boris the Spider.

How is it sex traffickers know what a woman is, but the politicians in this country don’t? It’s all intellectual wankery.

Orwell once said that some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.

Lots of really, really clever people are only really, really clever in their own area, but think their cleverness applies everywhere.

This could describe most of my colleagues. Only they genuinely believe it’s being kind. Gender identity is like Japanese knotweed and will take years to pull out of the bag of ‘progressive’ thinking. Even then, it’s likely that only continuous law suits will do it. Bit like Purdue Pharma was only stopped because of thousands of simultaneous law suits in the US. Meanwhile, the damage has been done to thousands.

I can understand why people think they're being nice to trans people. I can't understand why they don't care about also being nice to women and children who have been demonstrably harmed by this. I don't understand why they are OK with not being nice to women who will be excluded from certain spheres of life if they can't have single sex spaces and why a woman is wrong if she doesn't want to change alongside a man.

I really can't understand that.

I think the TRA argument is that sex does exist but gender identity is more important so if you feel that you are a woman that is the criteria to be accepted as a woman. Why cleverly it went from transsexual to transgender. No need for surgery or drugs. Just feelings.

This is true. Another aspect to this is that sometimes extremely clever/intellectual people appear to have no common sense at all.
Ditto actors/models/celebrities believing that their opinions on all manner of things should be taken seriously by the rest of us.

Surely if Lady Hale wants to appoint someone to ‘her board’ there’s no law to stop her - just don’t let a man pretending to be a woman take an actual woman’s place just one from the men! Surely there’s nothing wrong with that!

I was going to say exactly the same.

Unless she's been misreported and she has actually said something which is entirely different, it shows that experts when talking about things outside their own field can be as ignorant as the rest of us. She is not a medical Dr to my knowledge. Even if she were, there are many Drs who don't belong to the Beth Upton school of medicine.

It's not at all clear why anyone would think that the SC ruling would prevent trans people being on boards.

A board could still be made up entirely of trans people.

Good question. She’s just A.N. Other president in the case. I wish someone would point that out to her.

I can’t believe she had such power yet is so dim.

And of course she’s entirely missing the point. A talented transwoman might indeed be an excellent addition to her board.

But that transwoman will still be counted as a male board member in the reported figures.

Would she really think her board was balanced fairly if it consisted hypothetically of half men and half transwomen?

I wonder what kind of brooch would be a reference to The Who's song I'm A Boy (1966)
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am, I get it

which was going to be part of a concept album about a dystopian future where parents could choose the gender of their children, and in this case they were 'mis-sold' a male child so they 'transed' him.

The Who abandoned the idea, but unfortunately society didn't...

A board could still be made up entirely of trans people.

Imagine, a board of ten, five transwomen and five transmen, with the TWs being called she and the TMs he. A recipe for total confusion, I think.

Trans ideology has two ways to get to TWAW. One way being that woman is a social role linked, but not mapped exactly, to sex, the other way is more transhuman - that sex can be altered through surgery and drugs.

So socially, TW fit into the WI because their social experience matches that of women in the group. The medical pathway says that if science can allow an infertile women to conceive and give birth, its only a matter of time before TW can too. Therefore sex doesnt exist, even if at this time the idea of a man giving birth is theoretical.

I think activists claim that TW will be excluded from society - employment, housing, healthcare, on boards, because we are ignoring these social and medical pathways, forcing TW to hide from society?

So socially, TW fit into the WI because their social experience matches that of women in the group. The medical pathway says that if science can allow an infertile women to conceive and give birth, its only a matter of time before TW can too. Therefore sex doesnt exist, even if at this time the idea of a man giving birth is theoretical.

Apparently forgetting that e.g. IVF is not free, and that this theoretical treatment for men would be sex specific.