Phillipson criticised over women’s rights stance in sex and gender debate

[impossibletoday]

Phillipson accused of putting career ahead of women’s rights in trans war

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/bb0dee47182826e1

Good for the Baroness.

And the wet-lettuce tantrum from a 'Labour source' is laughable. The 'oh we need to carefully evaluate 11 pages of (existing) guidance' line would have worked for about 3 months at most, it is insane to keep saying this as if there's anyone left who believes it. And in the year of doing fuck all about this, they have left everyone in a state of angry confusion and continued to let all women's rights go on being steam rollered in favour of a small group of men.

As with the grooming gangs, the ones abandoned by Labour are always female and the ones benefitting are always men, on a binary sexed basis. Labour have abandoned women, and the law. However they identify, the reality is about as stark as a penis in a women's changing room, and is clear for all to see.

Yes, we had Labour supporters lining up to tell us once in power we wouldn't find Labour were as appallingly misogynistic and self serving as we thought. They were absolutely right: they're much worse than we could have imagined.

We're left with a depressing bunch of options, as this can no longer be trying to deal with 11 pages in any real or honest way, and if it was incapacity to actually do this and make decisions, surely the cabinet would have called a stop to this by now as it's not exactly making them popular or going unnoticed. So either:

A minister is sitting on this guidance and using it as a reason to delay the actioning to correct breached rights in existing law - and being permitted to do so by the PM which is fairly boggling, and is doing it for her own selfish reasons and personal ambition. A woman basically trampling other women for sheer personal gain.

Or they're all sitting on the guidance in the state of wibble and worry and possibly thinking about the possibility of possibly calling a possible meeting at some point to consider the possible possibility of actually doing something - long after the horse has bolted and died of old age - which is another characteristic of this appalling government.

Or as I strongly suspect, the bit of the EqA they are re writing has been extended, and they are actually, very quietly, gerrymandering the law without having the guts to be honest that they are seeking to remove the inconvenient bits of women's rights. Dishonesty being another major feature of this govt.

I can't help but remember the number of times we were told by activists that they had been promised everything they wanted under a Labour govt, including removing the single sex exceptions. And that the Labour party are always in hock to those who paid their bills to get into power.

Thank you for the article link - the comments are searing.

I'm not a subscriber but I could read the comments after following the link in the OP.

It sounds like some sort of narc rage meltdown. Completely unprofessional. “Yet again” - clearly a TRA who disapproves of her.

I suppose when you run out of any reasonable excuse all that's left is ranting and name calling.

Don’t forget it’s the Civil Service which advises ministers and provides ‘lines’ to take. The Civil Service is very deeply captured by trans activists and will not be giving up on that stance anytime soon. Hence all guidance published will have trans rights at its heart before any consideration of any other group. Even children.

2272 comments at the mo

Just for completeness there's a Telegraph View on the subject

https://archive.ph/CxNrY

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2026/04/12/the-pm-is-an-absurd-position-over-the-trans-ruling/

We have been so lucky to have had a few extraordinary women in the right place (thank you Baroness Faulkner), with money, a platform and a backbone (cheers JKR) or brave, pissed off and prepared to do something about it (FWS, Sandie Peggie, Linzi Smith and many others 🍻*). Although as i was typing 'many' it actually brought to mind the Battle of Britain and the few. I don't believe we're out of the woods yet but we're currently in a better position than many other countries.

*not forgetting MN and an unfortunate pair of pink leggings.

Also in the Mail. Noticeably not on the BBC. (Although several pics of Starmer looking panic stricken on different matters and in different situations.)

Yes, indeed they were, and unfortunately many women seemed to be naive enough to vote for Labour. I’m glad to say I think for myself & didn’t.

Pondering about whether they'll dare to try to rewrite the law to allow men into spaces where girls and women undress.

The press will have a field day. There's no good way for politicians to defend this. The steady stream of criminal cases plus the cases that women keep winning. The evidence about the harm done to children and of course the enjoyment that the media will take in challenging transactivist politicians. Alongside the presence of media savvy, legally informed groups able to martial intelligent informed comment within hours and a track record of exposing extreme tranactivism in institutions resulting in them backing down.

Maybe I'm being naive but, despite Phillipson's self interested behaviour I just can't see them daring to do it?

Hmm: "Baroness Falkner – who drew up the equality law changes"....

Nope, she didn't draw up any law changes.

Maybe I'm being naive but, despite Phillipson's self interested behaviour I just can't see them daring to do it?

May be not naïve just perhaps optimistic, I on the other had am pessimistic and I think there's a real possibility that they will try to change the meaning of the gender reassignment characteristic to include GI. With the majority they have, it won't matter who objects or has a field day, it will go through and everyone else be damned.

None us noticed that the visuals had been hijacked by that cheeky woman until we saw the photos 🤬

The only person who had those placards was the woman in the centre, dressed in black with grey hair. Photo attached.

She waited until everyone was getting lined up for the press photographer then she slid the placards along to the women either side of her.

They didn't look at them because it never occurred to them that they would be "off topic".

Someone caught it all happening on video:
https://x.com/charles_hart/status/2043347190135828537

She gathered up the placards and left straight away after the press photos, didn't come down to the pub with us afterwards.

Even women who took photos of the line-up didn't notice what was on the placards until it was pointed out.

The press photographer didn't notice what was on the placards at the time either. I contacted him but he had already sent the photos out for publication and it was too late to do anything about it. He said if he had noticed what was on the placards he would have asked to do a photo without them because he was there for the Acts Grassroots protest - not an anti-vax protest!

It is infuriating that that cheeky woman got away with hijacking the protest but it is a lesson for us all: if someone hands you a placard or a banner, check what it says. It is not safe to assume that women who are "standing with us" are there for the right reasons - like that woman they could be there to use us in the sneakiest way possible.

I am absolutely livid that she got away with doing this!

I suppose we can only be thankful that the placards did not say, "Decapitate TERFs" or "Protect Trans Kids" with pictures of guns or knives dripping blood!

They are pushing on with the SEND bill which is also a disaster, and I will not be at all surprised (disgusted, but unsurprised) if some of the re writing of the Equality Act also quietly removes some of the protections from the disabled to avoid being challenged on legal grounds. This lot are liars and conscienceless bastards. However they are vigorously spinning and briefing against the disabled, (over diagnosis, etc etc) to get public opinion in the right place before all hell gets unleashed, where as they are not briefing against women. Yet.

They don't seem to care about anything much. They will be absolutely toasted if they try to vote this SEND bill through and it succeeds; they will be loathed for decades on this alone.

She did well. It looks like a covid protest that a terf sneaked into!

Wow, thank you for the info @POWNewcastleEastWallsend - what a fecking cheeky mare! I hope someone knows who she is. Was she also the one wearing a hoody that said something about anti digital ID, or was that someone else?

I think Labour are trying to change the law to more 'gendered' spaces and single sex where absolutely necessary, like refuges. And changing toilets to gendered is more difficult than they anticipated.

It could be they are unnecessarily concerned about the 'passing TW' and the 'women who are always mistaken for men'. Something like truthful sex markers on id could solve that dilemma.

Labour didn’t put the GRA on the Queen’s Speech in 2003 so I doubt they’ll put anything like this on the King’s speech. Remember- it all has to be done by stealth because most people are against this… In 2003 they got the GRA put forward by the Lords the day after the Queens Speech - so we should be watching what’s coming through the Lords rather than the Commons?

She is a disgrace

I didn't know this.

They may also be waiting for the outcome of another court case? Even one that doesn't exist yet.

If only we lived in a world where a politician got promoted for doing their fucking job properly. Bridget Phillipson is an absolute ‘hole in the air’ as George Orwell put it, so she is right at home in the cowardly, venal shitshow that is the Labour Party.

All they'd have to do is define sex in the Act as meaning birth sex or acquired gender, so trans people would get two bites at the cherry, and Schedule 3 para 28 would kick in again to cover the refuges situation ( plus the Darlington case has established that mixed birth sex can be illegal sex discrimination but only depending on the facts of the case). We'd be back to square one.

They haven't done it yet though. I wonder if they could get it through. 40% of labour voters could be in favour, according to the Sex Matters survey, and I expect the plp to be more captured than that. They might need to fix other legislation as well, like the WR1992. That would be more conspicuous to the public.

I suspect you're right, and I suspect the release on the whole positive discrimination/to the front of the queue to the press is an attempt to spin this through, hiding the disability/sex/homosexuality changes. With the aim to then throw the guidance back to the EHRC and get them to start again with the new version of the law. If it gets through the HoC and HoL. And selling it as having cut the Gordian knot.

Except as the SCJ explains in very small words, it won't work, and it will just start a new wave of legal challenges. If there are any circumstances in which men can't be women, it's the same situation as now, the T lobby will go right on howling, and women will be able to continue to fight in court - and the ECtHR would also be interesting - that their needs, their access, their rights as a group which is separate and identifiable, cannot be met without equality of provision of single sexed spaces. It will be sex based discrimination. Fiddling the system against women to benefit a very small group of men who wish to use them.

I tend to think they won't. Granted the case against depends on the assumptions that Labour has a self-preservation instinct and a mature view of the law, quantities in which Labour under Starmer has shown itself to be deficient. But the case is roughly as follows - it's not sufficient to define sex in the act as "meaning birth sex or acquired gender" as there is law in which biological sex is clearly meant and can't be reconciled with acquired sex, including within the EA 2010 itself - the SC FWS judgement points this out explicitly and clearly. The original EA (and subsequent interpretation) tried to punt on this, leaving it ambiguous enough that judgement could be exercised on a case by case bases. But as the SC noted, that's not tenable - the supreme court was presented with apparent contradictions in the law and said the only way of resolving those contradictions was insisting biological sex meant sex in all cases.

Competent law demands that in the face of that judgement - that if Labour changes the definition of sex to mean both biological sex and acquired gender, that they then must explicitly harmonise that with the cases where treating sex as acquired gender is nonsensical. That harmonisation is a gigantic and politically fraught task. Failure to do the real work of harmonisation and simply changing a few words in the EA risks the SC rendering the exact same decision, noting the difficult position Parliament put them in by not passing reasonable law, because inherent contractions must still be resolved somehow, i.e. it's not sufficient for a legislature to say there is no contradiction by fiat.