Some extracts:
Reem Alsalem’s statement urged British politicians to uphold a ruling of their own Supreme Court, and observed that the backlash against it showed “how fragile the protection of women’s rights remains”. She closed by calling on the Government and the devolved administrations to state clearly that the law is clear and must be complied with.
The law is clear and must be complied with. A UN official had to say that sentence to the British Parliament. Every word of this article exists to explain why she had to, and to name the people responsible.
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Those 168 signatures were not an act of representation. They were an act of clientelism. The women in refuges were not consulted. The female prisoners were not consulted. The schoolgirls, the elderly women on mixed wards, the rape survivors for whom a female counsellor is the precondition of speaking at all: none of them were asked. The constituency being served was a lobby, and the lobbying machinery is not a conspiracy theory, it is on the public record. Whittome sits on the executive of the Trade Union Group of Labour MPs, the body through which the big unions carry policy into the Parliamentary Labour Party, and FiLiA’s trade union researchers have traced how the same unions now demanding the Equality Act be rewritten coordinated the push against the Code. The motion’s signatories included office-bearers of that very group.
And note who is missing from the 168: every single Conservative and Reform MP. Our liberal commentariat will tell you this proves the Code is right-wing. It proves the opposite. It proves the supposed party of labour handed the defence of working class women, gift-wrapped, to Nigel Farage. We warned in Pride And Fall what happens when the left vacates that ground. The 168 vacated it at a sprint.
Let me make the opponents’ argument better than they made it, because beating a strawman is a coward’s sport.
Their honest case runs: the Government’s own impact assessment accepted the Code would bear negatively on trans people; trans people are a small minority with genuine reason to fear public hostility; guidance that formalises their exclusion from opposite-sex spaces will make ordinary life harder for some of them; a decent Parliament should refuse to wave that through.
The premises are real and I do not mock them. The conclusion still collapses, three times over.
It collapses first on the law. The Supreme Court did not strip trans people of protection; the judgment explicitly reaffirms that gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic, alongside protection from sex discrimination. It collapses second on history. The Code invents nothing. The single-sex exceptions it restates have stood for half a century, written deliberately by Parliament because Parliament understood that women’s safety and privacy sometimes require male exclusion, however the male in question identifies. The court itself said the contrary reading would render those provisions “impractical, anomalous and illogical”. And it collapses third, fatally, on democracy. If you believe a law is wrong, you campaign to change it: openly, in a manifesto, before the voters. What you do not get to do is leave the law standing while strangling the guidance that makes it enforceable, so that the statute survives on paper and dies in every changing room in the country. That was the actual mechanism of EDM 65938. Whatever compassion motivated individual signatures, the mechanism was lawlessness dressed as kindness.
The unions understood the mechanism perfectly. Some of them were candid enough to say so out loud.
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The 2021 Census recorded around 262,000 people in England and Wales, half of one per cent of those over sixteen, identifying with a gender different from their registered sex, and the ONS itself warns the figure is likely inflated by respondents misreading the question. The number holding a gender recognition certificate, the legal instrument the For Women Scotland case actually turned on, is smaller still: 8,464 full certificates granted across the entire United Kingdom in the scheme’s first two decades, on the Ministry of Justice’s own figures.
Now the other side of the ledger: some thirty-four million women and girls, every one of whom will at some point rely on a single-sex space, whether a refuge, a ward, a changing room or a counselling room.
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So here is what our political class hopes you never compute. The most supported parliamentary motion since the pandemic, backed by the country’s biggest unions, its most famous human rights charity and 168 legislators, was mobilised to suppress statutory guidance whose contested cases concern a certificated population that would not fill a League Two football ground, while the thirty-four million on the other side of the door were never surveyed, never balloted, never so much as named in the union statements issued on their subscriptions. Every one of those 8,464 people retains, in full, the anti-discrimination protections the Supreme Court explicitly reaffirmed.
What they were never entitled to, and what the law has never granted, is entry to the spaces the other thirty-four million rely on. The emergency was manufactured. The constituency was invisible. That imbalance is the scandal, and it is a scandal of political priorities, nothing else.
Full article at https://labourheartlands.com/the-un-had-to-tell-britain-women-have-rights/
I've just quoted some of the paragraphs that stood out for me, but think it worth reading as a whole, although many of FWR have made these points.