One year on, we must continue to hope landmark Supreme Court ruling will end 'gender wars'

Everyone in the room knew the outcome would be monumental either way.

Would it be judged that women were protected in the Equality Act 2010 as adult human females, as the courageous women’s rights campaigners in that room had been insisting all along?

Or, was the legal definition of ‘woman’ – as the multi-headed hydra of online tormentors, hounders, berating politicians, the SNP government, zealous activist lobby groups, simpering self-identified ‘kind’ people, and those threatening women with violence insisted - actually ‘adult human females and some men with a “gender recognition” certificate saying they are one’?

Like many, I hoped the ruling that day, which was 100 per cent in women’s favour, would mark the beginning of an end to an intense, often horrifying era of attack on women defending their rights.

Contrary to the wailing of fractious gender activists, women like For Women Scotland, whose tenacity brought about the reconfirmation of women’s rights in the UK, have been campaigning so hard because they want an end to ‘the culture wars’ over this ludicrous issue.

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Those wars have been created by those who have very successfully forced or compelled people to go along with the untruth that sex doesn’t matter when it very much does. Who have declared ‘woman’ is a subjective category rather than a material reality. It has been as damaging to social cohesion and collective sanity as insisting tables are horses or that 2+2=5.

So, one year ago, jubilant at the unanimous ruling from the highest court in the land that women are female and have rights on that basis, I filed my report and headed to the pub with a group of campaigners, supporters, and a good few male allies.

First, though, a group holding the banner ‘Women Won’t Wheesht’ gathered for a photoshoot in Princes Street Gardens. I stood off to the side, watching, having always viewed myself as a writer rather than much of a campaigner.

A couple who looked to be in their twenties walked past. Good looking, foppish, the bearded young gent groaned to his partner, ‘Oh GOD, not THEM’ when he saw the jubilant women being snapped by the press.

His disdainful tone and obvious contempt at their joy was an early sign that being correct all along was going to be held against the courageous women who have fought so hard to re-protect the rights that have always been ours.

Let’s be honest: it has never been particularly fashionable to defend women’s rights, or to be a feminist. Everyone is finding out exactly where they would have stood in comparable times when women’s rights were denied or under attack.

Otherwise decent women rendered toothless

That young man likely isn’t a direct hounder of women. He’s probably one of the majority who have turned away from this issue, or sneered from the sidelines about those who care about it. His partner, meanwhile, might well be one of the many women secretly relieved her right to single-sex spaces and services have been reconfirmed by FWS’s successful campaigning.

But – as I’m afraid I’ve encountered many times, including from women who think of themselves as feminists in all other instances – the fear of being branded a ‘TERF’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist) or, God forbid, being seen as unfashionably strident has rendered otherwise decent women toothless this past decade.

The year since the Supreme Court judgment has been frustrating, and frequently angering.

As my colleague Susan Dalgety wrote at the weekend, the political intransigence and feet-dragging from both the UK Labour and Scottish SNP governments are astonishing.

We are now three days away from the one year anniversary of the seismic SC ruling. It has been 221 days since the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) sent the UK Labour government’s women’s minister Bridget Phillipson its subsequent draft guidance on single-sex spaces. She has still refused to table it in parliament.

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Last week also saw an election hustings organised by government-funded charities the Equality Network, Scottish Trans and LGBT Youth Scotland. Journalist Rebecca McCurdy, attending to report on it as is the role of a free press in a democratic society, was initially told she wasn’t permitted to, and asked to leave.

Given these organisations are publicly-funded, she rightly refused.

On the panel, Kaukab Stewart, the equalities minister, repeated the line the SNP ‘accepts’ the SC ruling, but insisted they had to wait for said guidance from the EHRC. This, despite EHRC chair Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson explicitly informing the Scottish government they don’t have to wait for guidance to act on the crystal-clear judgment.

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These tired lines and complacency have characterised the political response to For Women Scotland’s victory. Meanwhile, the cultural antagonism continues. On Saturday, women protested in several UK cities at the lack of action from the government, and were greeted with trans flag waving counter-protestors, shouting insults and blaring hateful anti-feminist messages.

Holding tight to that feeling of euphoria I experienced on 16 April last year has not been easy. A dazzling ignorance from many framed FWS’s success as ‘anti trans’, when the victory was for women, with the case fought on that basis.

For those who lament the ‘gender wars’, it’s time to recognise it isn’t the women fighting against them at fault for causing them. One year on, I’d prefer to be writing about how an important Supreme Court judgment ended them. It should have. And, despite foppish, fashionable opposition, and the inaction of irresponsible ministers, we must hope it still might.