We still need to get gender ideology out of schools

Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash

I am late to it but I want to put on record how much I welcome last week’s Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biogical sex. At a time when common sense can seem to be in short supply, it was a relief to hear such a simple statement of the truth. I am grateful to the brave and tenacious For Women Scotland and all the campaigners who supported them.

Many droll commentators have pointed out how funny it is that such a judgement was ever needed. It’s 2025 and it takes the Supreme Court to tell us what a woman is - hilarious! But it was necessary. So many women have been bullied and threatened, lost their livelihoods or been questioned by the police for saying exactly what the Supreme Court judge declared last week. Their experiences speak to the necessity and significance of this ruling.

Compared to some, I came off lightly in the gender wars. For defending women’s sex based rights, I was no-platformed on more than one occasion. Dealing with petitions and protests is exhausting but fun and always generates good publicity. I have long since learnt to ignore social media abuse and I’ve found that, when I do, those dishing it out quickly get bored. More significantly, one of the factors that contributed to me resigning from my role at the University of Kent after more than a decade as an academic was that complaints from people outside of the university about things I had written on gender being ‘in breach of the Equality Act’ were always taken deadly seriously. I was spending more time explaining myself to managers than working.

The Supreme Court judgement shows I never had a case to answer. While I’ve never once regretted leaving academia, I certainly miss the salary and pension! And what cannot be quantified are the speaking and publishing invitations and employment opportunities I never received in the first place.

If we need more evidence of the significance of the Supreme Court judgement we have only to look at Keir Starmer. For all his knighthood and professional qualifications, our cowardly Prime Minister needed a declaration from lawyers before he was able to state the truth about women being adult females.

Sir Keir has clearly been on a journey. Not that long ago he announced to the world that it was not right to say that only women have a cervix. Even more recently he declared that some women do indeed have a penis. If these views were so lightly held they can readily be shaken off, how can we trust what he says now?

We should welcome the Supreme Court ruling. But we must also ask: what happens now?

Starmer has issued no apology for the real harm that views he espoused have caused to women and children. There has been no gracious message for his erstwhile Labour colleague Rosie Duffield. There has been no credit given to J.K. Rowling despite the fact she remains a target for death threats. Neither has Starmer acknowledged Kellie-Jay Keen who was investigated by the police and subjected to vile abuse for uttering the very same words Starmer now pretends he believed all along. If we are to accept that shameless Starmer has changed his mind about what it means to be a woman then some contrition for past mistakes would be a credible first step.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen. Instead, Labour’s front bench has turned gas lighting into an art form. Women and Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, told the House of Commons: ‘This Government will continue, as before, working to protect single-sex spaces based on biological sex, now with the added clarity of this ruling.’ She added: ‘I know how important it is, and always was to survivors, to have single-sex spaces based on biology, places of safety after trauma.’ Please! Such dishonesty shows nothing but contempt for the public.

Our institutions cannot bend the truth so readily. Take the NHS. In London, transgender hospital patients can access every women-only space available. Female patients and staff alike are forced to share bathrooms, changing facilities and hospital wards with trans-identifying men. Across the country, women have been subjected to labels like ‘pregnant people’, ‘uterus havers’ and ‘chest feeders’. Pronoun badges and rainbow lanyards have become commonplace.

That women at their most vulnerable can be put at risk or subjected to indignity in this way reveals the extent to which gender ideology has taken root within our public institutions. After the Supreme Court judgement, we must go through every social and cultural institution and unpick policies and practices that prioritise gender over sex and permit biological males access to female only spaces. We must also stop promoting the fiction that it is possible for a person to change sex.

This will be a huge task but it is vitally important if we are to reassert women’s rights and protect children from mutilating surgery. If the government is at all serious about recognising the Supreme Court judgement, it must begin this work immediately. Never again must any woman be made to stand up in court and refer to a rapist as ‘she’, made to undress in front of a man at the end of a long shift, be incarcerated alongside men convicted of sexual assault or receive intimate care from a male carer against her wishes.

Undoing all this will be difficult and time consuming. But it is possible.

Far more complicated is the process of unpicking children’s minds. For the best part of a decade now, schools have indoctrinated children to think that gender is multiple and fluid. Through assemblies, ‘awareness raising’ campaigns and sex and relationships classes, children have been taught that whether you are a boy or a girl is not a matter of basic biology but simply a question of how you feel. They have been taught that breasts can be bound, names changed and new pronouns adopted. They have been taught that being kind means allowing boys into girls’ changing rooms. They have been taught that girls take second place to entitled boys in sporting competitions.

A whole cohort of children has been subjected to this dangerous thinking. In her role as Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson needs to take time off from gas lighting the nation and urgently send instruction to schools to stop such teaching with immediate effect.

Those of us who have fought the gender wars cannot afford to relax now. One very real danger seems to be that in schools in particular, rather than telling children the hard truth about biology, gender neutrality becomes the order of the day. Many schools have already introduced unisex toilets, gender neutral uniforms and refer to ‘children’ or ‘young people’ rather than ‘boys’ and ‘girls’.

This is not good enough. Children are not gender neutral beings. They are boys and girls. And as the Supreme Court now confirms, boys will grow up to become men and girls to be women. This is something to celebrate, not to wish away.

This weekend saw despicable scenes of rage as entitled transgender activists took to the streets to protest against women’s rights. To put an end to this madness once and for all, we need a proper reckoning with how this irrational and inhumane ideology ever managed to take such deep roots in our society.