Shock court victory gives real women a win against opponents of biology

Following prolonged judicial debate, Britain’s Supreme Court last week ruled that, in legally precise terms, women are women and men are men in an incredible win for reality, writes Tim Blair

Reality isn’t often a winner these days, so let’s enjoy a rare underdog victory while we can.

Following prolonged judicial debate, Britain’s Supreme Court last week ruled that, in legally precise terms, women are women and men are men. As such, under the UK’s Equality Act men cannot become women and should not be granted the rights and protections correctly and solely accorded to women.

“The judges have been absolutely clear that biological sex is real and it is binary,” UK Telegraph columnist Suzanne Moore wrote in celebration.

“This is not an attack on trans people but on largely heterosexual men barging into women’s spaces.”

It all makes sense, which in our present era is absolutely shocking. “Apart from being a statement of the obvious,” deservedly ubiquitous commentator Douglas Murray mused on US television, “isn’t it amazing that the best legal minds in Britain spent years having to work out the first thing we knew as a species?”

Yes, it is. But establishing basic reality is no easy task in the 2020s, so all credit to the feminist activists who fought against the pronoun police for so very long and were rewarded with that Supreme Court decision.

A “Trans Liberation Emergency Protest” in London was called following this week's UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex. Picture: Ben Montgomery/Getty Images

Harry Potter author JK Rowling wasn’t directly involved in the case, but she deserves particular notice for sticking with Team Reality when trans enforcers – including all those theatre munchkins Rowling made rich as Harry Potter stars – turned against her.

Rowling’s weapons in this battle were her obvious literary genius, potent logic and perhaps most importantly a sense of humour.

Marion Calder and Susan Smith from For Women Scotland celebrate outside the UK Supreme Court after the court ruled that a woman is someone born biologically female. Picture: AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Five years ago, infuriated by the female-erasing phrase “people who menstruate” being used in place of “women”, she wrote: “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Unable to respond with anything like the same creativity and wit, the US NBC network posted a 767-word news piece in which Rowling was denounced by reality opponents as exclusionary, hateful and disgusting.

That was the way of things under our gender-denying woke belief system, which in the wake of last week’s court decision and other social improvements now demands forensic review.

“Why did the mainstream so fully take leave of its senses, buying into a faddish mania?” asked Allister Heath, also in the UK Telegraph.

“Why were so many intelligent and powerful people so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for the truth and for reality, so willing to collaborate with a destructive, hysterical mob?

“Why were women so easily sacrificed on the altar of a totalitarian American-inspired belief system? Why were so many cancelled and pushed out of their jobs for daring to question an absurd orthodoxy?”

Victorian MP Moira Deeming was smeared as a Nazi associate and expelled from the Liberal party after speaking at a women’s rights rally, but has since won a defamation case and is now back in the party. Picture: NewsWire/Ian Currie

All great questions, and all significant in Australia, where businesswoman Sall Grover was taken to court after preventing a transgender woman from joining her female-only mobile app (Grover lost but is appealing);

Where columnist Julie Szego was dropped by The Age newspaper over her trans-critical views (she now publishes at Substack);

And where Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming was smeared as a Nazi associate and expelled from the parliamentary Liberal party after speaking at a women’s rights rally (she won a defamation court case last year against her main accuser, John Pesutto, who is now ex-leader of the Victorian Libs).

Interestingly, by which I mean horribly, senior old-school Liberals led by former state premier Jeff Kennett sided with Pesutto. Putting party ahead of biology, reason and fact, Kennett described Deeming’s allies as “disloyal, and perhaps even treacherous”.

This pattern is seen worldwide. Crazy leftists push wild, wrecking-ball notions into the mainstream, and frightened conservatives meekly go along with them.

In the UK, this meant sane leftists largely fought that Supreme Court gender battle without bipartisan support. “The defeat of gender ideology in the UK is now almost complete, and it was the left, not the right, that delivered it,” Heath wrote.

“Paradoxically, the greatest victory for conservatism since Brexit was engineered by a heroic gang of left-wing feminists.”

Good on them.

For their next sane move, reality advocates should maybe take aim at climate madness.

There’s an obvious parallel. Trans activists observe a static system known as the gender binary, claim that it’s variable, and then express alarm at entirely normal stasis.

And climate activists observe a variable system known as weather, claim that it’s static, and then express alarm at entirely normal variability.

Go for it, conservatives. In the UK, men are rightly being pushed out of women’s spaces. In Australia, we should be getting the hell out of Paris.

Originally published as Shock court victory gives real women a win against opponents of biology