The campaigners who won the Supreme Court battle over the legal definition of a woman have been inundated with death threats and misogynistic abuse since the landmark judgment. The Times has the story.
On Wednesday five judges sided with the campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS), which argued that single-sex spaces and protections should apply only to people born female. It marked the end of a long-running legal battle and is expected to have big implications for how transgender issues and sex-based rights are applied across Britain.
The public response has been highly polarised. The three women behind FWS’s campaign revealed they have since been subjected to an outpouring of hatred online. They also talked about how their opinions damaged their employment and business interests.
Messages sent to the organisation’s email address included one received hours after the ruling that said: “You’re a group of disgusting murderers and deserve death. God will rip you from your family one day and nobody will mourn you.”
Another read: “Your inhumanity makes me vomit. You stupid women should feel deeply ashamed for being so stupid.”
Susan Smith, one of the FWS campaigners, said: “It would never occur to us to send messages like this or to call our opponents ugly. But we get this every day.” Marion Calder, another of the three women, added: “Sadly, it is almost inevitable that women who speak up for our rights will be threatened by angry men. It’s a tale as old as the hills.
“Ironically, this lot think they are on the side of ‘progress’, ‘kindness’ and ‘human rights’, but they have no issue using the most dehumanising, sexist abuse or threatening the most extreme violence.
On Saturday several thousand protesters gathered in central London to demonstrate against the court ruling. In Parliament Square, close to the Supreme Court building, many waved the trans Pride flag and held handmade placards that criticised the government, particularly the health secretary, Wes Streeting.
Statues including that of Winston Churchill had Pride flags taped to their hands, and one of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett was defaced with a slogan. The Metropolitan Police said they were investigating acts of vandalism.
At mid-afternoon the crowd began an impromptu march through the roads around Parliament Square and Green Park, seemingly unhindered by the police and bringing traffic to a standstill. Demonstrators chanted slogans including “Wes Streeting, blood on your hands” and “F*** the judges, burn the courts”. Others chanted: “Trans liberation, no assimilation.”
The founder of Mumsnet claimed the parenting network had previously been “blacklisted” from hosting government advertising because of its stance on transgender issues.
Justine Roberts said the company discovered in early 2022 that the media agency that buys adverts for the government was no longer placing them on the site. Roberts, who believes the decision was overturned by officials working for Boris Johnson, the prime minister at the time, said: “We’re not anti-trans. But we believe women have a right to raise concerns about their sex-based rights.”
Trans activists targeted brands on social media, telling them not to advertise with Mumsnet, and tried to press the platform to “shut down” conversations about issues such as safeguarding of single-sex spaces.
“Things got particularly tough during Covid. We had to make some difficult decisions, including redundancies,” Roberts said. “We’d gone almost overnight from a world where saying there are two sexes was a commonplace view to one where stating that belief could be labelled as hateful. That kind of climate understandably made risk-averse companies jumpy … These days, advertisers rarely raise it.”
Worth reading in full.
