By Millie Collins and George Banks
Counterfire has responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling by capitulating before the wisdom of the justices, and downplaying the legitimate fears of transgender people. Counterfire feigns to stand above the fray, but in practice advocates accepting the ruling and abandoning the fight for trans equality.
In her article “Rights and Rulings” on Counterfire’s website, Elaine Graham-Leigh claims that the ‘Supreme Court decision is a chance to reset the debate and defend women’s and trans rights together.’ Yet at the same time she notes that the decision ‘has been greeted with jubilation by gender-critical feminists but alarm from trans-rights activists and others.’ How these two antagonistic groups can be brought ‘together’ or which class interests they represent is not explored.
Graham-Leigh argues that the ‘Supreme Court has not changed the law; it has clarified how the existing law should be interpreted’. She makes a distinction between ‘legal sex’ and ‘biological sex’, then claims the ‘confusion and ambiguity’ in the Equality Act was over these ‘two different interpretations’ of the word sex.
It is quite clear that ‘legal sex’ should form the basis of law, and ‘biological sex’ the basis of science and medicine. Not only has the law up to now overwhelmingly accepted at least those trans people with a Gender Recognition Certificate as members of their acquired sex, but so have most progressive organisations, from human and LGBT+ rights groups to trade unions and Labour councils. So why give reactionary interpretations equal status?
‘Ambiguous law is bad law,’ Graham-Leigh asserts. We agree, but if the ‘ambiguous law’ is replaced by a worse law, then we must oppose that regressive turn.
Gender critical feminists
Even though Counterfire never go as far as to say they explicitly support the ruling, they are clearly on the side of the gender critical feminists like For Women Scotland.
Graham-Leigh writes, ‘the perception that single-sex spaces [i.e. spaces reserved for cis or biological women] were not protected in law did mean that it was more difficult to assert our rights to these spaces where necessary’. This statement is transphobic.
Firstly, claiming that single-sex spaces need to be protected from trans women is a common calling card of both gender critical feminists and out-and-out reactionaries like Badenoch and Farage. Secondly, it passes without a thought over the rights of other, trans, non-binary women; they apparently can be outed and exposed to transphobic, misogynist and potentially violent men.
There is some recognition that the ruling will have reactionary consequences: ‘The respect and dignity which trans people have won over the last decades could indeed be lost, not because of what the law says about single-sex spaces, but if the consensus becomes that this ruling means that trans people don’t deserve equality.’
The idea that the law is neutral and a ‘consensus’ could be formed to interpret it one way or the other ignores the class forces that are driving this change in the law. This ruling is part of a wider rollback of progressive values and rights, being pursued by right-wing populist forces, like Trump, Farage or the AfD in Germany. Indeed it strengthens those forces and drags the ‘consensus’ to the right.
Throughout the article, Graham-Leigh never addresses the fact that, for trans people, the denial of their rights of self-identification undermines their very existence. She brushes away this defeat, saying,
‘Now that the position of single-sex spaces has been clarified, we need to make that true in practice by standing together both to assert women’s rights and trans rights in the face of the potential right-wing backlash.’
And how does she propose trans people do this? ‘One important fight for trans people, quietly dropped by Labour, is to make the process of getting a GRC simpler and less invasive’.
In other words, now that you have lost the right to be recognised in your acquired gender in almost all public spaces and sporting activities, with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate, let’s make the path to getting that practically worthless GRC simpler!
For those who claim to be revolutionary socialists to bow before the bourgeois courts and declare its bigoted rulings sacred; to stand idly by while the long fought for gains of a persecuted minority are stripped away; to declare their fight for equality to be over, that they limit their struggle to getting a certificate in case they are discriminated against… is a disgrace.
