As any sci-fi fan knows, the quickest way to fell a killer robot is with a logical paradox. Last week it turned out the same trick works on Bristol’s councillors. When residents asked how women’s legal rights can be squared with the council’s compulsion to “be trans-inclusive,” 18 Green Party representatives promptly blew a fuse and marched out.
One of the outspoken residents, local woman Katharine Rogers, was left stunned. She was among three people who reminded local politicians of their duty to uphold the law on single-sex spaces. “I was astonished when 18 out of the 27 Green councillors left the chamber in what seemed to be an orchestrated, quasi-religious political protest,” she said. “There were three statements about the rights and protection of women and girls from members of the public. The councillors left the chamber each time.” She says some smirked as they scuttled off.
Bristol City Council (BCC) seems to have decided it won’t enforce laws it dislikes. After the Supreme Court confirmed earlier this year that “sex” in the Equality Act means what everyone always knew it meant — biology — council leader Tony Dyer opined that the ruling “falsely pitted women’s safety against trans rights.” When the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued interim guidance, he complained that “the proposed language misgenders trans people and implies that their identities are not real, which is both inaccurate and discriminatory.”
Still, BCC clings to a July 2022 motion — “trans women are women and trans men are men” — as if mechanical sounding slogans could overwrite statute. The practical consequence is that the job of keeping the council legally compliant has fallen to ordinary Bristolians. It would be comforting to treat Bristol as an outlier, but similar failures are appearing across the British Isles: many local politicians seem unable to accept the Supreme Court’s clarification that “sex” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. Years of training and campaigning by trans-rights groups have left an institutional imprint; even as some of those organisations face scrutiny and funding pressure, their legacy persists. The result is a grotesque, robotic choreography — moronic politicians and officials marching in endless loops, incapable of recalibration and apt to glitch the moment a question falls outside the parameters of their programming.
Rogers highlighted the council’s own “inclusive” maternity guidance, which proposes replacing “women” with “people with ovaries” and “maternity” with “paternity.” She warned councillors: “The council will need to review and update its policies and procedures, but it’s clear the response was made without consulting women other than those aligned with gender ideology.” Another speaker described the practical consequences of this denial of equality law: “There are no longer any spaces for lesbians to meet. Lesbians suffer harassment from men identifying as women who claim a right to enter lesbian spaces in Bristol.”
Then came the killer question that undoes every “Queers for Palestine” drone. Stephen McNamara, the BCC’s former head of legal services, asked how the council planned to respect Muslim women’s right to single-sex spaces while indulging porn-sodden men who insist on stripping off in female changing rooms. Rather than engage, the Lord Mayor Cllr Henry Michallat branded the question “offensive” and tried to shut it down.
The Mayor and Green co-chair Heather Mack took turns silencing speakers. When McNamara raised the scenario of a bearded man who identifies as a woman joining a female running club, outrage erupted — not at the absurdity of self-inclusion policies which allow such cheating male perverts to race women, but at the audacity of pointing out the consequences.
The residents’ statements were calm, clear, and grounded in law. If councillors can’t hear the law without clutching their ethically sourced pearls, one wonders how they cope with potholes, budgets, or bin collections. What rattled Bristol’s Green councillors wasn’t wild hypotheticals but the awkward fact that these challenges were rooted in the black-and-white of the law, not to mention reality.
Local politicians behaved as if hearing people say “men can’t be women” was an act of violence. McNamara has now lodged an official complaint, arguing that councillors discriminated against residents, intimidated speakers, and brought the office into disrepute. He singles out Cllr Fraser, who boasted online that the walkout was “solidarity” with trans and non-binary staff, and Mack, who accused residents of comments “clearly intended to divide and hurt.” Both, he says, traduced law-abiding citizens exercising their democratic rights.
While councillors congratulate themselves on their “inclusivity,” women are reduced to “people with ovaries,” lesbians are expected to welcome predatory men, and council staff are left wondering whether expressing a protected belief will cost them their jobs.
Those entrusted to serve the public should stop flouncing out when confronted with uncomfortable truths
It should never have taken the courts to confirm that women are adult human females and that our rights matter, but it did. Now the challenge is to hold representatives at all levels, from town halls to Westminster, to account.
The time of “no debate” and performative offence is long over. Those entrusted to serve the public should stop flouncing out when confronted with uncomfortable truths and start doing the jobs they were elected to do. If politicians can’t process a simple statement of biological fact without short-circuiting, it’s time to send them back to the factory.
