This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
It’s more than a half-century since the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described recovery from grief as a five-stage process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. After the Supreme Court ruling that men who claim to be women don’t count as women for the purposes of equality law, it offers a handy way to track how gender ideologues are coping.
So far most are bouncing uncomprehendingly between the first two stages, with no sign they understand that their loss may prove fatal — presumably because it barely registered as a possibility beforehand. Three hours before the judgment was handed down, Jolyon Maugham — originally a tax barrister, then an anti-Brexit campaigner and now an evangelist for chemical castration of minors with puberty blockers — posted on Bluesky that his side would win because the law was “really pretty clear”. Strangely, in light of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the case, every lawyer JoMo knew apparently said it wasn’t even arguable.
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Stage one — denial — is led by the barrack room lawyers of X and Bluesky, who are merrily churning out legally illiterate hot takes. Amongst them is Stephen Whittle, a retired academic (and trans-identifying woman), who insisted the judgment changed nothing because the law hadn’t changed. That is axiomatic — whatever the Supreme Court ruled would by definition become the law as it always was — but misses the point. Since the judgment contradicted trans activists’ interpretation of the Equality Act, all policies based on that interpretation need to be torn up.
Stage two — anger — spilled off social media onto the streets. Trans-identifying men rallied with blue-haired young women, middle-aged virtue-signallers of both sexes and omnicause protesters taking a break from Just Stop Oil and Free Palestine.
Signs waved at a demo in Parliament Square called for the hanging of TERFs and the return of witch burning. One cross-dressing man wanted the world to know that his “pussy tastes like non-biological Fairy Liquid”. Two others brought a dog in a jacket declaring “I eat TERFs and I’m hungry”.
A middle-aged cross-dresser with fake boobs spilling out of a baby-doll dress explained to a passing videographer that he had used the ladies’ in Waterloo station on his way there. “I’m not going to stop,” he said. “If I walked into a men’s toilet looking like this, I’m just asking for trouble.”
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Nothing I can say about the violent, fetishistic narcissism at the heart of trans activism is half as persuasive as what trans activists say themselves. Every time they speak, they make it harder for all but the most gender-addled politicians to continue insisting that every “transwoman” is a vulnerable sweetie nobly coping with the tragic, albeit puzzlingly metaphysical, disability of having been born looking exactly like a man.
Depression, let alone acceptance, is far away — but the bargaining has started. Victoria McCloud, a trans-identifying man and retired judge, is fundraising with JoMo and Whittle to take a legal challenge on unspecified grounds. Their main beef is that even though McCloud and Whittle applied to intervene in the Supreme Court they were refused, and the court didn’t hear from “trans voices” (its job is statutory interpretation, not holding call-ins).
A few MPs are agitating for a change to the law (good luck; the judgment rested in part on the harm to women’s fundamental human rights caused by pretending men can be women, and any change to the law will have to account for that).
Dozens of open letters call on the government to do something; what precisely, none make clear. They warn of dire harm to “the trans community”, making offensive analogies with racial segregation, police entrapment of gay people and Section 28. It’s hard to remember, as you read, that what’s got the signatories (most of them artists and academics) so exercised is a court saying men with falsified paperwork don’t have the right to enter women’s spaces.
Again, all to the good. Academics making illogical and legally illiterate arguments are doing more to convince politicians of the need to slash funding for gender studies and the like than anything else.
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What might be the stages of victory? The first was certainly joy. It carried me through a series of post-judgment interviews in which one person after another asked me, “But what about the men?” I replied, with varying degrees of patience and tact, that my primary focus was the female half of humanity, which can now have truly women-only spaces, and not the petulant and angry men whose unreasonable demands have been humoured for far too long.
The joy made some men cross. Alastair Campbell whined to Rory Stewart, co-host on his centrist dad podcast, that despite the judges cautioning that the ruling wasn’t a “victory for one side”, after it was handed down women had had the cheek to smile and drink champagne.
Never mind that the judges said no such thing — they said no group in society was to be prioritised over another, and anyone who has been paying attention will know that’s a dig at trans activists, not women. What really delighted me was that this telling-off for being mean bitches was illustrated by a picture of me pouring bubbly for Marion Calder of For Women Scotland.
On the BBC, an interviewer told me off for failing to express sufficient sympathy for trans-identifying men who now don’t know where to pee — apparently I “don’t sound very sorry”. I certainly don’t, not when I was still delighted, and certainly not now that I’ve moved onto the second stage of victory: rage.
Rage at the colossal waste of time and at the obdurate stupidity and nastiness of the other side. At the fruitless attempts to get MPs to listen or get a hearing on mainstream broadcasters or in the left-wing press. Rage and grief at the stories of women bullied out of work for saying men can’t be women and of parents devastated at the harms done by gender doctors to their children. Before the victory I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of feeling it.
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Stage three is disbelief. The Supreme Court has spoken, it’s the country’s apex court and, unless and until a new law is passed, its word is quite literally law. If you put up a sign saying “men only” or “women only” — you commit sex discrimination, in other words — you can only do so under the “single sex exceptions” in the Equality Act, and it’s now clear that those refer to biological sex.
And yet police forces, NHS trusts and unions representing doctors, teachers, civil servants and academics are denying this, insisting they won’t comply and advising their members not to either. Who knew the country was run by such scofflaws?
The disbelief is tinged with fear. It’s sobering to realise how fragile our institutions are: both how easily internal activists have subverted them and how cowardly the regulators who should be punishing them are. Theorists of economic development make much of institution-building. Ours, it’s increasingly obvious, are decaying from within.
The fourth stage might be impatience — or maybe frustration. When I started this work I thought unrealistically, as many campaigners for women’s rights did, that ripping gender dogma out of public life might take a couple of years.
After discovering how deeply and widely it had spread, I feared that I was probably stuck doing it until retirement. For the first time since I’ve thought, what if I might actually do something else? Another book? One more foreign posting? The finish line is not yet in sight but is no longer unimaginable, and it’s hard to pace myself.
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I’m hesitating over naming the fifth and final stage, and perhaps won’t be able to choose until the enemies of sense, sanity and the rule of law have been beaten back considerably further. Resolve, perhaps: to keep going until the victory is complete.
Or maybe intransigence is closer to the mark. We gave an inch — sometimes under pressure, sometimes believing naively that we were being asked only for a minor, harmless accommodation — and they took ten thousand miles. We won’t be making that mistake again.
