Disgust Is Not a Policy.
Transgender Identity and the Argument beneath the Argument.
In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court gave gender-critical campaigners much of what they had spent years demanding. In For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, the Court held unanimously that the words man, woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The Court’s reasoning was not that trans people have no rights under the Act. Quite the opposite: it explicitly affirmed that trans people remain protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment, and may also be protected in other ways by sex discrimination and harassment provisions. But on the central interpretive question, the Court was clear. For the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means biological sex.
That clarification has now moved from judgment into institutional guidance. On 21 May 2026, the Minister for Women and Equalities laid the EHRC’s updated Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations before Parliament. Unless Parliament disapproves it within the review period, the code will come into force as statutory guidance. The EHRC’s own summary says that, for Equality Act purposes, a person’s legal sex is the sex recorded at birth, and that obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change that position under the Act.
So here we are. The law has, in important respects, caught up with the gender-critical argument. Biological sex is now treated as the operative category for the Equality Act. Single-sex provision can be organised on that basis. Organisations have been told to take a practical and proportionate approach to toilets, changing rooms, services, associations and public functions.
One might have expected that to settle something.
It has not.
Instead, it has exposed the argument beneath the argument.
What are we Talking About?
This is not a piece about whether sex ever matters. Of course sex matters. It matters in medicine, some sports, pregnancy and maternity, sexual violence, intimate care, and some forms of single-sex provision. There are contexts involving trauma, coercion, undress, vulnerability, privacy or bodily risk where it is not merely permissible to notice sex, but negligent not to. A liberal and tolerant society does not have to pretend that these things are irrelevant. In fact, it would probably become less liberal and less tolerant if it did.
Nor is single-sex provision inherently irrational. There are women who have survived male violence and who have good reasons to experience some spaces differently from others. There are service providers who have to make difficult decisions under competing legal, ethical, and practical obligations. There are institutions that must weigh inclusion against privacy, dignity, risk, feasibility, evidence and the needs of particular users. These are not imaginary problems. They cannot be resolved by slogans, however inclusive the slogan sounds.
But that is precisely the point. There is a difference between sex-conscious policy and disgust-conscious politics.
Sex-conscious policy asks a set of disciplined questions, critically and on a case-by-case basis. What is this service for? Who uses it? What risks are actually present? What does the law require? What does the evidence suggest? What alternatives are available? What would exclusion achieve? Who would be harmed by inclusion? Who would be harmed by exclusion? Is the rule proportionate to the aim?
Disgust-conscious politics does something else. It begins with a bodily flinch, then goes looking for a principle grand enough to dignify it. It starts with discomfort around a person’s voice, face, clothes, body, name, mannerisms or self-description, and then retrofits that discomfort into arguments about safeguarding, feminism, children, free speech, science or ‘reality’. The policy language may be serious, but the emotional engine is often something older, uglier, and harder to admit.
That distinction matters because the trans debate is now full of people who speak as though they are doing one thing while plainly doing another. They say they are defending women’s rights, but keep returning to the physical revulsion they feel towards trans women. They say they are protecting children, but talk about gender-questioning young people as though they are symptoms of a social ill. They say they are defending reality, but use reality as a polite synonym for disbelief in another person’s social existence.
This is not true of everyone who holds a gender-critical position. That needs saying clearly. Some people have serious, bounded, good-faith concerns about the interaction between sex and gender identity in law. Those concerns should be argued with, not psychoanalysed away. But it is also dishonest to pretend that all anti-trans rhetoric sits in that register. A great deal of it does not. A great deal of it is not policy reasoning at all. It is the politics of recoil.
The old analogy here is with the anti-gay rhetoric I grew up listening to in the years either side of the millennium, when the gay age of consent and later the issue of marriage equality were the ‘culture war’ of the age. The argumentative machinery is often strikingly familiar; one vulnerable out-group is presented as the thin end of the wedge for some larger horror.
‘If gay people are allowed to marry, the sanctity of marriage will be undermined and the family unit will collapse.’ (What does this mean?)
‘If gay men are allowed to adopt, what will it do to the children?’ (Implying that either gay parents would indoctrinate ‘their’ children to be gay too, or - more sinisterly - that this would erode the protection of children and enable paedophiles.)
‘What, will people marry their dogs next?’ (No, because there’s a world of moral difference between consenting adults and schnauzers.)
The claim is rarely just that this particular group wants something. It is that granting rights to one group is somehow transactional with another, and will open the door to predators, corruption, contagion or civilisational decay in some form or another.
This does not mean every contemporary concern about trans rights is equivalent to old-fashioned homophobia. But it does mean we should recognise the pattern. Moral panics often work by smuggling an older disgust response into a newer public vocabulary. Nobody says, or at least nobody respectable says, I want the law to enforce my revulsion. They say they are thinking of the children. They say they are protecting the vulnerable. They say common sense has been outlawed by fanatics. They say there is a silent majority. They say they are only asking questions, usually while standing next to a very large pile of answers.
The point is not that predators do not exist. They do. The point is that predators become rhetorically useful. The imagined faux-transgender male predator in a wig, lurking in a women’s toilet, is asked to do a suspicious amount of political work. They stop being merely a risk to be assessed. They become a symbolic solvent, dissolving distinctions between trans women, abusive men, cross-dressers, sex offenders, drag queens, identity-testing adolescents, Stonewall, queer theory, gender clinics, university HR departments and whatever someone on Twitter said yesterday. Once the panic is fully assembled, all of these become parts of one shadowy machine.
That is not safeguarding. That is folk horror.
Spaces and Gender.
The issue with toilet panic is not that safety is irrelevant. Women’s safety is obviously relevant. So are privacy and dignity. The problem is that the public version of the argument often bears only a loose relationship to practical safeguarding. A serious policy discussion would ask what kinds of facilities are being discussed, who uses them, how they are supervised, what evidence exists about risk, whether single-user provision is available, and how staff should respond to harassment or assault. It would distinguish between a school changing room, a nightclub toilet, a hospital ward, a domestic abuse refuge, a leisure centre, and a small workplace with two lockable cubicles in a corridor.
Instead, we often get a morality play about toilets. On one side, helpless women and girls. On the other, trans women treated less as people than as an aperture through which an unrestrained male violence will pour.
The evidential basis for that panic is thin. One US study found no evidence that gender identity non-discrimination laws increased criminal incidents in restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms, though one should be cautious about importing American evidence wholesale into a British legal context. More importantly, even if risk varies by setting, the answer cannot simply be to treat all trans presence as predatory presence. That is exactly the slippage that good policy exists to prevent.
The serious question is not whether every trans woman must be admitted to every women’s space in every circumstance. That absolutism is politically fragile and practically unhelpful. The serious question is what justifies exclusion in a particular setting. A rape crisis service working with traumatised women may reach one conclusion. A public library toilet may reach another. A changing room in a small leisure centre may require a third solution altogether.
The government’s own framing of the draft code emphasises practical, proportionate decision-making, safety, dignity and freedom from harassment. That is what the debate should be about. Not whether trans women make some people uncomfortable. Not whether someone can imagine a lurid scenario. Not whether a boundary feels emotionally satisfying. What rule is justified here, for this purpose, with these effects?
Think of the Children!
The same distinction applies, even more urgently, to children.
Here, the argument is genuinely difficult. Anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. The Cass Review has changed the terrain. NHS England’s implementation plan states that children and young people’s gender services are being redesigned around a more holistic model of care, and that there is insufficient knowledge about who may benefit from medical interventions. It also says that such treatments, where considered, should be available through carefully constructed research arrangements to build a better evidence base. In December 2024, the government announced that restrictions on puberty blockers for under-18s would be made indefinite, citing advice from the Commission on Human Medicines and the Cass Review’s concerns about the evidence base.
None of this should be brushed aside. Clinical caution is not moral panic. Evidence matters. Children’s healthcare should be careful, especially where interventions may have long-term consequences and where the evidence base is contested. There are legitimate questions about social transition, medicalisation, waiting lists, comorbid distress, family dynamics, safeguarding, consent, clinical governance, detransition, and how to support young people without either rushing or abandoning them.
But clinical caution is not the same thing as cultural panic.
Clinical caution says: the evidence is uncertain, the stakes are high, and care pathways need reform.
Cultural panic says: trans children are proof that society has gone mad.
Clinical caution asks how to support distressed young people safely.
Cultural panic asks who infected them.
Clinical caution is interested in service design, data, follow-up, risk, consent and therapeutic support.
Cultural panic is interested in villains.
This is where the rhetoric becomes dangerous. The figure of the child is almost always the most powerful weapon in a moral panic. Children are vulnerable. Children are suggestible. Children can be harmed. All of that is true. But precisely because it is true, think of the children arguments require more discipline, not less. Otherwise, children become rhetorical hostages. Their vulnerability is used to end the argument rather than improve it.
There is a good version of the concern about children. It worries that some young people may be medicalised too quickly. It worries that gender distress may sometimes be entangled with trauma, autism, sexuality, sexism, homophobia, body image, depression or social contagion. It worries that institutions may adopt affirming language without a sufficiently robust clinical framework behind it. These are serious concerns.
There is also a bad version. It imagines trans identity as a contagion spreading through schools, TikTok, activist teachers, weak parents and fashionable ideology. It treats young people not as complex human beings in distress, but as evidence of a decadent culture. It is less interested in helping children than in prosecuting the adults it already disliked.
Again, the distinction matters. A society can be cautious about puberty blockers without becoming cruel to transgender and gender-questioning children. It can insist on evidence without turning every trans adult into a groomer, every supportive parent into a fanatic, and every gender-questioning teenager into a dupe. The tragedy of the present debate is that too many people seem to regard these distinctions as evasions. They are not evasions. They are the minimum conditions of thought.
What is Really Real?
Then there is reality.
Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls is subtitled Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Stock’s central claim, broadly put, is that biological sex has material significance and that gender identity theory should not override it in contexts such as law, data, healthcare and women-only provision. There is a serious argument there. Bodies matter in a whole host of contexts. Reproductive sex matters. Law cannot function if its categories become completely detached from the purposes for which they exist. Medicine cannot be run on vibes. Data collection cannot be subordinated entirely to politeness. Feminism, if it is to mean anything material, must be able to talk about female embodiment, male violence, pregnancy, menstruation, sexual dimorphism and the social meaning attached to sexed bodies.
The problem is not the word reality in itself. The problem is what it can be made to imply.
In a careful argument, reality means constraint. It means that not every subjective claim can settle every institutional question. It means that law and medicine need categories stable enough to do their work.
In a careless argument, reality means dismissal. It means: you are not what you say you are. It means: your identity is make-believe. It means: I will tolerate your costume, perhaps, but not your claim on the shared world.
The difference is not small. One is a claim about institutional limits. The other is a claim about social illegitimacy.
This is where high-profile progressive women in the gender-critical debate have often been most revealing. Germaine Greer has not merely argued that womanhood should be defined by sex. She has done so with a relish for bodily disparagement, famously describing trans women in terms that linger on voice, hair, hands, physical incongruity, and a dehumanising “it”. The argument is not simply I disagree with this legal category. It is look at this body. The disgust is not incidental. It is part of the performance.
"On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem."
J. K. Rowling’s rhetoric is more complicated, and it is worth being fair about that. In her 2020 essay, she wrote that trans people deserve protection and acknowledged the vulnerability of trans women, particularly those exposed to male violence. She has also argued, repeatedly, that sex matters, that women’s spaces matter, and that women should not be punished for saying so. I don’t believe those claims can simply be waved away as transgender hatred.
But Rowling’s public argument also repeatedly returns to the idea that recognising trans women as women opens the door to any man who wishes to enter women’s spaces. Her 2019 support for Maya Forstater framed the issue around whether women were being forced out of jobs for saying that “sex is real”. The trouble is not that sex is real is false. It is that the phrase functions as though it settles questions it has barely begun to ask. Sex is real. But so is gender dysphoria. So is gender-affirming care. So is social transition. So is violence against women. So is violence against trans people. So are privacy, dignity, law, fear, trauma, recognition and disgust. Reality is not a single trump card. It is the whole difficult mess.
Greer, Stock and Rowling are not the same thinker, and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise. Greer often sounds openly contemptuous. Stock is more philosophical and institutional. Rowling writes as a survivor of male violence and as a public campaigner who sees herself as defending women from a misogynistic ideology. Their arguments differ in tone, seriousness and object.
But across much of this terrain, the same slide recurs. A legitimate point about the role of sex as a category boundary becomes a general suspicion of trans identity. A concern about safeguarding becomes a lurid fantasy of invasion. A defence of reality becomes a licence to treat other people’s lives as delusion. The argument begins with policy and ends with metaphysical exasperation at the existence of trans people at all.
The Argument Beneath the Argument.
It is not enough, in a liberal society, to say that someone makes you uncomfortable. Many people make many other people uncomfortable. Gay couples make some people uncomfortable. Public displays of affection make some people uncomfortable. Masculine women make some people uncomfortable. Feminine men make some people uncomfortable. Disabled bodies make some people uncomfortable. Religious clothing makes some people uncomfortable. Neurodivergent behaviour makes some people uncomfortable. The sight of poverty makes some people uncomfortable. Ageing makes some people uncomfortable. Public grief makes some people uncomfortable. The human body, in most of its actual biological and social variety, is a near-endless affront to those who feel they were promised a tidy world where everyone would be basically just like them.
Some of this discomfort may be understandable. That does not make it authoritative. Disgust is a real human response, but it is a terrible political philosopher. It is quick, certain, embodied, and almost always convinced of its own innocence. It tells us that what repels us must be wrong, and that what unsettles us must be dangerous. It gives us moral clarity at the exact moment we should be most suspicious of ourselves.
This is why the progressive self-image matters. There is something especially jarring about people who have spent their intellectual lives criticising oppression, essentialism, moral panic and patriarchal control, only to become so incurious about their own recoil when the subject is trans people. Feminism at its best is not merely the defence of one’s own category. It is a discipline of critical attention to power.
The law has now clarified some things. It has not clarified everything, it has muddied some things (particularly the legal status of gender, which now sits in a sort of limbo) and it certainly has not absolved us of the need to think. There will still be hard cases. There will still be bad policies, bad-faith activists, frightened institutions, confused guidance, opportunistic politicians, and people who would rather shout adult human female or trans women are women until the room empties, than do the miserable work of institutional design.
But if we are going to have the argument, we should at least have the real one.
The real argument is not whether sex ever matters. It does.
The real argument is not whether women’s safety matters. It does.
The real argument is not whether children’s healthcare should be evidence-led. It must be.
The real argument is whether those truths justify the wider cultural-political project now being built around them: a project in which trans people are treated not merely as participants in difficult policy questions, but as symbols of suspicion, fraud, danger, unreality and social decay.
That is where the line should be drawn.
A liberal society cannot be built on the rule that nobody must ever encounter a person whose body, identity, name, pronouns, or existence makes them uncomfortable. Discomfort is real. It may even be understandable. We are all, in one way or another, carrying the prejudices of the world that made us. But discomfort is not, by itself, an argument.
And it is certainly not enough to carry the moral weight that anti-trans rhetoric keeps asking it to bear.
Sources
UK Supreme Court, For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, press summary.
Used for the opening legal context: the Court’s 2025 ruling that ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, while also noting that trans people retain protection under the characteristic of gender reassignment. (https://supremecourt.uk/cases/press-summary/uksc-2024-0042)
House of Commons Library, ‘Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act 2010: For Women Scotland’.
Useful as a clearer parliamentary briefing on what the judgment did and did not do; especially the point that the ruling gave an authoritative interpretation of the existing law rather than formally changing the statute. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10259/)
EHRC, ‘UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act: our work’.
Used for the 2026 update: the EHRC’s account of how it has responded to the Supreme Court ruling, including the statement that legal sex for Equality Act purposes is sex recorded at birth and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change this for Equality Act purposes. (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/our-work/uk-supreme-court-ruling-meaning-sex-equality-act-our-work)
EHRC, ‘Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations’.
Used to establish the procedural status of the updated code: laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026, subject to the 40-day review period, and intended to become statutory guidance once commenced. (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/codes-practice/code-practice-services-public-functions-and-0)
GOV.UK, ‘Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations 2026’.
Used for the discussion of practical, proportionate decision-making by service providers, and for the distinction between serious sex-conscious policy and symbolic boundary-making. (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/equality-act-2010-draft-code-of-practice-for-services-public-functions-and-associations-2026/equality-act-2010-draft-code-of-practice-for-services-public-functions-and-associations-2026)
NHS England, ‘Children and young people’s gender services: implementing the Cass Review recommendations’.
Used for the section on children and clinical caution, especially the shift towards redesigned, holistic gender services and the post-Cass emphasis on evidence, safety and service reform. (https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/children-and-young-peoples-gender-services-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations/)
GOV.UK, ‘Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice’.
Used in the discussion of puberty blockers and youth transition pathways, following the Government’s December 2024 decision to make restrictions indefinite. (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ban-on-puberty-blockers-to-be-made-indefinite-on-experts-advice)
House of Commons Library, ‘Hormone treatments for children and young people: Clinical guidance, policies and regulation’.
Useful for the most compact current-policy summary: restrictions on puberty blockers, review planned for 2027, and NHS England’s 2026 consultation on stopping routine prescription of gender-affirming hormones to children and young people. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10596/)
Hasenbush, Flores and Herman, ‘Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Laws in Public Accommodations’.
Used cautiously in the spaces/toilets section as evidence from the US context that gender identity non-discrimination laws were not associated with increased criminal incidents in restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms. (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rs4n6h0)
Williams Institute summary of the same public accommodations study.
A more accessible source for the same point: it summarises the finding that inclusion of gender identity in non-discrimination laws did not affect the number or frequency of criminal incidents in the relevant facilities. (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/ma-public-accommodations/)
Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.
Used as a primary example of the ‘reality’ argument: I try to treat Stock as making a serious philosophical and institutional case about sex, gender identity theory, and feminism, while criticising the way ‘reality’ can slide from institutional constraint into social dismissal. (https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kathleen-stock/material-girls/9780349726595/)
J. K. Rowling, ‘J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues’.
Used as a primary example of Rowling’s own framing of her position, including her arguments about sex, women’s spaces, vulnerability, safeguarding and her personal experience of male violence. (https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/)
J. K. Rowling, 2019 Maya Forstater tweet.
Used as a compact example of the slogan-like function of ‘sex is real’ in the public debate: a phrase that is not false, but which often operates as though it settles much more than it actually does.
Germaine Greer, ‘On Why Sex Change is a Lie’ / quoted extracts.
Used as the clearest example of rhetoric that moves beyond policy disagreement into bodily disgust, particularly Greer’s appalling description of a trans woman in terms of voice, clothing, hands and physical revulsion. (https://www.artandpopularculture.com/On_Why_Sex_Change_is_a_Lie)