Laddie or lady?

How many times do I have to tell foreign visitors that Scottish men don’t wear skirts?

It’s kilts, chaps, not skirts, and, if anything, wearing them makes those Scots more, rather than less, masculine. Alas, they are all too eager to prove that by wearing nothing underneath and raising their hems over their heads at the slightest provocation.

The laddie doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would say – but I won’t. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to the landmine ruling… no, make it the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court.

That august body boasts a fine tradition of judicial review going back all the way to, well, 2009, when Tony Blair, PM at the time, somehow found the traditional parliamentary institutions wanting. That was part of his assault on Britain’s constitution, in the course of which he created the Supreme Court, a redundant and therefore harmful body.

This time around, however, that appellate court got things almost right by ruling that: “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.” In other words, a conversion from laddie to lady isn’t legally recognised.

Or is it? In handing down the judgement, Lord Hodge threw a smokescreen of waffle around it: “The Equality Act gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and harassment, in substance in their acquired gender.”

First, the Court talks about sex being either-or binary, then it decries discrimination against “their acquired gender”. I am confused, but then I find modernity generally confusing.

On the plus side, those strapping lads who have replaced their kilts with skirts, with or without parallel alterations underneath, won’t be admitted to women’s lavatories and dressing rooms. Those .001 per cent of British women who, according to Sir Keir Starmer, have penises, are men in the eyes of the law.

The issue came to a head in Scotland, whose devolved government (another Blair contrivance) mandated that any public board should have 50 per cent female representation. That raised a question that in the recent past wouldn’t have occurred to any sane person: What constitutes a woman?

According to the Scottish government, anyone in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) was a woman who must be treated as such under the 2010 Equality Act. The Scottish courts rubber-stamped the decision in 2023, which had wide-ranging implications for the whole UK.

Characteristically, mad laws can these days be challenged only by half-mad people, in this case radical feminist and lesbian groups. Normal people, those who rely on millennia of tradition, evidence before their eyes, science, and also moral and aesthetic judgement, are effectively disfranchised in such cases.

Someone who looks and sounds like Jacob Rhys-Mogg wouldn’t be able to share with the public his views on the matter, which I suspect are no different from mine. He’d be heckled, shouted down, possibly assaulted. And his political career would be over.

But wild-eyed, bra-burning zealots, riding into battle with their pronoun weapons at the ready, enjoy quite a bit of latitude. They worship at the altar of a different piety espousing equally respectable but different perversions, which earns them a share of voice.

Using that privilege, Marion Calder, co-director of the feminist group that launched the successful challenge against the Scottish government, said the ruling delighted “the vast majority of women across Great Britain”.

I’m happy for them, but I’m neither a feminist nor even a woman, although I have been trying to get in touch with my feminine side (unsuccessfully, according to Penelope). And, according to Miss Calder, men have no dog in this fight. The issue of public decency and indeed sanity doesn’t come into it. It’s all about women’s rights.

She then went out of her way to make sure her delight wouldn’t be misconstrued: “In day to day life, you can go around and it doesn’t really matter what your sex is. But in certain circumstances it is very important, such as prisons or women’s sport, changing rooms or rape crisis centres. This is where it’s actually important.”

Particularly for a certain sub-set of womankind: “Especially for the lesbians who intervened in this case, if they hadn’t actually won today it would have been illegal for lesbians, or gay men, to have a group of more than 25 people if they didn’t admit the opposite sex and we’d have the ridiculous notion of a lesbian with a penis.”

A straight woman with a penis, on the other hand, is perfectly all right, provided she doesn’t try to sneak into a women’s dressing room. Am I missing something or has the world gone mad?

My conviction that it’s the latter was reinforced by Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance, who said: “The ruling confirms that the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ refer to same-sex sexual orientation and makes it absolutely clear that lesbians wishing to form associations of any size are lawfully entitled to exclude men – whether or not they possess a GRC.”

Earlier I described the Supreme Court ruling as a “landmine” decision, and it wasn’t just indulging my propensity for playing on words. Call me selfish, insensitive and reactionary, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying about transsexuals stealing lesbians’ thunder.

As framed and communicated urbi et orbi, this wishy-washy ruling is exactly what one would expect from a redundant legal body designed as a weapon against our ancient constitution.

The Court should have stated that the issue isn’t about transsexuals entering women’s lavatories or tennis tournaments, and it’s not about protecting the exclusive same-sex rights of lesbians.

The situation is simple, so simple in fact that it should never have reached the jurisdiction of an appellate court: a laddie can call himself a lady, have his manhood snipped off (or not, as the case may be) and swap his kilt for a skirt. But in the eyes of the law and society he remains a man, full stop.

And if he is still a man, it should go without saying, and certainly without a Supreme Court decision, that he can’t enter spaces reserved for women. Anyone who says otherwise should have not just his genitals but also his head examined.

As it is, this landmine ruling leaves plenty of room for further challenges, meaning that the mental disease afflicting our society will continue to progress and fester. So forgive me if I don’t rejoice at this half-justice.

I like my justice like I like my wee dram: full-strength. There, I’ve now exhausted my reserves of Scottish lore. “Haste ye back,” as they say north of the border.