The Supreme Court ruling on what it means to be a woman is a chance to take back our rights

The Government has made the fantastically brave step of edging towards protecting single-sex spaces for women. Forgive the sarcasm but as Labour stood by for the past decade watching so many individual women being thrown under a bus for insisting that biology matters, to say that it is untrustworthy is something of an understatement.

Indeed, many of the biggest cheerleaders for the “women can have a penis” brigade were and are Labour MPs. They now seem to be leaving that loony tunes position to the Greens – who have yet to fully explain how eco-friendly artificial hormones are – and to befuddled Lib Dems.

Just as bad as the cheerleaders were those who kept quiet. I include Keir Starmer in this. A mixture of cowardice and fashion – yes it’s that superficial – has led us to a position where women’s sports, women’s spaces in prisons and women’s refuges have been compromised.

This has happened because the deliberate conflation of sex and gender has meant that many organisations have misinterpreted the law so that those who identified as the opposite sex have pushed themselves into women’s private spaces. To be clear, it is men who are doing this. There has never been much furore about trans men (biologically female at birth) doing the same thing in male spaces.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has decided that new guidance is necessary as the Equality Act of 2010 is not clear enough. This set of recommendations will be put forward to the Government, then agreed in Parliament so it becomes statutory guidance. In other words, this is an attempt to revert to the intention of the Equality Act and protect women’s spaces. It will require all organisations to spell out the difference between sex and gender.

It will mean that those of us who have said we cannot protect women’s rights if we cannot define what a woman is will have been vindicated. Kind of. On a basic level it will mean that the nurses of Darlington do not have to get undressed in front of biological men. It will mean that some men’s feelings get hurt because their sense of male entitlement has come to mean they can violate women’s boundaries simply by insisting that they are, in fact, female.

How we got to this situation is a lesson in collective delusion. This was never about being fair to the 1 per cent of the population who are trans but about ignoring the rights of the 51 per cent of the population who are female. The media and political class has pushed the idea of undefinable gender identity as truth.

Countless tribunals and court cases have exposed these beliefs for the incoherent nonsense that they are. Yet it has taken individual women to stand up to their employers to win these cases in which they state they will not go along with this ideology. Wins yes, but at great personal loss, which is why we say “the process is the punishment”. Too many individuals have lost livelihoods and their reputations have been trashed as a result. We heretics know what it means to challenge the liberal orthodoxy.

Still, as the evidence has built up around puberty blockers and the Cass report, politicians can no longer ignore it. Likewise, Prof Alice Sullivan’s review, published last month, which found that cancer screenings had been missed and criminal convictions overlooked because of the way biological sex and gender had been conflated.

Indeed, we are now at the stage where, if I hear of a dreadful crime involving the mutilation of animals or a rape committed by “a woman”, I don’t even need to see a picture to know that this crime does not belong to my sex. This is indeed “fake news”.

Progressive misogyny, though, has its self-imposed limits. While activists insist that anyone who says they are a woman can barge their way into women’s spaces, I note they are happy for certain Muslim and Jewish communities to maintain very strict rules around sex segregation. Years ago, I used to go to a women-only gym with both Muslim and Hasidic women. Some interesting conversations were had in that sauna because it acted as a safe space for all of us. Having spent my youth in gay clubs, I also know there were nights when the guys didn’t want women around and fair enough. Men are also entitled to single-sex spaces.

On Wednesday we will have the judgment from the Supreme Court on how a woman should be defined in law. The case, brought by For Women Scotland, is the culmination of a challenge against reforms by the Scottish government which say that any biological man with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is legally a woman under the 2010 Equality Act.

Again, this rests on the legal definition of sex. Does it mean biological sex or can someone with a GRC be deemed female and enter women-only spaces? Lesbians in particular have become an endangered species, with so many trans women (biological men) flooding lesbian dating apps, this decision matters very much.

The old chat-up line of heterosexual men – “I love women so much that I must be a lesbian” – has somehow come to be accepted as reality. The madness must stop. Trans rights were never the new civil rights movement. The past few years have been instructive in showing both the power of lobby groups and the gullibility of those who want to appear good rather than do good.

The UK Government and the Supreme Court may struggle to define what a woman is. Seriously, I can’t wait for the day when I can be told not only what I am but regain the protections afforded to me because of my sex.

Those rights that we took for granted have been stripped away from us in a mixed-sex changing room that we never agreed to enter. Women are only asking to be given back what belongs to us already.