September 1 2026 - 10:45am
There was a time when the suggestion that separating men’s and women’s sport was a “colonial imposition” would have been laughed out of the student union bar. Today, it is on the verge of becoming official Green Party policy.
A motion heading for the party’s conference in October insists that dividing men and women in sport is the product of “historical colonial and Eurocentric attitudes” and “transmisogyny”. The plans would “extend trans people’s rights” so they can compete in the categories “they feel most comfortable in”.
The synopsis warns that such bans have “serious consequences for gender diverse and global majority peoples’ mental and physical health”. The solution offered is to “stop blanket bans”; to issue an inquiry as to how they came to be passed; and to “hold sporting bodies accountable”. Accountable for what, exactly, is left vague.
Most adults understand perfectly well why sport is sex‑segregated. Men, on average, are taller, stronger, faster. The greater muscle mass is no more a colonial artifact than pregnancy is. Only the deluded could believe that “scientific evidence” was needed to prove what has been established by years of evolution.
Moreover, despite clickbait headlines claiming “transwomen” are banned, men who identify as women have not been excluded from sport. They remain perfectly free to enjoy the camaraderie of competition. What they are not entitled to, and what is being restricted, is unfettered access to women’s changing rooms, women’s competitions, and women’s records.
Sporting bodies and gyms that have updated their rules after recent legal judgments are simply acknowledging the obvious: men and women have different abilities, vulnerabilities, and needs. Only a gender activist would understand these reasonable and lawful measures as discriminatory, and as such it’s what one might expect to hear at the Green Party conference.
Yet the belief that recognizing sex differences is somehow offensive has crept from fringe activism into mainstream politics. Nearly a quarter of sitting MPs have backed an Early Day Motion urging the rejection of the EHRC’s statutory Code of Practice, the very guidance that explains how the Equality Act is meant to work in real institutions, from changing rooms to hospital wards. By opposing it, these MPs effectively endorse the same premise as the Greens: that organizing spaces and services by sex is an act of cruelty rather than common sense. It is a remarkable position, revealing just how far a once‑marginal ideology has seeped into the mainstream.
The Greens, of course, luxuriate in permanent opposition. Their policies function less as practical proposals than as moral accessories; badges to pin to social‑media bios alongside pronouns and flags. Labour MPs, however, do not have that excuse. They belong to the party of government. When scores of them oppose rules preserving sex-based spaces and services, they reveal that the delusion beneath the Green motion is no longer confined to the political fringe.
Zack Polanski’s Greens are simply more candid about where the logic leads. If sex segregation is oppressive in the changing room, as a quarter of British MPs apparently believe, then why should it matter on the running track? If declaring oneself a woman confers access to women’s spaces, why not women’s medals and records? That is the accidental virtue of the Green motion: it takes fashionable political fiction and follows it to its inevitable, absurd conclusion.
