The backlash has begun. It’s happening up and down the country, where thousands of trans activists raged at the weekend against last week’s Supreme Court judgment. In London, they carried placards threatening to kill “terfs”, urinated on a statue of the suffragette, Millicent Fawcett, and daubed it with the slogan “fag rights”. In Sheffield, a small group of women had to be protected by police from an angry mob of trans activists.

But there’s also something going on behind the scenes. Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday has revealed that government ministers secretly condemned the ruling in a WhatsApp group and plotted to challenge it. Labour MPs specifically attacked Baroness Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is due to issue new guidance this summer on the court’s common-sense ruling that “sex” means biological sex.

Falkner has correctly interpreted the judgment to mean that men who claim to be women cannot use single-sex spaces or compete against female athletes at sporting events. But when a Labour MP in the WhatsApp group described Falkner’s response as “pretty appalling”, Culture minister Sir Chris Bryant replied that he “agreeed [sic]”. A Home Office minister, Dame Angela Eagle, suggested that they should seek a meeting “ASAP” with the “relevant Equality Minister”.

This high-level attempt to defy a definitive legal judgment casts new light on Keir Starmer’s silence. Bryant and Eagle are patrons of LGBT+ Labour, which now lists more than 50 MPs and 10 Labour peers as patrons. Four years ago, the group began to harass the then Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, demanding an apology and “reparations” after she liked a tweet stating that only women have a cervix.

Since then, the influence of the pressure group has grown considerably. Following last year’s general election, new MPs flocked to join and it now has several ministers as patrons. They include the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting; the Science and Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle; and the junior health minister, Ashley Dalton. Their views on the Supreme Court judgment are not known, although Streeting has accepted that data on biological sex is vital for patient safety in the NHS.

Trans people have not lost a single right in this country. What they don’t have — and never had, despite the claims of activists — is a right to be treated as biological women. The hysterical response to the judgment is a cry of pure fury, an echo of every time an entitled man has heard the word “no”. And that makes it an exceedingly dangerous moment for women.

As a former prosecutor, Starmer should know this perfectly well. The most dangerous moment in a woman’s life is when she stands up to an abusive man. Trans activists have nowhere to go except the streets, and some of them appear to be itching for a confrontation; it is clear that someone could get seriously hurt. The Prime Minister has, in the past, been quick to denounce public disorder, but the sight of women being shouted at by thugs with trans flags appears not to move him at all.

Refusing to speak is taking sides. Starmer has tolerated and enabled misogyny in the Labour party for far too long. His silence is no longer tenable.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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