On 17th April 2025, an episode of ITV’s Loose Women paused to consider the Supreme Court’s verdict the day before that ‘sex’, as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, refers to biological sex - male or female - and does not include gender identity. It was a consequential verdict with a very consequential aftermath, that is still playing out.
The Loose Women panel were plainly torn on the subject, and also somewhat nervous about discussing it because of the toxicity of the trans ‘debate’.
Nadia Sawalha innocently asked “Where did this toxicity start?” with an underlying implication of “When and why did it start?” The panel noted that there had been a transgender character in Coronation Street 25 years ago and also a trans winner of Big Brother 20 years ago, yet there was very little of today’s poisonous discourse back then.
The panel managed a calm and reflective conversation - rare for this topic - and clips of it were circulated on social media.
But what did the conversation actually achieve? The women decided there needs to be less shouting and more listening. Well, Amen to that, but they didn’t want to ruffle any feathers for fear of ‘cancellation’ (as one of them put it).
This is a tough subject. The risk of saying something wrong is very high indeed. I shall apologise upfront for any clumsy phrasing. And yet of necessity, the article can only scratch the surface - a risk in itself. This is why a lot of people avoid the subject.
But Sawalha’s question is not a bad starting point: Where did this toxicity start? Why is the ‘trans culture war’ now so contentious, what are the points of contention, and how will it be settled?
Perhaps a place to start is the early 2010s, when veteran feminists began to be no-platformed by university student unions over their views on gender - most notably Julie Bindel in 2013 and Germaine Greer in 2014-15.
In 2014, the BBC children’s channel CBBC televised I am Leo - about someone born female who had since taken puberty blockers and now identified as a boy. In the same year, the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) decided to move to greater use of the puberty blocker pathway for young people who came to them questioning their gender.
Around 2015, Stonewall - the charity most notable for its historic campaigning for equal rights for the gay community - officially began lobbying for trans rights.
In 2016, the way in which referrals were made to GIDS changed such that all sorts of practitioners could now refer a patient there. Referrals consequently increased enormously as did growing awareness (and discomfort for some) at the rapid increase, especially among young/teenage girls.
The social media sphere, most notably Twitter, saw growing clashes between ‘traditional feminists’ - who collectively became the ‘gender critical movement’ - and ‘trans activists’ (for want of a better term).
All of this gradually developed over time but if one had to identify a ‘formal start’ to the trans culture war, I would suggest it occurred in 2017-18 when Theresa May’s Conservative government proposed reforming the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to make it easier for transgender people to achieve legal recognition.
These proposed changes sent arguments into the stratosphere, not least because of new possibilities being discussed around ‘Gender Self-ID’, in which people could go through a procedure that relatively easily recategorised them as their preferred gender - and that this could happen without any medical transition and without any ‘outward effort’ to look like their chosen gender. Gender was something you felt inwardly.
This put the ‘gender criticals’ on the back foot, and made them fearful and angry. It seemed possible they were about to ‘lose’, and yet more people piled in on their side, most notably the Populist Right who until then hadn’t taken much notice of the subject.
The core issues here centre on the concept of gender identity, which, crudely stated, says that everyone has a gender identity, and that while most of us will have a gender identity that fully aligns with our biology - males or females - a small minority won’t have that alignment. This is ‘gender dysphoria’ and those feeling it often talk of ‘being born into the wrong body’. They may (or may not) seek a medically-assisted transition of their biology, at least to the extent that this is possible - hormone and bodily changes can be made with medical assistance, but chromosomes cannot.
In its purest form, the trans activist position is as follows:
Gender identity should trump biology, not least because of the distress an individual can feel when forced to live according to their biology rather than to their differing/opposite gender identity. Society should thus treat people according to their gender identity, not their biology. The intention is that everyone can live harmoniously with who they really are - a desirable objective. The term ‘women’ thus becomes an umbrella term for ‘biological women’ and those biological males who identify as women. The same is true for the term ‘men’. So while someone born as a man but identifies as a woman is a ‘trans woman’ and someone born as a woman who identifies as a man is a ‘trans man’, the ‘trans’ prefix is often removed by trans people to avoid being marked out as ‘different’.
This position explains the statement “trans women are women” - with the word ‘women’ now used in a broader gender-based way. This has been at the centre of the trans debate controversy, alongside the idea that ‘trans’ ultimately refers to an inner gender identity not necessarily one’s outward appearance, which could still align to the trans person’s biological sex (e.g. beards). This is a point the gender criticals particularly object to, given that the historic everyday judgment of who is a man and who is a woman is ‘by looking’. The outward appearance point is therefore seen by them as not passing the test of reasonableness.
But the broader objection to the trans activist view of the world generally starts from feminists who have a history of battling for women’s rights due to women’s particular life experiences that they argue are rooted in their female biology. So: their sexual organs; their experience through puberty; their designed-in biological capability around pregnancy, gestation and birth; their generally lower strength/muscle mass compared to biological men; and finally, females are significantly more likely to experience sexual aggression from biological males than from any other group.
These facets of being biologically female have a set of real-world consequences: a natural weakness (on average) compared to men; a vulnerability to biological men’s unwanted sexual aggression and therefore to be inherently the more vulnerable sex; the necessary periods of ‘slow time’ or ‘downtime’ due to pregnancy and childbirth, not to mention the challenges of the menstrual cycle and the menopause. As a consequence, biological women face a set of health challenges that are either exclusive to them or are much more common in them than in men. For them, all these factors are invested in the word ‘woman’.
These are the driving forces behind the gender critical standpoint, the point being that biological females have a set of perspectives, outlooks, experience, and physiologies that need different and special attention that biological men don’t need. ‘Biology is real and has real-world consequences’, they are apt to say.
The two sides of the trans culture war meet at certain ‘touchpoints’ where these elements of being biologically female matter more: Women’s Sports, Women’s Health, Rape Crisis Centres, Women’s Prisons, Women’s Changing Rooms, and - dare I say it - Women’s Toilets.
The gender criticals want trans women (i.e. those born as biological males) excluded from these spaces for reasons they see as obvious - that trans women are not biological women, and each of these spaces are protected for biological females by dint of their different/weaker/vulnerable biology (versus biological men).
It almost goes without saying that it grates on gender critical feminists that they have spent years fighting for biological women’s rights relative to stronger and potentially threatening biological men, only to now be asked to allow a (small) number of those biological men (trans women) into their exclusive spaces and to dilute their word ‘women’. Some have even been through legal cases in recent years simply to defend beliefs that gender identity should not trump biological sex and that “sex is real and immutable”.
But on the other hand, where is a trans woman meant to go when it comes to public male/female toilets or changing rooms? Going into a male toilet or changing room could end badly for them. And how, for example, do they participate in sport if it is all based on biological sex? Even if the gender critical view was taken as correct about identifying biological women as a distinct group, trans people genuinely feel these questions around their identity. What are they supposed to do? How do they fit into society? To deprive them of toilets, changing rooms etc is essentially to eradicate them.
Nonetheless, for good or ill, these touchpoints are where the trans culture war is now being resolved. There have been legal cases across a number of these touchpoints - and the gender criticals are winning. Sporting bodies have also been steadily reiterating biology after controversies involving trans women, both in the UK and abroad.
In the policy sphere, the gender criticals scored a particular victory when the Cass Review was published in 2024 which was immediately accepted by government, but is certainly not without criticism. For example, shortly after its publication, the British Medical Association passed a motion to “publicly critique” it and to oppose the implementation of its “unsubstantiated recommendations” (although this stance was partly reversed shortly afterwards).
But the biggest victory for the gender criticals (to date) was at the Supreme Court in April 2025. It was the first time the UK’s highest court had found, in any context, that biological sex held sway over gender. Rightly or wrongly (and there are concerns about the response of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in particular), that verdict has reverberated and acted as catalyst to tilt the national conversation in a gender critical direction. Members of the Labour government, including Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer had been shuffling in a gender critical direction before both the Cass Review and the Supreme Court judgment, but those two events really cemented the changes in their stance.
Taking a step back from ‘victories’, however, the debate - such as it is - is still hopelessly and poisonously divided.
One possible way forward is to find agreement and a policy framework that recognises ‘carveouts’. In other words, exceptions where, by default, a particular space or touchpoint can only be used by biological females. According to Harriet Harman, an architect of the Equality Act 2010, such agreement regarding women’s refuges and rape crisis centres had been achieved between the two sides during the construction of that law, but that subsequent debates (2017-18) around amending the gender recognition act blew that sense of compromise apart.
We are back to 2017-18 being the formal start of this culture war.
The principle of carveouts is undoubtedly a difficult one for the trans activist side - carveouts necessarily make a distinction between biological women and trans women, which is precisely what the trans lobby doesn’t want. And yet the debate needs to get past this. Some in the trans community do accept the need for carveouts, but it’s more about where and how they are applied sensitively. It’ll also be important to allow individual organisations some flexibility in this space to make context-specific decisions for themselves.
The recent gender critical victories in the courts and in politics mean the trend is leaning (back) firmly towards an acceptance of traditional women’s rights and of carveouts. The trans lobby is not only losing the carveout debate but is now being ‘done to’. The law and the politics have run away from them. This shift is happening quite rapidly and there is a clear risk of unintended consequences or overcorrection. It’s understandable why many in the wider trans community feel unsettled by this.
At the same time, it’s important to recognise that a new societal model that entirely erases distinctions between trans women and biological females in every context is simply not going to gain broad acceptance. The debate on both sides needs to bring forward its more nuanced voices, with the overarching objective of finding workable, compassionate, and evidence-based policies that respect both gender identity and biological realities, while minimising harm and maximising inclusion for everyone.
So yes, we need to find voices/ears of reason and sensitivity to navigate through this (Amen again to Loose Women) but we also need voices/ears that avoid getting stuck on the endless topic of ‘public toilets’ - this should be much less of an issue in public discourse than it is because of the existence of private cubicles (a sub-topic where the EHRC interim guidance after the Supreme Court may be muddled/wrong). It’d also be useful for people to maintain perspective: we are not facing a sudden ‘invasion of trans people’ as some would like us to think. This is a debate about principles and edge cases - numerically, the trans community is itself an edge case.
I think there is potential for some common ground here. There are voices of moderation on both sides - if only we could hear them above the noise.
Having said all that, the ‘losing’ side - the trans activists - first need to pause and soberly assess where this has gone wrong for them. Of how they and culture ran ahead of law and politics, with consequences we are seeing play out now. To my mind, the wider trans community has been very poorly served by its lobby groups.
However on the ‘winning side’, the gender criticals need to also moderate their positions. I understand the stress that gender critical women have been under, through lost jobs, legal cases, insults and worse, but it’s not hard to find leading gender critical voices being rude, hectoring, and downright offensive to trans people - including suggestions that trans people don’t really exist: “it’s all in the mind”; “it’s a faddish ideology or neo-religion”; insisting on referring to trans women in interviews as “he/him” etc. For example, J K Rowling has been in some horrendous Twitter spats with trans woman India Willoughby - it’s stuff like this that made Stephen Fry eventually disown Rowling.
It’s examples like these that show why trans activists often accuse gender critical voices of being transphobic.
The gender criticals should accept that a small minority of people do indeed have a gender identity that is different to their biological sex. And for reasons of good manners if nothing else, such people should be treated with respect and in accordance with that identity as far as is humanly possible. Furthermore the gender criticals should accept it is possible that a different gender identity can sometimes be genuinely felt at a young age.
This brings me to the subject of how and when one might feel that one is transgender, and how others - including professional medical practitioners, close relatives and other stakeholders - should respond to that development.
A much discussed element in this is the ‘affirmation model’ - an approach that leans towards affirming rather than questioning what the individual is saying when they first claim a different gender identity. This has been encouraged by the trans activist organisation Stonewall through various resources and training materials it produced, and they have criticised those calling for a more cautious approach, considering it verging on ‘conversion therapy’.
At the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), various clinicians, including Dr David Bell, a whistleblower who spoke out from 2018 said that the GIDS process was essentially sloppy and that some practitioners leant too much in favour of affirmation when engaging with children with gender dysphoria. A Care Quality Commission inspection of GIDs in 2021 reported findings that seemed to echo those clinician concerns. The Cass Report validated such concerns and criticised the affirmation model.
This is and has been a murky topic in the specific context of teenagers (and also some early 20-somethings) who are already going through a confusing time of physical, hormonal, and emotional changes, as well as ‘rites of passage’ like leaving home, losing their virginity, becoming fully independent etc.
In recent years, there has been a huge surge in the numbers of young people coming out as ‘trans’, particularly young girls. From 2016, the raw number of girls seeking help with gender dysphoria rocketed and the ratio of girls vs boys flipped - boys had previously dominated the numbers. Furthermore, a disproportionate number of the broader trans community were/are autistic, with 24% found to be on the spectrum in some studies, which is far above the <5% in the population at large. The former Head of GIDS, Polly Carmichael, observed in 2015 that close to half of the patients referred to GIDS had some autistic traits, although the Cass Review later observed it was “approximately one third” who were on the spectrum - still a very high proportion.
These numbers must cause most reasonable people to at least pause to wonder what is going on here.
As a father of daughters on the autism spectrum, I have sat in sessions organised by professional practitioners for the parents of autistic teenagers and recall instances of parents describing their son/daughter as “having had a trans stage”. To be honest, it was always a daughter, although we happen to know a son (separate to those sessions) who actually became a trans woman.
I separately know someone who is a national champion on the subject of autism in girls, and has spoken to MPs in Parliament. Her particular interest is the interplay between autism and eating disorders, saying that this is an area we don’t yet fully understand and needs more research. Indeed, I’m not sure we fully understand autism in general. I imagine it being something we look back on in 20 years’ time and roll our eyes at our rather primitive understanding of it.
Into this mix of struggling young people, one might add the cases of trans regretter/detransitioner Keira Bell, and Sinead Watson (an early-20s transitioner and subsequent detransitioner). Bell, Watson, and other detransitioners like them, are believed to be proportionally few within the trans community but they add to the concern that while the majority of young people (in particular) who have come out as trans in the last 5-10 years do not and will not regret doing so, there is a minority who do/will.
As with everything in this culture war, there is controversy here too - about how big/small this minority of regretters/detransitioners is.
The trans activist side supported by recent studies claim regret/ discontinuation/ detransition is very low - under 10%, and even lower when one strips out those who cite external pressures as their reason (so not a genuine change of mind). Meanwhile, the gender criticals often cite older studies (pre-2015 before the explosion in the numbers of people with gender dysphoria) showing that of the young people who get these feelings, most ‘grow out if it’.
However there is also recent evidence (2022) showing, firstly, that voluntary discontinuation of hormone treatment can be high - a circa 30% ‘dropout’ rate among a study group of c.1000 people who had an average age of 19.2 years. And secondly, there is further evidence from 2024 in Germany that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in young people has ‘low diagnostic stability’. In other words, reliability is not great over time.
This is a minefield. But looking at this from a slightly different angle, one could legitimately argue that the exact percentage of regretters/detransitioners to longer-term transitioners is almost irrelevant. Whether it is 1% or 30%, the point is that they demonstrably exist. And given they exist, they present us with issues about how a practitioner assesses or ‘filters out’ unstable/suggested gender dysphoria from ‘real’/stable gender dysphoria.
Why should this be such a concern? Why not just accept that a small minority who are not ‘genuinely trans’ will sometimes ‘slip through’? They can surely just revert when ready and carry on with their lives?
It matters because unlike someone going through a gay phase when young but ending up heterosexual, this gender-questioning group could engage in life-changing medical and physiological changes. See Keira Bell. There is no life-changing equivalent in the gay scenario.
It is clear that for some - the majority - gender dysphoria is ‘real’, just as trans people are real. It truly ‘is what it is’ and such people need the most profound care and support. But for others, regrettably, there is something else going on. That also needs deep care and attention but not by putting such people on a pathway to transition.
This is seemingly what Tavistock GIDS practitioners were trying to grapple with, causing their internal crisis. They were operating in a somewhat pioneering and uncertain landscape, as even GIDS director Polly Carmichael has acknowledged. It seems what a patient said they felt inside could not be definitively proved - at least not to a level that might be demanded in other medical/pharmaceutical contexts - and yet patients were being directed towards potentially lifechanging treatments.
This is why we are where we are: with the affirmation approach in retreat, the Tavistock clinic closed, puberty blockers now banned for under-18s, and much more (especially in the legal sphere).
The trans lobby clearly have legal recourse to some of what has recently unfolded, using the European Court of Human Rights (particularly relating to the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s April 2025 judgement), but that is to come. There also remains ongoing criticism of the Cass Review and its methodology. The problem is that politicians now don’t want to tamper with any boxes labelled ‘trans’ for fear of releasing another load of poison into the national conversation.
On that note, I have barely touched on the politics of all this, the central point being that the gender critical movement has become associated with the Populist Right despite some leading gender critical voices being self-confessed left-wingers. The trans activist movement, meanwhile, has become very closely linked with the Left.
I became concerned about this alignment some time ago after seeing valid arguments coming out of the gender critical side (sometimes after having to strip out all the populist, insulting, and generally emotive nonsense).
Watching Keir Starmer’s difficulties on this topic has also been worrying.
The point here is that the Left willingly vacated the field to the Right on this issue, convinced of the full trans activist case despite there being some legitimate and very difficult arguments around a clash of rights that might have suggested a more cautionary approach. That’s not to say Labour should have gone ‘full gender critical’ some years ago - that would have been very difficult given the strength of feelings within the party. But the party and Keir Starmer in particular have subsequently given the appearance of being dragged kicking and screaming to the position they now occupy, which is somewhat closer to the gender critical Right.
But what of those gender critical feminists, and also the Populist Right who latched on to their arguments? What has this issue done to all of them?
To my mind, the gender criticals, while still very angry, have become more self-assured and more likely to use wild language, hence my earlier comment about them needing to start moderating themselves. To some extent, they have been radicalised by all of this. The Populist Right’s generally emotive tactics may have rubbed off on them while they toured the Telegraph-Spectator-GB News-Talk TV ecosystem. (They would say this started because outlets on the Left like The Guardian refused to give them a platform.)
As for the Populist Right, it has piggy-backed onto a series of gender critical victories that it sees as part of its ‘War on Woke’, culminating in the April 2025 Supreme Court sex/gender judgment. When one breaks down what ‘woke’ actually means to the Right, it often seems to boil down to the subject of trans and “how the trans lobby and the Left over-reached”. It’s why I suggest the trans debate is the ultimate culture war: It is at the very core of the Right’s ‘War on Woke’.
For those on the Centre-Left deeply worried about populism, what’s worse is that in America, the gender critical lobby is almost exclusively associated with the Trumpist-Republican Right and the trans lobby with the Democrats. Trump may have even been nudged over the winning line in 2024 because of the trans issue, with a series of effective attack adverts saying that while “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you”. Some UK gender criticals have since praised the new Trump Administration on its trans stance.
But, let’s be clear, the Trump Administration denies the existence of trans people and of anyone outside the male/female binary.
Blatant transphobia.
This is what happens when the Left vacate the field to Populists. What a mess.
This is why politicians and other institutions in the public and private sectors welcomed and indeed ‘grabbed hold of’ the Cass Review and, more so, the Supreme Court judgement.
Both events provided an apparently ‘expert’ victory to one side of a very toxic culture war.
And who would want to open that up again?
Certainly not those ‘Loose Women’.
Postscript
It took an absurd amount of time and a holiday to write the above and there will still be things wrong with it. But because of the toxicity of the subject matter, it is likely I will not engage on it further or will only do so minimally.
It is what it is.
Further reading and listening
“Everything you need to know about the trans Supreme Court case” by Ian Dunt.
House of Commons Library page on the trans Supreme Court decision
EHRC figures say the trans community has been lied to for years and the law never permitted self-ID
“Judgement Day for the EHRC” by Ian Dunt
The Tavistock: Inside the Gender Clinic - a podcast series by Tortoise Media.
The Witch Trials of J K Rowling: What if you’re wrong? - a podcast by Megan Phelps-Roper
Transgender person here. Whilst I don’t agree with all of the language you’ve used (and much of this conflict manifests in language), I appreciate the approach you’ve taken on a complicated and contested matter. When it comes to a way ahead, I suggest at least two things are missing: evidence (about early transition, about reality of self-ID in other countries etc.), and transgender voices in mainstream media. There’s a lot of shouting going on over our heads, less genuine engagement with us.
I think what you put out here is mostly fair/balanced. Although I think you're a bit dismissive once you get towards the end about trans people and what they're up against. The attack on us is just brutal. Some of the issues can be solved but they don't want to even attempt to acknowledge problems and actually have a debate. If there is a debate we're never invited by the way. They don't want things solved. They (the religious right and conservatives) want things to remain contentious and with sharp edges. Compromise forget. They won't even give US Congresswoman McBride (DE) a bathroom in the House Chambers in Washington DC. To conduct business. One measly unisex bathroom would be very easy too quickly construct. And this would certainly be dignifying. But they won't do it. On purpose. So that is what you're dealing with. Things like the bathroom issue could be solved or at least moving along with solutions if that's what they wanted. But nobody wants that. Except trans people. And the idea that cisgender women are in great danger is just not something I've seen ever. The safety issue is largely a philosophical debate let's be honest here. Take away trans women and you're still going to have (cis heteronormative male) sexual predators and violators overwhelmingly dominate as they always have.
[Is there some cross-dressing hideous perv guy out there somewhere lurking near women's bathrooms with a dress, and a wig, and hairy legs? I guess sure somewhere, but it ain't me and I need the world to treat me with some respect and fairness as I come full circle with my gender identity. Because I really am trans.
[and I'm not trashing cross-dressing men per se if that's what they want to do in their homes privately, on YouTube, or perhaps and even venture out to clubs, etc. That's not my point here; further, as I write I'm falling into the trap that my trans sisters would be critical of which is over explaining and apologizing defensively as I make my points].
As a trans femme and transitioning person still, I'm under pressure from cis Men who size me up and give me that laser beam sexual stare from afar even if I'm pumping gasoline into my truck ⛽ (a couple weeks ago 2 at once --- I was like Jesus). Wanting to be left alone. Nobody gives a damn about trans women being in danger. We are expendable freaks with no rights. So let's be honest about that. We have no place in society and that's the way they are designing it.
But again pretty good effort here. Mostly a thumbs up on characterizing both sides honestly.