Ten months ago, the Education Secretary had no issue with trans women using female toilets.
Prior to that, the now-Prime Minister gave us some advice, that ‘99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis’.
Yet this week, we have seen a jaw-dropping act of political gymnastics. The Education Secretary claimed that ‘we have always supported the protection of single-sex spaces based on biological sex’.
Always? Really?
The Education Secretary seems to think that if you repeat something enough, it makes it true. It doesn’t.
We have seen this time and time again. For example, the Education Secretary says she supports academies, but her legislation abolishes them in all but name.
Their rhetoric is devoid of reality, but the British public will not be taken for fools.
It’s the same with biological reality. Women across the country know exactly what’s been going on: Labour has spent years pandering to ideological extremists, bullying those who dared to speak up for women’s rights. Bridget Phillipson may believe the revisionist fairy tales she’s spinning but there’s action she could take right now if she’s serious about protecting women and girls.
Following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that biological sex does matter, the Government must stop dithering and publish the long-overdue guidance for schools to follow to help them make decisions regarding gender-questioning children.
That guidance provides much-needed clarity and includes sensible steps such as parents not being excluded from decisions taken by a school in relation to requests by their child to ‘socially transition’ and single-sex spaces must be protected for the safeguarding of all children.
We also began work on banning gender identity ideology from classrooms because, let’s be honest: teaching children that ‘sex is a spectrum’ is not education, it’s indoctrination.
But the new Education Secretary slammed the brakes on progress. She claimed the guidance ‘drifted into partisan language’ and called it a ‘political football’.
It is not partisan to protect young minds from being polluted with adult concepts of gender identity. Children deserve facts, not ideology.
Labour blames the delay in implementing this guidance on the Cass Review, a devastating, forensic report that laid bare the medical scandal that had unfolded in front of our eyes. That report was published more than a year ago.
One year and a Supreme Court judgment later, the Government still isn’t ready to act. Why are they dithering while they could be protecting children?
This goes beyond schools. One of Bridget Phillipson’s first moves in office was to try to scrap our Free Speech Act, an action that would have protected gender-critical voices.
Labour would rather listen to student union activists than to women who’ve been hounded out of their jobs simply for stating simple biological reality.
While Labour paused that legislation, brave women such as Professor Jo Phoenix were forced to spend eye-watering sums on legal fees, fighting for their rights, some even remortgaging their homes to do so.
Professor Phoenix herself said that if the Act had been in force, she would have been spared the nightmare. Delay has an impact.
What thanks did these women get? No apology. No remorse. Not even a word for the former Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who was vilified by her own party, and forced out, for speaking the truth.
So yes, it’s welcome to hear Labour finally acknowledge basic reality. But that’s not enough. Words are cheap. We need action.
Implement the policies that were already in motion to safeguard children. Deliver the guidance to protect them. Because if the Education Secretary thinks she can just rewrite history and get away with it, she’s sorely mistaken.
Laura Trott is the Conservative education spokesman.