To use possibly an inappropriate expression, we seem to have got our knickers in a twist with the State and society’s attitude towards trans individuals.
On 16th April 2025 the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in equality law refers strictly to biological sex. It said that holding a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) does not change a person’s legal sex of the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. In clarification, the judges ruled that interpreting the law to mean anything other than biological sex would make the Equality Act ‘unworkable and incoherent’ and stressed that service providers can continue to maintain separate or single-sex spaces based on biological sex.
The Scottish government had argued that transgender people with a GRC are entitled to sex-based protections, while the lobby ‘For Women Scotland’ claimed they only apply to people who are born female. At the centre of the debate was Sandie Peggie, a senior NHS nurse who, in 2023, objected to a transgender doctor, Beth Upton, using a female changing room at the A&E department in Victoria Hospital Kirkcaldy. Upton was biologically male but identified as female.
Arguments about biological sex and how to accommodate trans people have rumbled on for years but it’s worth remembering that only 0.5% of the population of England and Wales identify as a gender different from their birth sex. (Note 1) Even so, various government departments and organisations are dragging their feet over the implementation of the Supreme Court’s ruling that sex is based on biological sex; surely, they have a responsibility to implement the law, whether they agree with it or not? Sandie Peggie, in taking her union, the Royal College of Nursing, to an employment tribunal, says: ‘The union should be working for their female staff and ensuring spaces for biological women, who should have separate changing areas, but the Trans lobby had blinded the nursing union’.
Shades of how Stonewall pushed its Diversity Champions Programme, a paid initiative that advises employers on LGBTQ+ inclusion. Critics argued that the programme pushes a disputed ideology prioritizing gender identity over biological sex and provides incorrect interpretations of the UK Equality Act regarding single-sex spaces. Nice huh! So much for the biased lobbyist!
I suspect we all like a good gossip, reading tittle-tattle about Mr Jones or Mrs Smith. I belonged to a number of Officers’ Messes in my twenty-year Army career and every one of them provided the whole range of British newspapers, from ‘the broadsheets’, The Times, Telegraph and Guardian, through The Express and Daily Mail to the ‘red-tops’, The Sun, The Mirror and The Sketch (published from1909 to 1971), the latter three focusing on celebrity gossip, sports and sensational stories rather than serious news.
Of course, we all argued that we had to read the red tops, or glance at the photographs, in order to keep abreast of what our soldiers were reading; ah! the snobbery of privilege, education and class. And of course, The Sun was still publishing its daily Page 3 photograph of semi-naked Samatha or Linda or …… (Note 2). You may remember my postcards about my active service in Northern Ireland 1973/74 and 1975/76 (PCs 196, 197 & 198 September/October 2020). During the first tour the Public Relations Officer managed to secure a visit of Miss UK and later from Miss World. In 1975 Wilnelia Merced, aged 18 and recently crowned Miss World, spent three days with us, giving a much-needed morale boost.
As an outsider, news of our own Royal family and other European royals can sometimes read like a soap opera. For instance, the recent death of King Harald V of Norway gave the media the opportunity to remind everyone that the new King’s stepson has been convicted of rape but is appealing, while his sister’s second husband Durek Verrett is a shaman who believes he’s come from another planet!
Here in the UK, just as the Royal Family were getting used to, or rather reluctantly accepting, that the Duke & Duchess of Sussex had returned to the UK, true to form, Harry & Meghan made headlines when they announced after two days that the drive to their children’s new school was too long and they would choose one closer to their home. Didn’t they factor this in when they made their choice in the first place? Early this week the headline screamed that photographers were ‘extraordinarily reckless’ trying to snap one of their children at their school.
And after Prince Harry’s rather ill-advised book ‘Spare’, another storm briefly blew through, with the publication of Earl Sencer’s book ‘Swan Song: Diana My Sister.’ It’ll be thirty years next August since Diana was killed in her car in Paris and Spencer wants to rake over the coals, to him still hot while for most of us it’s history. He’s made arguably outrageous claims about a conversation he had with the then Prince of Wales when Diana’s death was announced. There was a dignified silence from the current Prince of Wales, but the Palace felt obliged to issue a statement – ‘…. the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’ Am I alone in being unable to remember who said what last week, let alone 30 years ago?
AN Wilson’s review of Spencer’s book in the Sunday Times is worth reading. He writes about the difficult dynamics in the royal family and how we the public respect our monarchy, but don’t love them, whereas Diana had an incomparable public appeal. We loved her, were enchanted by her! ‘It cannot have been easy to be her public companion.’
Indeed!
Richard 2nd October 2026
Hove
Note 1 The figures are open to interpretation! Some 48,000 identified as trans men and the same number as trans women. ‘Non-binary’ made up 30,000. However, some 118,000 individuals wrote ‘no’ to the question that asked if they identified differently from their birth sex – without choosing any specific identity!
Note 2 The Sun stopped publishing topless models on its Page 3 in January 2015, ending a 45-year tradition.
