What happened to all those female penises, Keir?

Women have penises. Men can grow cervixes. Babies aren’t born with a biological sex. Show me a batshit take on transgenderism and I’ll show you a high-profile Labour Party figure who has gladly spouted it. Like those Thai cave boys a few years ago, Keir Starmer and his mob became so lost down the gender rabbit hole they needed some external miracle to break them free.

Well now they’ve got it. The landmark Supreme Court ruling yesterday is surely Labour’s opportunity to slowly back away from the crime scene. In a unanimous decision, the court found that sex in UK equality law means, well, sex. If you’re a man you’re a man, if you’re a woman you’re a woman, if you’re a lesbian you shouldn’t be expected to treat Belinda – with his beard and his balls – as one of your own. Sex is not a feeling, nor a matter of having the right paperwork. Otherwise, sex-based rights cannot exist. It couldn’t be clearer.

The initial noises from His Majesty’s Government are simultaneously encouraging and hard to take seriously. Minister for women and equalities Bridget Phillipson has suddenly remembered the w-word in her title. ‘We have always supported the protection of single-sex spaces based on biological sex’, she says, with a straight face. This is the same Bridget Phillipson who said transwomen in possession of a penis are legally entitled to use the women’s loos. That wasn’t even a year ago.

I suppose you can’t blame her entirely for the confusion. Her boss spent the best part of five years publicly wrestling with what you might call The Penis Question, before he was elected prime minister and journalists felt compelled to ask him other, less humiliating questions. In the end, he famously settled on 99.9 per cent of women not having a penis. Which would still mean tens of thousands of female penises out there in the wild.

Where are they now, Keir? Now that five Supreme Court justices have made the bleedin’ obvious sayable again, will he listen to them where he refused to listen to voters, feminists and the few remaining sane people within his own party? Perhaps this former human-rights barrister doesn’t know what to think until he’s had it relayed to him by top-ranking members of the legal profession. He certainly didn’t want to take Rosie Duffield MP’s word for it, who was hounded out of Starmer’s supposedly ‘moderate’ Labour for daring to cling to her heretical view that biology exists.

I might be wrong about this, but watching Starmer or David Lammy or various leading Labourites squirm on television whenever the trans issue was raised, I never got the impression they were all true believers. It was almost worse than that. They were slavishly following what they deemed to be the respectable orthodoxy, oblivious to its irrational and horrendous implications. This is why they couldn’t defend – or even articulate – the ideology that clearly had them over a barrel.

Of course there are probably more gender ideologues in Labourworld than in any other sphere of British life. But the question remains: why did the leadership listen to them? Why believe the people who insist that you ignore the evidence of your own eyes, and the growing bemusement of your own voters? Why take the trans activists’ line that they are the 21st century’s answer to the Suffragettes, when they are clearly much more reminiscent of the misogynists who would show up to Suffragette demonstrations to beat them up?

The trans takeover of Labour speaks to how susceptible the technocrats are to mania. These supposedly smart people have trained themselves out of common sense. They belong to an overeducated caste that defers blindly to expertise. That is naturally suspicious of what ordinary people believe to be true. That thinks the counterintuitive idea, the one that is hard to understand and even harder to explain, must be superior. They will happily believe that 2 + 2 = 5, men can become women, and insanely expensive windmills will bring down energy costs, if someone with letters after their name says so.

It also speaks to how visionless our rulers have become. Bizarre ideas have so deranged governments across the West precisely because they stand for so little. They have no ideology, no vision for society, and so they latch on to transgenderism or critical race theory or climate alarmism to lend some meaning, some semblance of purpose, to what is otherwise power for its own sake.

Above all, Labour and mainstream politics more broadly has lost the civilising influence of ordinary people. To a man and woman, today’s Labour MPs will have spent more time in Oxbridge junior common rooms than they ever have in northern working-men’s clubs. The more Labour has become the political wing of the professional managerial class, the more prey it has become to the luxury beliefs that percolate in upper-bourgeois Britain.

Indeed, the problem of our age isn’t mass hysteria, but elite hysteria: the establishment’s unnerving capacity to embrace one barmy, toxic idea after another, before quietly dropping it and moving on to the next. There’s something almost comforting in that. It’s not inconceivable, with one more concerted push, that the trans madness might now be jettisoned by the ruling class. That the spell has truly broken. ‘Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with’, writes the ever-wise Lionel Shriver. Perhaps trans extremism will one day be filed alongside the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns and (let us pray) mullets, as things everyone now claims to have always been against. Hence Phillipson’s statement yesterday, claiming she has always been at war with Eastasia.

But we can’t take that much comfort in it. Politicians clearly cannot be trusted to defend women’s rights, gay rights and children’s safety. They would rather say the right thing than do the right thing, even if what they’re saying is mental and what they’re doing is monstrous. Don’t expect things to snap back to normal. The courageous TERFs who got us to this place know the pain of a false dawn all too well, which is why the assorted gender-critical groups are now taking the fight to the NHS, the police, sports bodies and schools to ensure this ruling isn’t ignored by our captured institutions.

More to the point, as we try to see off one elite mania, we must be on our guard for the next one to come along. For all the snobbish talk since Brexit of ordinary folk being dangerously suggestible, the battle for TERF Island reminds us of the mote in the establishment’s eye. The elites have gone insane, while voters remain radically sensible. That really is the story of our times.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater