A trans-activist temper tantrum

Rejoice! For the They / Thems have risen. After being legally crucified by the Supreme Court last Wednesday, the trans faithful marched from Parliament Square in London yesterday in a display of devotion and defiance. It was a tantrum disguised as a protest over the court’s heresy – that the word ‘woman’ refers to a biological category, not a personal sense of gender.

Chanting ‘Fuck JK Rowling’ and ‘Fuck Wes Streeting’, the mob wailed over the apparent injustice of women having legally defined boundaries. Banners held included ‘The only good TERF is a dead one’; as legal commentator Dennis Kavanagh pointed out, there are currently people in prison for saying less.

Somewhere along the route, the statue of women’s rights campaigner Millicent Fawcett was defaced with ‘Fag Rights’. Ahead of the march, former TV presenter India Willoughby urged people to engage in a synchronised #PeeForMe piss protest – because nothing says dignity and equality quite like public urination.

The faithful finally gathered at St James’s Park to hear the gender gospel delivered by omnicause preachers draped in trans flags and keffiyehs.

One of the first to speak was Avery Greatorex, a greasy-haired lad who identifies as a transwoman and serves as co-chair of Pride in Labour. In a suitably manly voice, Avery railed against the Labour leadership for not introducing gender self-ID and for accepting the recent ruling: ‘When we needed them most they turned their backs.’

Another comrade took the mic to lament that the Supreme Court had not consulted trans-identified people or organisations. As lawyer Peter Daly has noted, anyone could have intervened in the case on gender ideology’s side. It’s just that the only organisation to manage it was Amnesty International.

Next came a dull vagina-owner who said her name was not important. She rallied support for Dr Beth Upton and Rose Henderson – two men demanding access to women-only changing rooms at work. The pair were hailed as civil-rights pioneers. The speaker, who is coordinating a ‘Flowers for Beth’ campaign, urged support for these changing-room Che Guevaras.

She was followed by a bearded union activist called George. He told the crowd the solidarity between the Labour movement and trans activists was just like the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign. The timeline was a bit hazy – ‘30 or 40 years ago?’, he wondered out loud – but the vibe was right. George blamed Christian fascists in the US for funding transphobia. No receipts were provided.

He was followed by Sarah Jane (né Alan) Baker, a violent ex-con turned trans activist who in 2023 called for TERFs to be punched in the face and was reported to have removed his own balls in prison while doing a stretch for kidnap, torture and attempted murder.

It was a carnival of causes: ‘anti-racists’, ‘anti-imperialists’, Palestine campaigners. Despite having spent much of the past decade declaring they simply want to pee, the activists’ chants extended beyond a demand for equal treatment. They included: ‘No assimilation, trans liberation’; ‘No justice, no peace, no gender police’; and ‘One struggle, one fight, Palestine, trans rights’.

The showstopper was a man from the Trans Legal Clinic. After explaining that ‘all cops are bastards’, he raged that despite his ‘double-D titties’, he’d been called ‘Sir’ by a police officer. He then assured the crowd that ‘sex work is work’ and took the opportunity to announce the launch of the Trans Legal Fund to take on the Supreme Court in some unspecified way.

Unlike previous protests, no celebrities or politicians dared take the stage. Childish graffiti, limp placards and discarded leaflets are all that remain to prove anything happened at all. The activists, full of rage but empty of reason, still can’t say what rights they’ve actually lost.

Following the Supreme Court ruling, it’s baffling to recall the grip this muddled mob of dimwits and fetishists once had on public life. How did we get to a point where women were hounded from their jobs for stating biological facts – all to avoid offending these deranged people, some of whom are prepared to piss in protest? How did they hold so much sway that even the prime minister felt he could not definitively say that women don’t have penises?

One day, we might well laugh at the collective lunacy that gripped the early 21st century. But not yet. First, we need to ask the people who indulged it: what the hell were you thinking?

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.