They’re All Going to Tell Us They Always Supported Women’s Sex-Based Rights

They’re lying; don’t believe them.

April 17, 2025

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the UK ruled that sex is real and biological under UK law. Paid subscribers will be able to hear details about what I think about the ruling during this week’s podcast episode here in The TERF Report tomorrow.

Bottom line: This UK court ruling is great news for women and girls in the UK, and as the group Women’s Platform for Action reports, it is likely to have global implications. Here is a lovely video of women celebrating after the ruling was announced.

As a US leftist radical feminist and author of the Democratic Women’s Declaration, I hope the Democrats in power pay attention. As I explained in The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, I hope they hold themselves accountable for throwing women and girls under the bus at the altar of “trans” or “gender identity.”

However, I think it’s much more likely that leftist politicians all over the world are likely to straight-up lie to all of us and tell us that they never supported the shredding of women’s rights or the abolition of sex in the first place. This post explains why.

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The UK case arose because the feminist group For Women Scotland filed a lawsuit about a Scottish Parliament decision in 2018 to define the word “woman” to mean, essentially, anyone who claims to be a woman. To be more precise, it defined the word “woman” to include men who have a “Gender Recognition Certificate” (GRC). I don’t want to get into the details of that here, but the gist is that in the UK, anyone can obtain a legal document declaring himself or herself to be the opposite sex, upon satisfying some minimal requirements. You can read all about it here, if you’d like.

In 2022, the Scottish Parliament also voted to “reform” the Gender Recognition Act to remove all of those minimal requirements and allow anyone to obtain a GRC simply upon his or her say-so. That decision would have allowed any man to get a GRC declaring himself to be a woman, for any reason or for no reason at all. It would have allowed such men to access any female-only space simply upon getting a GRC by calling themselves women.

At that time, I published a piece in Newsweek titled, “The Global Abolition of Sex,” explaining:

On December 22, the Scottish Parliament passed a controversial new law that allows for "gender self-ID." Two days earlier, it had voted down an amendment to the law that would have prevented sex offenders from being able to gain access to women's prisons on the basis of their self-declared "female gender identity." On Wednesday morning, it voted down another amendment that would have made an application to change sex retroactively fraudulent if the applicant was subsequently convicted of rape.

What this means is that any adult (or minor as young as 16), including sex offenders, can obtain legal recognition that he or she is a member of the opposite sex on the basis of his or her say-so. The law passed over the objections of countless Scottish women who have explained repeatedly that this will result in men being able to force themselves into women-only spaces like domestic violence shelters and prisons, and despite two-thirds of the Scottish population opposing it.

For the past several days, women (and plenty of men) have been standing outside Holyrood, bearing signs and banners, to register their dissent. A UN special rapporteur on violence against women has also warned about its dangerous repercussions.

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Think these developments are irrelevant on the other side of the pond? Think again. For years, the U.S. Congress has been considering a bill called the Equality Act (H.R. 5). The text of H.R. 5 does not contain the phrase "self-ID," but it's effectively the same thing. That bill would redefine the word "sex" to include the nebulous phrase "gender identity" throughout U.S. civil rights law. President Joe Biden promised during his 2020 campaign to get the law passed within 100 days of taking office, and it has been before the U.S. Senate since March 2021. The U.S. chapter of the global feminist organization Women's Declaration International has suggested an alternative bill, the Equality for All Act, which would protect women and girls on the basis of sex; lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people on the basis of sexual orientation; and all people on the basis of nonconformity with sex stereotypes.

I’m happy to report both that the UK government blocked the Scottish Parliament’s efforts to “reform” the Gender Recognition Act, and that the “Equality Act” in the US appears to be dead. When the UK government blocked the Scottish Parliament’s actions, I joked with some Scottish TERF friends that before becoming a TERF, I had no idea how much I would eventually come to understand about Scottish law. For example, I now know what the words “devolution” and “section 35” refer to because of these events. The group Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA) published a statement in early 2023, celebrating the apparent death of the US Equality Act.

Now, all of a sudden, everyone (or nearly everyone) in the UK appears to know what a woman is, thanks to their Supreme Court. That court has now explained that the words “woman,” “man,” and “sex” refer to biology, not to ideology or to a legal fiction, under the UK Equality Act of 2010 (which is very different from the US Equality Act, for complicated reasons not worth getting into here).

So, the Scottish politicians who voted in 2022 to “reform” the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland to allow men to access female-only spaces are holding themselves accountable for their actions, right? They’re apologizing to Scottish women and girls, right?

Not so much.

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Meet Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party. Shortly after the UK Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday, he declared on X: “I’ve always called for the protection of single sex spaces on the basis of biological sex.”

Except that he hasn’t “always called for the protection of single sex spaces on the basis of biological sex.” In 2022, he voted for the “reform” of the Gender Recognition Act, which would have allowed men access to female-only spaces upon their say-so. Not only that, but as you can see in the community note, he whipped his MSPs in Labour to vote the same way.

He’s just outright lying.

After voting for “reform” of the Gender Recognition Act in 2022, he didn’t change his mind that some men are women upon their say-so until February of this year. As reported in The Spectator on February 18:

At long last, Scottish Labour has clearly and decisively set out its position on gender self-identification. Party leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy Jackie Baillie have now robustly stated the case that Scottish Labour supports single-sex spaces based on biological sex. Good, clear, precise messaging of the type entirely absent from the SNP leadership – and long overdue.

Yet that clatter you hear is the sound of jaws dropping violently at the audacity. Shock at this astonishing volte face by Sarwar will be most keenly felt by two of his MSPs, Claire Baker and Carol Mochan, who were forced to resign their frontbench posts in the Scottish parliament when they declined to support the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

Sarwar, in an interview with the Holyrood Sources podcast, has said that, knowing what he now knows, his party would not have supported changes to legislation designed to allow people who identify as trans to self-declare their gender. What on earth might Sarwar know now that was not available to him in 2022 when the Scottish parliament voted on the bill? Organised groups of expert women clearly signposted the pitfalls of the legislation.

Even literally today, he acknowledges that “mistakes were made,” but is declining to apologize to Scottish women and girls.

I predict that Democratic Party leaders in the US are going to do the exact same thing. We know from January polling that 80 percent of American voters (including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents) understand that sex is real and that it sometimes matters (at least when it comes to sports). Polling conducted by WDI USA in 2023 revealed that a clear majority of Americans understand that the word “women” means “adult humans who are female.” Perhaps mostly importantly, we know that this issue made a difference in the 2024 presidential election.

This is how the back cover of The Reckoning reads:

In The Reckoning, Kara Dansky, a radical feminist and lifelong Democrat, exposes the invasion by men into female-only spaces, the harming of children, and the silencing, punishment, cancellation and even violence against women who speak out. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which claims to represent the interests of women, ignores the problem, while its allies in the organized Left and mainstream media paint all opposition to the “trans” agenda as “right wing.” But radical feminists are not “right wing.” They are leftists who know that sex is real and are not afraid to demand women’s hard-won rights to safe spaces and privacy.

The Democrat-Left wing establishment knows all the ways in which “gender identity” harms women and girls—and plenty of boys. Yet they are sacrificing women and children to a vicious profit-driven industry that allows men to invade women’s spaces and sports, denies that sex is real, and slices up children’s bodies.

Now the Democrats are facing a reckoning. Detransitioners are starting to speak out, clinicians are blowing the whistle, and women and girls, including many lesbians, have had it. Even now, the tide of common sense and decency is starting to turn in other countries that have banned harmful medical and surgical procedures for underage children and a handful of Democrats are bucking the trend at the state level. Elected Democrats will later claim they didn’t know, that they couldn’t have known, that the science has changed. But they knew. They have known all along. This book provides the evidence.

Thanks ever so much to J.K. Rowling for her kind remarks about it:

The Democrats in power are going to go the way of Sarwar in Scotland. They are going to say they have always supported single-sex sports and spaces. They will be lying. We can’t let them get away with it.

I understand that the Democrats need an off-ramp. That off-ramp cannot be anything short of “I’m sorry. We were wrong. I apologize to America’s women and girls.”

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If you are a Democrat (or former Democrat) who is frustrated with the party’s insistence that some men are women, please consider signing the Democratic Women’s Declaration.