The problem with Kemi Badenoch’s transgender reforms

It is five years since Labour’s then equalities spokeswoman, Dawn Butler, told a BBC interviewer that babies aren’t born with a sex. It was the high point of transgender ideology, which captivated all the politician parties to some extent in the 2010s. 

Even the Tory minister, Penny Mordaunt, told MPs in 2018 that ‘trans women are women trans men are men’ – a genuflection to the quasi religious dogma that people can be born in the wrong body. They cannot of course, and this weird doctrine has been one of the most extreme examples of the flight from reason and scientific certainty on the left since the millennium.

Now five years on from the Butler Doctrine, the Conservatives say they will change the Equality Act to assert the primacy of biological sex. The equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, says she wants to stop predatory men from exploiting an ambiguity it the law which allows them to enter women’s single-sex spaces.