A woman is an adult human female. That used to be a very controversial statement. It did, didn't it? Yeah, you could lose your job for saying that. They all got the law wrong and have got it wrong for the past 15 years. Every single regulator, every government department, every mainstream charity all thought that being a man or a woman was a piece of paper. So I thought that when this ruling would come out, that would be the end. Well...
Is it? Or is there still a massive fight? Hey Francis, do you ever feel like you're missing out by not reading enough woke romance novels? Yeah, I often think, you know what's missing from my life? A love triangle featuring a non-binary barista and an anarchist street poet. All right, all right. I'm sensing some sarcasm.
let me introduce you to Daniel's Desire, the latest satirical novel by the tired moderator. It's the sequel to the wildly popular Daniel's Passion, a hilarious satire with an average rating of 4.4 stars on Amazon.com. Sounds promising. Do I have to read the first book or is Danielle's desire self-identifying as a standalone? No commitment issues here, mate. It stands alone. Plus, if you'd rather listen, the audiobook is an audible so you can enjoy it in the car, at the gym.
or while completing your next corporate sensitivity training. Finally! A book for our times. Pick up your copy of Daniel's Desire today. Available now on Amazon.com. Maya? Yes. Welcome finally to Trigonometry. It's been a while. We've been meaning to have you on for ages and now you have something to...
talk about and celebrate, you might say, with the recent ruling of the British Supreme Court in the case that you and Helen Joyce and others were involved in. So tell us everything that's happened, why it's happened, what the ruling was, etc. So, last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a group called Four Women Scotland, which is a grassroots group from Scotland, and again... the Scottish Government on what the meaning of sex is in the Equality Act.
And we, Sex Matters, the organization that I run, was an intervener in that case. So we made legal arguments, put evidence. and that was part of the winning side. There was also a group of lesbian intervenors who put the case that in particular the definition of sex matters for lesbians. And on the other side was the Equality and Human Rights Commission, so the nations.
Equalities Regulator and Amnesty International, and they all got the law wrong and have got it wrong for the past 15 years. And now we know that a woman is... a woman is an adult human female. That used to be a very controversial statement. Yeah, you could lose your job for saying that. I do remember that. It's amazing. And it was unanimous by the Supreme Court. They said...
Women in law has been recognised for forever and ever. It's not controversial, it's not difficult. And then the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 was the act that first gave women protection against discrimination at work.
um, and harassment, or a bit later harassment, uh, and that was based on the clear definition of sex. And then since then, we've had... the addition of the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, which protects transgender people from discrimination, and then the addition of the Gender Recognition Act.
And the question was, does any of that change the underlying definition of sex and the protection that women have from sex discrimination? And the Supreme Court said no. They said sex is as it always was. Look, you've done brilliant work. You all have, and we commend you all. It takes an enormous amount of bravery. You lost your job as well in horrendous circumstances.
It's stupid. I mean, it's a stupid question, and it corrupted every single organization. I mean, that's the thing, that the people who won this case... scrappy little organizations that get called hate groups and, you know, barely until this week. get on the BBC. And on the other side was the Scottish Government, the UK Government, the Welsh Government, every single regulator, every government department, every mainstream charity, all thought that being a man or a woman...
a woman was a piece of paper and thought you could run a country, run your institutions like that and keep people safe. And they were all wrong. And you saw, I mean, the prime example of this was Nicola Sturgeon. I think the peak of this lunacy was the story of Isla Bryce and Adam Graham. Yeah, I mean, so Isla Bryson was... a man, a rapist, in a women's prison. But there have been several of those. And, I mean, when I started...
paying attention to this in 2018. Partly it was because of a man in a women's prison in England. And I thought, you know, when I started tweeting about that, oh, well, people are going to see this. They're going to think this is mad. They're going to think, how could you possibly have a man in a woman's prison? But they didn't. There were people saying... Oh, the poor trans woman. Think of the poor trans woman.
And all the way through this, we've been trying to say, think of the women. You know, as soon as you say trans woman, as soon as people think about this kind of magic of transition. they forget to think about the women. And, you know, why do you have women's prisons? Why do you have women's sports? Why do you have everyday single-sex services? It's to protect women from men and enable women to be part of public life. And I think it's a really important point that we should...
just double click on for a second, which is, I think in this time we've been living in where it's like, well, everyone's the same, everyone's equal, everyone's isn't. We've kind of forgotten some pretty basic things that actually human beings have always known, which is there's a difference between men and women. It's so physical, but it's also temperamental. It's psychological. Men are much more likely to be violent. Not all men, but there's a small subset of men who are.
So why does sex matter? It's the name of your... Can you just break that down for us in a kind of succinct way? If people are coming to this and maybe they've never really thought about this before. I mean, exactly. As you say, human beings are mammals. We reproduce sexually. It's an important part of our life. It shapes society. And if you forget that, then you end up harming women. Everyone has a mother and a father, and being a mother or father is a huge part of...
And, you know, if you try and erase those differences, and like you say, erase the differences in terms of strength, in terms of prevalence of violence... You're operating counter to reality. And you're making yourself stupid. You're making your institution stupid. And, you know, I think people are trying to do it with good intentions. but you end up corrupting everything. So, Helen, my colleague Helen, has a saying that...
saying that men are women is like saying one equals zero. And if you think about any equation, what you learned in maths in school, if you take any equation and you turn one equals zero... you're going to destroy the integrity of that whole equation. And the law is basically a set of equations. And the way a state runs is... a big engineering project. It's a big set of equations. So what they did was they sort of set...
One equals zero over here for, you know, for a small number of people. They said, you know, in order to be compassionate, in order to accommodate this very small number of people. say this untrue thing. And we will say that this untrue thing is not going to harm the rest of society. We can accommodate it. But it turned out you can't. Once you say that a piece of paper or a statement or a...
piece of clothing or whatever turns a man into a woman, you end up breaking everything that keeps people safe. And not just, I mean, people have been talking about toilets since the judgment, and obviously toilets is... a sort of everyday application of this. But it goes through everything. It goes through data, it goes through systems of safeguarding, you know, how you keep children safe, how you keep bad people out, how you decide, how you differentiate between...
people who are telling lies and people who are not, which is important for keeping people safe. You know, how you differentiate between people who are... smart and people who are stupid or people who are doing something which is... trying to achieve a public goal or doing something for their own benefit. All of those things that you need to do to make big institutions work.
Once you say we're going to have this lie in the heart of our institution and we're all going to have to pretend it's the truth, you corrupt everything in society. And, Maya, talk to us about the impact of this, because it seems to me, from what I've seen, there's still a kind of... There's still a back and forth for some reason, like the court has ruled.
But we saw these leaked messages from the Labour ministers who are basically clearly trying to work out a way how to circumvent this ruling. There's a big debate about the enforcement of all of this. What do you anticipate will be the impact of this for women? But also, and I think it is important to talk about this for trans people as well, because I think the motivations of those people who've been accommodating...
has been to make sure that we don't exclude people and we don't discriminate against people who are trans, which I don't think anyone in this room wants to do. So what do you think will be the impact of this when it's all said and done? I mean, I think that there needs to be a big sort of... re-education, de-radicalization. I mean, it's not difficult, it's just... Ask your mum, go back to common sense, what's a man and what's a woman. You know, it's not...
Difficult to understand that. But all of these institutions in society have misunderstood the law for the past 15 years. And the way that they've misunderstood the law has harmed women and girls. And they've told themselves that that's all right. And so now they've got this cognitive dissonance. You know, they think they're good people. You know, I'm sure they are good people. Like you say, they did it. in order to accommodate this vulnerable group. And they...
They basically set the harms to women at zero. You know, they wrote it off and they said it was fine. And now we're saying to them, no, it's not fine. And women as a coherent group exist. And you need to set rules and policies that recognize that and protect them. And that's obviously coming up against big resistance. because we're asking them to completely flip the script from saying, you know, the default is...
that in any women's space, women's service, women's sport, that you allow in a man who identifies as a woman. And what people had thought was... You might exclude them if it's what they call a proportionate means to a legitimate aim, but the default is you include them. And what the Supreme Court has said is, no, they're men. basically. And that sounds mean. I mean, you know, that is what I'd lost my job for, is for saying politely that trans women are men. But if you're going to, um...
operate rules fairly, then you're going to have to say that. And there's a lot of... resistance to that, and institutions have been captured. You know, on this issue, they've made stupid decisions because they listen to their internal LGBT network. They listened to external organizations like Stonewall. And they did that not because these people are experts, but because they were frightened of them. And they're still frightened of them. And they're gonna have to find their bull.
Sorry. No, it's fine. How do you think, though, that... this conflict of interest is going to be resolved because If you take someone who has transitioned, let's say, who looks feminine in every way, are they going to have to now go to a male toilet? I mean, the trivial answer is...
In most places, there are three options. Most large buildings now have male, female, and unisex. So you're not forcing anyone to go anywhere they don't want. You're just saying, these are the places that you can't go. And the whole thing about the Equality Act protects transgender people against discrimination, that means they should be able to obviously get a job, keep a job, be promoted, be judged the same as everyone else.
you know, go to the cinema, go on a train, go on a plane, you know, all of those things. And in order to do most of those things, you do need to go to the toilet. But you don't need to go to the toilet that affirms your gender identity. You just need to go to the one you're allowed to go to. And I think that's been the misunderstanding of the Equality Act. You know, for 15 years, people have pointed at it and said, it gives us the right.
It gives a trans woman a right to use a women's toilet. It doesn't. It just gives a trans woman a right to have a job, to go to the cinema, to go to the shop. and to use a toilet that doesn't disturb or alarm other people, which is not the women's toilet, however they look. And you can't set rules on somebody who looks... very feminine or thinks they look very feminine. And some people unfortunately have...
you know, not clear self-perception about how well they pass. And that's just not... a an argument that an employer or service provider should be having to get get into with somebody and they can't set rules that say oh well you know you look good in your makeup but you but you don't sorry mate um you know that that's not fair on anybody that's that's not a conversation you should be having what the conversation you should be having is you know we have
These spaces are for men and women, people of either sex. This space is for women, female people. This space is for male. men, male people, you know, we respect your self-expression, you know, we love you as a gardener or as a... you know, shopkeeper or whatever it is you do, but you're not coming in the women's changing room. One of the things I've always found really fascinating is, look, England has been demented on this.
Let's be honest about that. Scotland's been worse. Exactly. And the reason this has happened is because of Scottish law, which our American viewers and listeners and our international viewers and listeners might not be aware has a different legal system to England. Why is it that Scotland have lost the plot even worse than the rest of the UK? Or certainly worse than England? I think partly it's because of the kind of... fight for low-stakes politics.
You know, what can Scotland do? Well, Scotland could redefine what a man and a woman is, or they thought they could. You know, this case was... It was a devolution case, so it was about the conflict between legislation that's across the whole, well, not the whole of the UK, but the whole of Great Britain. So England, Scotland and Wales have the Equality Act. But Scotland has its own government which can do certain things on a devolved basis.
the Scottish government wanted to do was to redefine what a man and a woman is in Scotland, which is, you know, which is very mad. I mean, you think, you know, you cross the border and suddenly a man and a woman is a different thing. And so they did it two ways. One way was they tried to pass this gender recognition reform bill to make it easier for people in Scotland to get a gender recognition certificate.
And that was passed a couple of years ago, and then the UK government stopped it. They said, no, we can't have two different systems across the country where we're giving men certificates to be women. in England, based on, you know, having lived as a woman, whatever that means, um, and have a diagnosis. But in Scotland, you can just get one by rocking up and signing a piece of paper. You know, they said that had gone too far, and so they put a stop to that.
But meanwhile, the Scottish government had also basically been acting, enacting. gender self-ID, so treating people as men or women based on what they say. And they'd done it in this little piece of legislation in Scotland about counting women on public boards. So this is what the Supreme Court case was about. The Scottish government said... They had this piece of legislation to encourage more women on public boards, but the way that they would count them was if they said they were a woman.
Four women in Scotland said, well, that brings you into conflict with the UK law, with the Equality Act. And so that was the fight. And it was found that what the Scottish government had done in terms of this counting women on board. was wrong. And you could see it. So the Supreme Court, which is a panel of itself, and it was three men and two women. You could see the two women judges going, but if we're counting somebody in terms of their achievement in public life as a woman...
and yet they're a man, and they've lived most of their life as a man, and they've had all the advantages that that gives. And the judges on the Supreme Court, they're a bit older than me. They've lived through more sex discrimination than I have, and they were like... well, that doesn't make sense. That's not fair. And so, you know, so it's not just about safety. It's not just about prisons. It's not just about sport. It's also about things like when you say, you know, you're the first.
woman judge on the Supreme Court, well, you want that to be a woman, not a man in a week. The news moves fast and it's not just about keeping up, it's about seeing clearly. In a world where headlines are constantly shifting and narratives change by the hour, understanding how a story is being reported is just as important as what the story is. That's why I use Ground News. It shows you how coverage of any story differs across the political spectrum
helping you break out of echo chambers and actually see the full picture. Take the recent landmark UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of woman. Using ground news, we can see that CNN, which leans left, ran with UK Supreme Court says legal definition of woman excludes trans women. The Spectator, which leans right, led with the Supreme Court ruling is a victory for women. Same story, two completely different takes.
Ground news makes these contrasts easy to spot by letting you compare headlines at a glance. It also shows you ownership information, like the ownership status of both CNN and The Spectator. My favorite feature is the blind spot feed. It surfaces stories being ignored by either the left or the right. stories you might not even realize you're missing, so you can stay informed without being trapped in a single worldview.
Click the link in the description or head to ground.news slash trigonometry for 40% off their unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use. More than a million people have already downloaded the Ground News app. If you care about seeing every side of the story, join them today. If you're part of the trigonometry audience, chances are you're not just interested in politics. You're properly dialed in. You ask questions, you challenge assumptions, and you don't settle for one side of the story.
That's why the NPR Politics Podcast... is a great listen. The team covers Washington with real damn... And right now they're unpacking the first hundred days of Trump's presidency. What's changed? What stayed the same? And what's coming down the track? They take one topic per day. Immigration, trade, executive power. and boil it down in under 15 minutes. It's focused, well produced, and always clear.
even when the news cycle isn't. If you're serious about understanding the political landscape, the NPR Politics Podcast is well worth your time. Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcast, only from NPR. wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think part of the issue is with Scotland is that it's far more progressive and left wing than England, which tends to be more conservative and more right of centre, particularly when it comes to economics?
Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I think I mean, I don't know enough about Scottish politics, but, you know, watching the gender recognition reform bill. gave me a new love for the House of Lords. You know, just having a second house that can go, you know, no, you can't do this. But they don't have that in Scotland. And so have you been surprised now that the ruling has come and common sense has been restored a little bit?
at the reaction that a small minority has had. But I would also largely as well, most people are going, well, that just makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean... You know, no one expects the Trannish Inquisition, and we didn't see this weekend coming. I mean, we didn't know if we were going to win or lose, but we didn't. expect the level of vitriol and intimidation and threats of violence, which is surprising because we've had it for the past eight years.
But obviously, you know, it's kind of ramped up again. Um, you know, so you had people in Parliament Square with signs saying, um, the only good turf is basically a dead turf, you know, a picture of a noose and things like that. male sexual violence intimidation of women. That's what it is. And, you know, they were there waving those violent signs with their pink and blue flags. And then the next day...
And their employer's waving the same pink and blue signs. And their employer has misunderstood the Equality Act for the past 15 years and thought that somebody saying that trans woman is a man is, you know, if not a Nazi, then, you know... Pretty close to it. And now their employer has to treat them fairly and has to kind of rethink their whole approach to men and women. And yet you've still got these people within organisations terrorising.
Well, my favorite thing of those protests was there was two people next to each other. One had a placard which said trans people are not a threat. And the other one had one saying, bring back witch burning.
You've got to pick a team, guys. But I'm curious what you think about the future direction of this, because I think most people thought, and I said this... in an article I did on my substack in a little video that we put out on this channel, which is we kind of stopped talking about this issue on trigonometry because we felt...
that at the ideas level, like there were no more questions. Like I know what a woman is. I know what a man is. I know why they shouldn't compete in the same sport and et cetera, et cetera. Like I couldn't in good faith bring you on here and be like, so am I, tell me what a woman, do you know what I mean? So I thought that when this ruling would come out, that would be the end. As in, done, dusted, sanity is back, Francis' common sense has been brought back.
Is it or is there still a massive fight now to, as you say, de-radicalize the institutions, get all this crap? Because from what I understand, a lot of this stuff is in the policing. It's in the NHS. It's pretty much everywhere. And a lot of the people who implemented it are still there.
I don't imagine they're necessarily delighted that this has happened. No, and people have made their career out of promoting this. It's still there in all of these systems, and it's still there in the data. I mean, I think that... The way we got here was the idea that people could keep their sex secret, and they could keep it secret at work. And in practice, it's impossible to keep your sex secret. Almost nobody passes as the opposite sex. Some women who have taken testosterone for a long time.
passed more successfully than men. It's almost impossible for a man to pass as a woman. on Instagram, possibly, but in person, the body, the shoulders, the voice, the height, you know, it's... basically impossible to do and here's a fair sorry to interrupt my as well that my sense is women are far more attuned to this stuff than men so you like a woman can really
You've kind of got a bit of a bullshit detector when it comes to that issue. Yeah, and there are studies that show, they do these studies like with pixelated pictures and women can identify or... whether it's a man or a woman, at a lower level of detail than men can. And that would make sense because you have to be much more aware of the potential threat than a man would be. Exactly. And so what they were trying to do was...
Make this thing which is fundamentally not secret. It's written into every cell of your body. And also, once you know that about a person, if you know someone's a man or a woman, you never forget it. You might forget their middle name or their birth date.
you know, what they do for a living or all kinds of things, but you never forget somebody's sex and make that secret. And so what they did was change the data. So they allowed people... first in the 70s to change their passport because the first people who transitioned, they went off to Casablanca to do it because that's where the experimental doctors that were doing these horrific surgeries were.
In those days, you couldn't walk around being a woman with a man's passport or a man with a woman's passport. So the passport office, not even the government, there was no decision making in the government. Somebody in the passport office went, oh. Well, okay, so we'll give you a man a female passport because he's gone off to Casablanca and had his penis removed. Sorry, it always comes to that.
Then they came back and they had to get jobs. So then they said, well, you know, at that time you had like a men's national insurance card and a women's national insurance card. You couldn't go and pay your stamps with the wrong card. So they gave them. a card for the opposite sex and they all of these things were just done just to allow people to move around in a world where
being male or female was very clear, but it changed the data. And then they brought in the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed people to change. their birth certificate and all of that still exists. So the data is a mess. You don't even have... There are about 8,000 people that have changed the sex on their birth certificate, but there might be 100,000 people that have changed their sex somewhere else.
So on their NHS records, on their passport, on their driving license records. And you can do that without a diagnosis. You can do it, just go to your doctor, seven minute interview, you know, seven minutes. GP's appointment and you say, I think I'm a woman, I want to live as a woman. And the doctor signs your passport application to say, this person wants to live as a woman. They'll give you a passport, says female. And so then you go and apply for a job.
The employer doesn't know any of this, even though they might know that you're male. they look at passport and think, well, that's a government document. I better trust that. I'm going to write down female. And so that has proliferated across all of these systems that are supposed to be... keeping people safe, collecting data, managing risk.
And that's all still there. And fixing that is, I mean, sounds sort of a bit techie, but that's really important because that's the mechanic, the machinery of the state. And at the same time, the government's bringing in this digital... digital use and access bill. So there's a bill that's going through Parliament at the moment to allow people to have digital identities.
Do you know they've got a thing on your phone where you can go to, you probably don't need it, but go to pub to prove you're over 18. And instead of having to show your passport, it just shows that you're over 18. Doesn't necessarily show your name, doesn't show your date of birth, but it shows, you know, you're the person who owns this fingerprint and you're over 18. But all the data that that's built on comes from passports, driving license, the NHS. So you're going to be able to say,
I'm a woman. Look, government says so. And, you know, who reads Supreme Court rulings if what you've got is a government app with a tick that says I'm female? So all of that needs to be undone, both in terms of the data and in terms of... institutions and, you know, untraining people on these stupid things they've trained them on. And how confident are you that this will actually happen? Because, as I alluded to earlier, we've seen private exchanges between Labour government ministers.
who are quite clear in their determination to subvert this entire process. Keir Starmer has come out recently and reversed his position that trans women are women. Now he says they're not. Are you confident that the current government is actually going to enforce all of this? I mean, if they don't, we'll be back in court, basically. The Supreme Court ruling is a really strong thing. It's the highest court in the land. It was unanimous, and it said that...
men are not women. For institutions then to think they can get around this with weasel words or ambiguity. they'll trip over themselves and they'll end up in court. And we have been winning and winning and winning. I'd rather not. I'd rather they do the right thing. But the law is on our side.
The next thing that needs to happen is the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is the regulator of the equality law. So that's the body that employers turn to to say, you know, what's this mean? Since 2010... They have put out guidance that was wrong because they thought the law said something that it didn't. Now they need to put out guidance that is correct. And I think it needs to be, you know, back of a postcard simple.
When you have that symbol, the male symbol or the female symbol for toilets, changing rooms, everyday public services... It means what it says. No man has a right to go into a woman's space. And you have to say no. At the moment, their guidance is hundreds of pages long, and it says, think about all these different things. Is it a proportionate means to a legitimate aim, to exclude them? But the Supreme Court has made it much, much simpler now. They can just say, no.
You know what a man is. You know what a woman is. Everybody knows their own sex. If they don't want to talk about it, sometimes that's fine, but they just don't use a space that requires them to talk about it. One of the things you've touched on lightly, but I think it's really important to delve into, is how our language has been corrupted. My ex-girlfriend went through a very invasive medical procedure.
And there was something, I was reading the literature that she was given. There was talk of chest feeders. And this is an NHS. This is a cancer specialist hospital. And you're going, why is it that we are talking about chest feeders? And it wasn't just that. There was loads of this stuff. This is going to take a lot of rolling back. Yeah. You've achieved remarkable things. But there's a part of me that thinks that's going to be an even bigger...
I think these people are cowards, though. I mean, they got here by being cowards, and I think once they see that... you keep your job by complying with the law. And that, you know, once that becomes the default and the easy way, and also when they can point at someone else, say it's above my pay grade, Supreme Court says so.
then I think, you know, it will get easier and easier. I mean, the thing that happened with my case was, you know, I won the right for us to say this. And at the time, it was very, very hard to say it. And the people who did were brave because they could lose their job. But now, you know, you can lose your job the other way. If you say to your boss, I'm not going to comply with the Equality Act.
I disagree with it. I mean, politically, fine to disagree with it, but in the workplace, you need to comply with the law. And if your position is, I'm not going to comply with the law, then... then you can lose your job. And I think, you know, most people are, you know, they just want to get on with it. They just want to do their job. go home, you know, enjoy their life.
And if it's made clear that the way to do that is to follow the law as it's now understood to be, I think most people, and also they know it's the right thing. What we see is that... You have a lot of these policies that are written down, and then you have doctors and nurses, social workers, teachers going round them because they know what a man is and what a woman is. I mean, you also have some that are, you know... woke and crazy going the other way but
This has flipped the balance, basically. And I think what's going to be very interesting as well from a legal perspective, and I really hope this happens. is that people who have lost their jobs unfairly, people who have been suspended. I think there's one particular case, egregious case in Scotland, which is, is it Sandy Peggy? Sandy Peggy the nurse. What's going to happen to these people who've been dragged through the mud, they've lost their jobs, they've had their reputations tarnished?
I mean it's retribution time, isn't it? I don't know if it's retribution, and I certainly haven't seen any apologies yet, and I haven't seen anyone lose their job for this. I think, I mean... A lot of the cases that had been brought were brought on the basis of belief discrimination, which is what my case was about. And my case was about this question of...
whether the belief that sex is real, immutable and important is worthy of respect in a democratic society. And first, the judge said it wasn't, and they said that it was. And now it turns out that that thing that we call the belief, you know, it's just the law. I mean, it's reality too, but it's the law. And so... So when I won my case, I pleaded both belief and lack of belief. So I said, I believe in...
sex is real. Some other people believe in gender identity. I don't share that belief. I'm an atheist towards that belief. And you're protected. by being an atheist against discrimination. And there's a question of, well, is that belief worthy of respect in a democratic society?
And I think some versions of it are, you know, some versions of religion are, you know, you shouldn't be discriminated against because of your religion, but your religion might not be that rational. But if your religion involves harming other people's human rights...
then it's not the kind of thing that's protected at work. And similarly, if your belief about gender is so extreme that you can't respect other people's rights... or you think men should be in women's changing rooms, or male police officers should be able to strip-search women. I don't think that belief is worthy of respect in a democratic society. So I don't think it's, it's not so much about retribution, but it's about kind of taming crazy beliefs.
We've tamed crazy beliefs before. We know how to do that. We know how to live in a plural society where people keep the madder reaches of their beliefs. at home or on the internet and respect each other at work. And I think that's where we've got to get to. But the problem is that the crazy beliefs have been the ones that have been flying the flag at Sussex University and, you know.
well, every institution of government up to now. And it's not just crazy beliefs. It's also, quite frankly, crazy organisation.
that institutions like the NHS and the BBC have let come in. Groups like Mermaid, Stonewall, who were once very reputable, have been pushing this stuff. I think we're now going to have to have a very... difficult and uncomfortable conversation as to what actually went wrong and by opening the door to all these crazy beliefs the the damage that was wreaked on people's lives i mean and you know the biggest damage
for people who think that they're transgender. I mean, they have been sold a lie, and they were sold a lie by the doctors who didn't think about other people's rights. and who said, you know, doctors sometimes get very excited about their bit of medicine, their bit of the body, but they don't think about it in a wider context. So there were doctors who thought, you know, we can turn penises into vaginas.
You can't. But you also have to think about how does that person live in the world? And what they thought was, well, the world will reshape itself around them. And now... the world has bitten back and the world is saying no you know you wear what you like call yourself what you like um do what you like with your body up to a point. But that doesn't put obligations on the rest of the world, and that makes trans people's lives very difficult. But that's because they've been...
sold a lie. And some of those people are vulnerable people, and some of them are very young people. And the harm that's been done to those people, I think, is huge. I mean, that's human rights abuse. Sterilizing somebody, removing their sexual function on basically a false promise is, I think, a human rights abuse that's been done to those people.
Some people deal with stress by journaling. Some take up yoga. I tried bottling everything up for 15 years and called it character building or being British. Eventually, I decided to give therapy a go. And honestly, it's one of the best decisions I ever made. But therapy isn't always easy to get. Long waitlist, high cost, therapists who don't take your insurance. It's exhausting.
Rula is doing something genuinely different. Rula, spelled R-U-L-A, is making mental health care simple, accessible, and best of all, affordable. With Ruler, most people pay just $15 per session using their insurance. That's game changing. Ruler is not some faceless tech company. They're a healthcare provider group that supports you through your journey.
monitoring your progress, making sure you're paired with the right person and staying with you every step of the way. You could be speaking to a therapist as soon as tomorrow. Thousands already trust RULER to support them on their journey toward improved mental health. and overall well-being. Head over to ruler.com to get started today. And when they ask where you heard about them, make sure to say trigonometry. Go to R-U-L-A.
And take the first step towards better mental health today. You deserve quality care from someone who cares. Did you know you spend a third of your life in bed? That's a lot of time. So why not make... every night's sleep the best it can be. That's why we trust Avocado Green Mattress. Unlike most mattresses, which are packed with synthetic foams, chemical flame retardants,
and petrochemicals, avocado is made with organic latex, wool, and cotton. No toxins or harmful chemicals. And here's what really sold me. Avocado's mattresses are not only built to last... but their organic materials actually help you sleep better. Natural latex supports your body properly, while wool and cotton regulate temperature, keeping you cool in summer and warm in winter.
They offer up to one year sleep trials and generous warranties to make sure it's right for you. Go to avocadogreenmattress.com today and save up to 10% on certified organic mattresses. Dream of better. You talk about young people, I think one of the most worrying things for anyone who's a parent in all of this is...
You look at the stuff that's being taught in schools. I mean, most parents might not be aware, but schools are infiltrated, absolutely infiltrated with this stuff. They're teaching the gender as a spectrum and all kinds of. What is the impact of this ruling and the broader kind of readjustment on education and young people in particular? Because we do know, whether you like it or not, I'm sure you don't, as I don't, there has been an explosion.
just numerically in the number of young people who feel that they are the opposite sex or different gender or whatever. So what will be the impact of this on young people and education? I think, I mean, we had the CAS review, which looked at the medical evidence for child transition. And we've been waiting for the government to give guidance to schools on... the broader question on the Equality Act and how they should treat
so-called gender-questioning children at school. And we've been waiting eight years for this guidance. They've been trying to do this for eight years and they couldn't do it. Now the Supreme Court gives them... absolute clarity that people cannot change their sex. And you cannot, I think... tell children that they can, and promise children that they can, because children can't...
assess those claims. You know, they believe what they're told. And I think the adults in the room now have to say, look, you know... Being a teenager is tough. You're discovering yourself. You're making mistakes. We're going to... try and make sure that you keep you safe while you explore and do stupid things that teenagers do. But we can't promise you that you can change your sex and we can't force your classmate. to treat someone as if they're the opposite sex, and we can't change.
all of our rules and processes that we have to keep children safe in school, which are based on knowing what sex they are. So once you take all of that off the table, there's not that much left in terms of... Well, you say that, but actually, I don't know that that's true. And the reason is that I think the one thing we haven't really talked about is the concept of gender.
and gender identity. If you've been teaching, I don't know, children from the age of six up until the age of whatever they are now, that gender is a spectrum and you're like, I don't remember the exact metaphor they used, but like there's different colors of... teddy bears or whatever it is, and you can be green or blue or purple or whatever. And you're just on a spectrum of all these things. Now you're having to say to them, by the letter of the law, boys are boys and girls are girls.
So where does all of this leave the concept of gender and gender identity, which is to say, I'm non-binary, I'm this, I'm this gender, I'm that gender, I'm cat gender, I'm whatever. Where does it leave that? Does it affect that at all? I mean, I think it leaves it in the playground. It leaves it as something that... children say to each other, that people say to their friends.
You know, they can talk about their horoscopes or, you know, being goths or being emos or whatever. You know, that self-expression, none of it changes what sex you are. And I think... If schools have clear rules and expectations, they're going to have to stop teaching this stuff because in practice, they're running sport. They're running changing rooms. They're running trips away. All of these places, they know what's set.
children are, and they're also teaching them biology. And, you know, I just think Hopefully this will go out of fashion and it will just be one of those playground things that kids say and then they grow up and they fall in love and they get a job and they discover that the world is far more interesting than wondering what gender you are. I mean, I sincerely hope, Maya, but my worry is with social media. This is where the stuff gets pumped into them.
I mean, if we're going to achieve that, which everybody in this room desperately wants, that's surely the next battle, isn't it? I mean, on... On sex and gender, one sort of encouraging thing we're hearing is that the next generation of kids, you know, the next generation of kids always think the ones above them are a bit naff. And, you know, the kind of... trend is
So there may be that, but what the next awful thing that comes on the internet, I don't know what that will be. But it may be that this is just a generational thing that doesn't go away completely. is a thing that happened and is not happening to the extent that it did anymore. But, you know, it has shown how vulnerable our institutions are to capture by crazy damaging ideas. And, you know, like you say...
This idea is so stupid you didn't even get me on to talk about it, and yet it captured all of our institutions. And I don't know what the next crazy damaging idea will be, but I'm sure there will be one. What do you think? The fact that this... Particular ideology ran rampant to such an extent that you had the future prime minister unable to define what a woman is.
The fact that people lost their jobs, the fact that people had their careers destroyed, reputations, times, etc. What do you think that says at a very fundamental level about our society? I think it says that big institutions are vulnerable. I mean, you know, fundamentally we are... We're mammals. We are not the kind of higher beings that we think we are. We're selfish and horny.
prejudiced and you know care about our families more than we do about the next person and and yet we also have kind of big ideas about ourselves and our societies and it's those big ideas that make um Great. You know, we make great things out of them, but then the great things that we make are vulnerable to, you know, this is why you have, you know.
sexual abuse and sexual harassment in every big company. It's why you have corruption, it's why you always have to be... wary of the things that can go on in your big institutions while you're pursuing the goal that you say you're pursuing. But we can't give up on that. We can't go back into living in our little tribes and hating everybody else. So, you know, the most important, valuable things, I think, that we have.
are our institutions that's what makes us clever, it's what makes us wealthy, it's what keeps us safe, it's what stops us. you know, just living by might alone. We need all these things. We can't burn them down. We want the police to work. We want the universities to work. Or, you know, maybe not the universities, but we want people to be able to learn things and maybe, you know, the...
institutions that we currently have are not the ones that are going to do that. So all of that stuff about how people work together with people who are not their families and who are not their tribe. are the most valuable thing. And I think the fact that they all got... crazy, stupid, harmful idea is a sort of lesson that... you know, that we should learn. And I'm going to be focused on just this crazy, stupid, harmful idea. But I do think it has been a canary in the coal mine for...
thinking about institutions. Well, right. And this is, I think, rephrasing Franca's question in a more forward-facing way. Ultimately, I think the thing we ought to be asking in this moment is what mistakes did we make as a society? And you might say, I didn't make any mistakes. I spoke up about it and you did and other people did. And that's great. I think there's something about the way that this happened from which we really have to be able to learn some practical lessons.
about our susceptibility to bad ideas and how rapidly they can infiltrate institutions. Do you have any thoughts on... what mistakes might have been made and how we can prevent the next bad idea from becoming as mainstream and institutionalized as this one was. The big lesson that I've taken away from it is how... The things that we have to protect us can be used against us. And checks and balances are really important. So the Equality Act...
is a very carefully put together piece of law that has checks and balances in it. It says, You have to think about everybody's rights. And when you have a policy that might harm one group, you have to understand what that harm might be and think about how you can mitigate it. But you also have to think about... what you're trying to do so you know your actual business but also how your policies could harm other people and you balance all of those things off and and hopefully you then
are able to achieve your goals while not screwing people over. But if you only focus on one group, then all of those instruments that are meant to... make the balance work, make it not work. And so you end up, you know, the complaint system gets weaponized. unreasonably the metric. drive the thing off in the wrong direction. It's the cancer that takes over the body, all of the things that are meant to regulate the body.
start working overtime in one direction and take over the resources and the... you know, the body of the institution. And I think that's what happened here. People said, be kind, and... stopped looking at how policies affect everyone and only looked at how they affect this one group. That's the big thing for me, just thinking about how institutions work and how you stop this happening again, because there will be another group.
Well, maybe this is the thing that we ought to address then, I think it sounds like, which is this over-focus on victimhood and over-focus on the protection of minorities. has meant that we can no longer say, actually, you know what, we do care about protecting minorities, but you are actually going too far. You're asking too much of us as a society. You're asking for too much accommodation.
And that seems to me like a crucial part of this. And I suspect given that we remain in that mindset of like, well, let's make sure we look after these people. There's probably more of this stuff to unravel down the road. But the one thing we haven't yet talked about is actually your own contribution to all of this because we've kind of skirted around the fact that you lost your job. It must have been a pretty difficult period of time for you, Maya.
Yeah. I mean, so I lost my job in the beginning of 2019 for speaking up about this and I... I recorded the last conversation with the boss, the big boss, because he rang me up to tell me. Tell us more. Where were you working? What happened? What did you say? Et cetera. If you're part of the trigonometry audience, chances are you're not just interested in politics. You're properly dialed in. You ask questions, you challenge assumptions, and you don't settle for one side of the story.
That's why the NPR Politics Podcast... is a great listen. The team covers Washington with real depth. And right now they're unpacking the first hundred days of Trump's presidency. What's changed? What stayed the same? And what's coming down the track? They take one topic per day. Immigration, trade, executive power. and boil it down in under 15 minutes. It's focused, well produced, and always clear.
even when the news cycle isn't. If you're serious about understanding the political landscape, the NPR Politics Podcast is well worth your time. Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcast, only from NPR. wherever you get your podcasts. I was working for an international development think tank called the Centre for Global Development, which is actually a US organisation based in Washington, DC. But I was working in the London office.
And at the time, the UK government was doing public consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act. And so, you know, I worked at a think tank. I thought I should be allowed to think. And it was an organization that... It doesn't take institutional positions, the fellows in it disagree about things, and the idea was...
you know, bring the evidence, like politely disagree. This is what we do. And I was working on tax policy, nothing to do with sex and gender, but I was interested in this. And so I tweeted about it. And people in the US complained, so a couple of people in fundraising complained. The organisation at first said, oh, this looks a bit controversial, but just put a disclaimer on your tweets, which was the right thing.
carry on. But then they had EDI consultants in and they got nervous, they deferred to the EDI consultants. The EDI consultants did a whole investigation on me, looked at all my tweets, which were about the government consultation, about men and women's prisons, but also about... When I first started tweeting about this, and I had about 2,000 followers, and they were like policy wonks, they like an argument, and nobody was responding to me at all. And so...
I tweeted a question to my followers, which was about mannels. So lots of men who work in international development who are generally woke. um say that if they're asked to speak at a conference and it's all men on the conference panel they'll say could you get a woman and you know you can replace me with a woman or you can make the panel bigger but i won't speak on an all-male panel
And so I set the question for them in terms of this is a policy, a personal policy that you've made to do something good for women. What if... And there was a guy called Pips Bunce, Philip Pips Bunce, who worked at Credit Suisse and who came to work a couple of days a week dressed as a woman in a wig. and the other days of the week as a man. And I said, well, what if it was you and another man and Pips Bunce, would you still say this is a mannel?
And because I sort of asked it in a personal way, people responded and we had about a week's worth of heated debate on Twitter. And that's what I lost my job for, was that. And so it was the same question, really, that the Supreme Court was asking. If the Scottish government has taken this position to make sure that you don't have manholes, you don't have boards of public institutions that are all men. And so you said you were about to say you recorded your... So I recorded the final...
conversation with the big boss when he was telling me they weren't keeping me on. And I've only listened to it twice because it was quite traumatic. But it's in, obviously, it's in the... evidence bundle for the case. I was basically on that call saying, but this is the law in the UK. Women... Women are female. We have the Equality Act. It protects women's rights. And he was saying, well, we recognize sex gender, he said, or sex slash gender, you know.
And I was saying, but that's not the law. And it just felt so Kafkaesque. I was the one saying, this is the law. And he was the one saying, well, you're fired. And it's taken, you know, five years from then to now it being really clear and it's in the highest court in the land that, yes, that was the law. They shouldn't even have thought that it was controversial that I was saying it. It's the law, they should have been saying it too.
As you say, I lost, I had to bring this belief discrimination claim. And in order for a belief to be protected, you have to show that it meets these criteria that is coherent, that it's an important part of your life. and that it's worthy of respect in a democratic society, which basically means it doesn't destroy other people's human rights. So, you know...
being a Nazi or wanting to overthrow the government by violent revolution is not a protected belief. But almost anything else, or not almost anything, but lots of other things are like... Being an ethical vegan, for example, or Scottish nationalist are both protective beliefs. So I had to show that this belief that sex is real and immutable is a...
is a protected philosophical belief. And they asked me things like, when did you come up with this novel idea? And I was like, I can't really remember, but I've always known. And the judge in that case said, no, this belief... it basically is on par with Nazism. What? Well, that's what he said. That's what failing the test of being a protected, worthy of respect in a democratic society means. And he said, this belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society. That was in December 2019.
That was when I lost. And the next day, JK Rowling tweeted and my life was turned upside down because up to that point, I mean, I had... I'd crowdfunded, it was public. I'd been in the papers, but it wasn't as public as it is now. And then suddenly it was, you know, in Variety and in the Australian newspapers and, you know, and I was kind of...
villain number one, and every time they wanted to go after J.K. Rowling and say what terrible person she was, and then people say, well, why is she a terrible person? It looks like she's saying very sensible things. They say, oh, but she defended this bigot, Meyer Vorstatter. So that was my life for a while. And then we went back to court, won the appeal, and it was turned over. So it was.
a protected belief, it's worthy of respect in a democratic society. And that now means that other people can use this legal precedent. to protect themselves at work. And so, you know, the most wonderful thing is people coming up to me and saying, you know, I said your name at work. and it stopped the investigation, it saved my job. Or, you know, I can speak up and I'm not afraid because I know that the law protects you.
And it's kind of crazy that we had to protect this thing as a belief, because it's not a belief, it's the truth. And the belief part of it was that it's important. So not, you know, most people will accept that. There are two sexes. But some people say that gender identity is more important than sex. So the belief part is that sex is the thing that's important and that you still need to be able to talk about it and that you need rules and laws based on it.
Maya, you mentioned J.K. Rowling. What has been her role in all of this? How impactful has her intervention been? Because I can see she's taken a lot of flack. Pretty much entire, all of it undeserved as far as I'm concerned. What's the positive impact that she's made here? It's been huge. You know, she's uncancellable and she kept coming back. You know, when she first... you know i thought maybe that's that's it you know she doesn't have to carry on talking about this
Um, and she did. She kept tweeting about it and then she wrote an essay and her essay was, you know, careful and compassionate and, you know. She's a good writer. And, you know, I read the essay and I thought, oh, well, that's it. It's over now. Just read the essay. But obviously, you know, it wasn't. Then she was...
got death threats and rape threats and, you know, cancelled by the actors from Harry Potter and, you know, people burning her books. And she just kept coming back and she kept coming back and saying... No, you can't cancel me. And that has just been huge. You know, particularly, obviously, she lives in Scotland. You know, she's supported the women in Scotland. She's, you know, she said Nicola Sturgeon is a destroyer of human rights.
But, you know, she's just been kind of the queen, really. I'm glad we spoke about J.K. Rowling because I think she showed incredible bravery. But I think the most powerful... element of this story is it's just ordinary regular women like you who just went no enough is enough and they took on government and political parties and figures like Nicola Sturgeon. And you won. Yeah. That's incredible. I know. That's what a story. I know. It is. You must be so proud. I am. I really am.
We've done an amazing thing. And like you say, ordinary women organizing around their kitchen tables, you know, putting their £10 together and facing down the government and saying... This is the law that protects women. We want protection. We were right and we were right.
Um, you know, and now they're pointing at us and they say, you know, they're right-wing, they're funded by, you know, this dark money and, you know, because people can't believe that a bunch of women can be that organized to do this. Yeah, Turf Island is... showing the way for the rest of the world.
Absolutely. And it's not just the impact you have on this island. It's the impact you have in America. When I'm in America and we go and we talk to, you know, all these different people, really big names. The thing they all talk about, a lot of it, is what's happening here with the movement that you started and the pushback that's happening here. Because they haven't been able to engender nearly as much in the United States or in Canada as a group of...
A small group of women in this country. I think... I mean, I think we had the advantage that it's a small country, so we could meet. I mean, it's really hard in the US to do anything. You know, we only had four nations, and it's relatively small, and we could meet. And also we could kind of look over the pond and see the craziness that was going on over there and in Canada and sort of see that coming.
So I think those are kind of two reasons why it really took off in the UK. And then there are things like we had Mumsnet, you know, just this kind of wild card. But, you know, a lot of this started on Mumsnet. sort of Women with, you know, more time and smarts than they were using on Mumsnet going, this is wrong, what do we do about it? And organising anonymously, being able to organise anonymously.
And so I think what we have done is shown that you can use the law. And my case was based on the European Convention on Human Rights, although it was based on the Equality Act. it was based on wider principles that people in other countries can use. And it was really based on this question of the balance between privacy and... and other people's human rights you know yes you can keep your sex
and you can keep any part of your information private as long as you don't leave your house. But as soon as you leave your house, people are going to work out what sex you are. You can't... use the right to privacy to bludgeon everyone else into telling a lie. And that kind of human rights principle applies in every country that's signed up to any kind of human rights framework so they can use it.
And then similarly, the data stuff, if we sort out the data stuff, data has to be interoperable. You can't have somebody else's. gender identity data substituting in for your sex data. We recently had a case of a non-binary guy from California, Ryan Castellucci, who had a... non-binary gender recognition certificate from California and he wanted a non-binary certificate from the UK government. The UK government said no, and won in court.
because they said, no, here we only have male and female. So getting it right in one place then allows you to hopefully help people to get it right in other places. Do you think part of the reason as well that the movement was so successful here is it isn't as politicised? as it is in America, where it's very much a left-right issue. If you're a liberal, you believe in this. And if you're conservative, you believe in this.
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. The fight back in the UK really did start with left-wing women. It started with a group of trade unionists who founded Women's Place UK. And now it's across the political spectrum, but it is much less politically polarized in general and on this issue.
Maya, it's been great having you on. Thanks for coming. We're going to go to our sub stack where our audience get to ask you their questions. But before we do, the question we always end with is what is a woman? I think we've answered that. Thank God. The last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Oh, God. I only talk about this topic.
I should have thought of that. We do talk about this topic as a society an awful lot now, so it's probably not that. Yeah. I mean, I really only talk about this one stupid topic. All right. Well, head on over to Substack where we're going to talk more about this stupid topic with your questions.
if we are to believe that the tide is truly turning with the gender debate what is the next part of this debate also what might we see if the pendulum swings too far Francis, I want to take a minute to give a special mention to one of the best podcast interviewers out there.
Okay, be quick though, mate. Who is it? It's me. No, it's a certain someone who's funny and smart. Oh yeah? He's got an incredible knack for creating honest conversations with fascinating people. Go on. Do you know who I'm talking about? Is it me? What? No, it's Jordan Harbinger. Oh. The Jordan Harbinger Show is a perfect complement to trigonometry, and we recommend you add it to your podcast rotation. Yes!
Just like Trigonometry, Jordan hosts weekly mind-broadening conversations with some of the most fascinating people in the world. But a key difference that I'm a big fan of is that Jordan is focused on pulling actionable, growth-oriented advice... Give Jordan's show a go today. Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R. On Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.