What is a woman?

The UK supreme court is currently addressing this ancient riddle, one that has perplexed the greatest minds throughout the ages...

It was known as the sphinx: a terrifying hybrid with a lion’s body and a human head. According to the legend, the sphinx was sent to guard the city of Thebes by the goddess Hera who wanted to punish the citizens for some ancient crime. It perched on a nearby mountain, and whenever anyone attempted to enter or leave the city it would pose a riddle. If the traveller failed to answer, he or she would be devoured, but the riddle was so confounding, so esoteric, so abstruse, that even the greatest intellectuals of the day soon found themselves reduced to snacks for the mighty sphinx.

And what was this riddle? What was the question that foxed even the sharpest of minds? It was simply: “what is a woman?”

And now, a hearing at the UK’s supreme court has taken place to solve the sphinx’s riddle once and for all. The campaign group For Women Scotland raised the case in order to challenge the Scottish government’s contention that the word “sex” in the Equality Act includes men who identify as female and hold a Gender Recognition Certificate. We can expect the results of this hearing over the next few months.

And yet I’m sure most of you are thinking to yourselves: “How will these judges possibly answer such a metaphysical conundrum?” And you’re not alone. Many valiant and learned individuals have fallen in the attempt. Take a look at this from a group of representatives for Australia’s Department of Health…

Perhaps we need a higher authority to tackle this riddle. What about Ketanji Brown Jackson, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States…

As our esteemed judge notes, she is not a biologist, so how could she possible answer the question? It’s the same reason I don’t know the difference between a cat and a dog, because I’m not a zoologist. It’s why when a friend asked me where I was going for my holidays, I told him I don’t know because I’m not a cartographer. It’s why if anyone ever asks me to call them on the phone, I tell them I can’t because I’m not Alexander Graham Bell.

So lets broaden the scope. If the top medical and legal minds in Australia and America cannot solve the sphinx’s riddle, perhaps our Prime Minister will fare better…

How about Anneliese Dodds, the government’s Minister for Women and Equalities? Surely as an expert in the subject of womanhood, she would be the most qualified to wrestle with this enigma…

Evidently Dodds is struggling. So let’s turn to Dawn Butler, the former Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities…

Is Butler correct that a child is born without a sex? Does the midwife simply flip a coin and fill out the birth certificate according to this whim of fate?

Inevitably, activists tend to frame the entire question of “what is a woman?” as some kind of “gotcha”. Or they claim that to even broach the question of sex differences is “transphobic” and “hateful”, a means to bully the most marginalised. But of course, the transgender lobby wields incredible power in our society; it can see people silenced, harassed and even arrested for speaking truth, and all in the name of “progress”. Genuinely marginalised groups do not enjoy this kind of clout.

Others will say that all of this is a distraction from the “real issues”. But gender identity ideology has a deleterious impact on everyone, and has proved to be a major factor in political change. In its post-election analysis in November 2024, entitled “How Trump won, and how Harris lost”, the New York Times singled out an advertising campaign by Trump’s team which drew attention to Kamala Harris’s statement that all prison inmates identifying as transgender ought to have access to surgery. The tagline was: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.

Although the New York Times considered this a “seemingly obscure topic”, its writers were forced to admit its efficacy. Even Trump’s aides had been astonished at how popular the campaign had proven. According to the political action committee Future Forward, a group established to support the Democratic Party, this advertisement actuated a 2.7 point shift in favour of Trump among those who saw it. Inevitably, the New York Times misclassified the message as “anti-trans”, a ploy guaranteed to exacerbate the very resentment that made the campaign so effective in the first place.

To ask a politician the question “what is a woman?” isn’t some kind of cruel test. It’s a way to ensure that those in power are being honest with us. We know that they know the answer. And they know that we know that they know the answer. It isn’t that they can’t define it, it’s that they are too frightened to do so. It’s one thing for politicians to lie and hope they get away with it, but quite another for them to lie when they know that we are all fully aware that they are lying. It suggests a degree of contempt for the electorate that is unlikely to translate to success at the ballot box. And it hasn’t escaped the attention of feminists that the question “what is a man?” mysteriously never seems to be asked.

It would be mildly forgivable if these politicians had bought into gender identity ideology to such an extent that they no longer believed in biological sex differences. That would be deranged, but it would at least be comprehensible. And yet it is clear that this is not what is happening. While most of us have a limited understanding of various key political issues, we can all see that a failure to define “woman” is either delusional or dishonest, neither of which are qualities we seek in our elected representatives.

As for last week’s Supreme Court hearing, the philosopher Kathleen Stock has described it as a “surreal experience”. This is an excerpt of her account in the Times:

“It was glorious to hear the ghosts of arguments first dreamt up by teenagers on Tumblr hitting daylight. ‘If I may, I’ll come back to that after lunch,’ was a frequent response of the increasingly demoralised-looking lawyer, probed by judges in the morning session. At one point, questioned on how the presence of males who looked like males but were categorised as ‘women’ might affect discrimination claims by fellow women in the workplace, she spoke for a bamboozled nation and declared she would have to consult a flow chart.”

Those who hold fast to the old adage of the law being an ass could find no better instantiation of their view than the spectacle of the country’s top judges gathering to decide how the word “woman” ought to be defined. After all, this is a question that would not trouble any moderately intelligent four-year-old child. This is not to suggest that clarity in the law is not necessary, but the fact that we have even reached this moment is the stuff of satire. It has the quality of the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Dickens's Bleak House, a protracted and pointless legal exercise that could only ever occur in a society in which bureaucracy is valued above common sense.

The question “what is a woman?” has become a litmus test. It’s not a “gotcha” or an example of “transphobia”, but rather a means by which we can assess the honesty of the ruling class. And if they can’t speak candidly about the things we all know to be true, we won’t be able to trust them when it comes to anything else.

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