We've got a Minister for Women and Equalities who doesn't care about women's equality - but only about her ambition to replace Keir Starmer: SHARRON DAVIES
The other week, at a popular London leisure centre, a woman took her ten-year-old daughter and schoolfriend to a swimming session.
As the girls were drying themselves in the female changing rooms, two men walked in. They stood right next to the little girls and started removing their clothes.
Horrified and frightened, the mother bundled the children up in towels and took them to the furthest corner of the room, while the men proceeded to strip naked before donning women's swimsuits. Since then, the mother tells me, she and her daughter haven't been back to the pool.
Can you blame them?
It's shocking that, a full year after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on women's rights, biological males are still barging into female-only spaces such as changing rooms and toilets. And it's sickening that the Labour government is tying itself in knots over the issue, rather than taking steps to ensure the law is followed.
The so-called 'Minister for Women and Equalities', Bridget Phillipson, appears to be trying every dodge possible to avoid her legal obligations. She should be championing the historic judgment by the Supreme Court, yet all she has done is find excuses for delay.
Readers will remember that, in plain terms, the court ruled last year that being a woman depends on biological sex, and not on an individual's feelings or fantasies.
This, of course, is what human beings have believed since the dawn of time. Yet such has been the aggression – and in many cases bullying – from activists over many years, it took a unanimous agreement from some of the finest legal minds in the country to declare the obvious: that 'trans women' are not women.
Yet now, as the Daily Mail reported yesterday, this ruling is being flagrantly ignored by more than half the NHS trusts and local councils in the country, while the Civil Service appears to be actively undermining it in any way feasible. This is how the Left love to treat the law – to weaponise it when it suits them, and to ignore it when it doesn't.
The so-called 'Minister for Women and Equalities', Bridget Phillipson, appears to be trying every dodge possible to avoid her legal obligations
Just look at our Prime Minister, who – as he frequently likes to remind us – is a lawyer himself, and you would think would want to insist on implementing such a crystal-clear judicial ruling.
Keir Starmer falls over himself to bow down to any merely advisory judgment from a foreign court – as he did over the surrender of the Chagos Islands at a potential cost to you and me of tens of billions. But when a ruling is passed that directly affects half the country's population, Starmer's not interested. It's utter hypocrisy.
As for Phillipson, she is a disgrace. It is beyond frustrating to have an Equalities Minister unprepared to stand up for women's equality.
The draft guidance on the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling was delivered by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) more than six months ago. This aims to advise anyone who provides a service to the public, from a local gym to a sprawling hospital, on how to operate within the law.
But in the meantime, Phillipson has found a succession of increasingly baroque excuses for failing to present this crucial guidance to Parliament for approval, as she should have done within six weeks of its publication.
At first, she blamed the EHRC for not publishing an 'impact assessment'. Yet in fact it did so as far back as October. Then she claimed to be waiting for more 'data' from the EHRC on the projected costs to businesses. That was nonsensical: MPs don't decide which laws to recognise and which to ignore, based on the likely cost to employers.
Now the minister is seeking to claim that she cannot publish the guidance because the country is in the middle of a local election campaign. That is simply atrocious.
Many in Westminster suspect that the ambitious and dogmatic Phillipson fancies her chances in the Labour leadership battle that is likely to follow those elections on May 7, which are predicted to be disastrous for the governing party – and spell, one way or another, the end of Keir Starmer's mercifully brief political career (if the latest Mandelson revelations don't do it).
Phillipson doesn't want to risk losing the support of the still-powerful trans brigade on her party's hard-Left – and she worries, too, about the demented Greens, who are steeped in trans dogma and bleeding significant support from Labour.
In the meantime, utterly outdated guidance remains in place – dating all the way back to 2011 – which instructs bosses to permit biological males who 'self-identify' as female to use spaces that should properly be reserved for women. That is the precise opposite of what the Supreme Court decided – and by any sane reading, it's illegal.
Whenever these brave women's rights activists go to court after being forced to share their spaces with males, they win, because they now have the law on their side
Phillipson and Starmer clearly don't care a fig for this, but a year after the Supreme Court ruling, women around Britain are having to fight for their rights not to be bullied, intimidated and displaced by men dressing up as the opposite sex.
We've now seen several women launching high-profile legal cases against the NHS over this issue, where many managers remain in thrall to trans lunacy.
Whenever these brave women go to court after being forced to share their spaces with males, they win, because they now have the law on their side. But we should not have to be fighting the same battles again and again.
I've been vocal about this issue for more than a decade. It can be difficult, because some of the trans activists are angry, violent people.
Only this week in the House of Lords, I spoke out against the sports organisations failing to protect sportswomen against what I call the 'male invasion'. The Football Association of Wales is still allowing males to play females, even though the English and Scottish FA have stopped it for safety and insurance reasons. Sport England, funded by the taxpayer, is still giving money to bodies that are shamelessly ignoring the law.
Gymnastics, diving and powerlifting are some of the most egregious areas, where men's physical advantage should be obvious to anyone. By allowing men into categories such as these, women are driven out. That's not inclusive – it actively excludes women and girls.
Women's sport is already woefully underfunded. We get 5 per cent of the sponsorship and 4 per cent of the TV prime airtime compared to men. Yet it's also one of the most effective tools for helping women make their mark in the wider world. In the US, half of all female CEOs have come up through sport.
And it starts young. Most little girls naturally don't want to compete against boys at football or rugby – and their parents baulk, too. Female teens on the tennis court or in the pool inevitably become discouraged if they are constantly being beaten by trans-identifying males surging with testosterone.
Last November, the yachtswoman Tracy Edwards and I set up the Women's Sports Union with the aim of reminding government bodies what the rules are and what they should be doing.
We've been asking nicely for a year. It's got to the point where we can't keep being nice. Watch this space.
Baroness Davies is an Olympic and Commonwealth medallist.
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