I Tried to Ignore This. But I’m Really Bloody Angry

On the Supreme Court ruling, trans women, civic trust, and the private cost of being turned into a public argument.

Since Bridget Phillipson gave her statement in Parliament following the Supreme Court ruling, I have avoided reading about it like the plague.

And I’ll tell you why.

Before I transitioned, I spent most of my life avoiding myself.

I did it with extraordinary sophistication. I looked outward instead. Economics. Politics. Federal Reserve policy. UK news. Interest rate probabilities. Endless YouTube videos about systems, governments, markets, civilisation, decline, progress, collapse. Anything, absolutely anything, except the thing sitting quietly inside me waiting to be looked at.

Then I transitioned, and one of the promises I made to myself was this:

Stop staring endlessly at the whole world and start paying attention to your own immediate one.

How am I feeling?

What is happening in my life?

How are the people around me?

What is actually in front of me?

So when this ruling came, and my YouTube feed filled itself to the gills with Helen Joyce’s grinning face and another forty-seven thumbnails explaining that civilisation itself now depended upon who pees where, I avoided it.

I play a game with Helen when she’s on a podcast. How long will it take before someone mentions she has a PhD in maths?!!

Not because I did not care.

Because I cared too much.

And because I have finally learned that not every public fire requires my private nervous system to be thrown directly into it.

But last night I sat down and thought about it properly.

And I think I am duty bound to speak.

Not because I want to join the screaming. Not because I want to perform outrage for a side. Not because I think every trans woman must become a full-time political combatant.

But because I think I have something useful to add here.

And yes, I am angry.

The Supreme Court ruling itself was actually narrower and more legally coherent than many people on either side pretend. The court essentially decided that for the Equality Act to function consistently, the definitions of “sex”, “man” and “woman” had to refer to biological sex. The government and EHRC guidance now flowing from that position claims to be doing two things simultaneously:

Protect trans people from discrimination.

And exclude trans women from female legal classification in certain contexts.

That is the actual terrain now, whether people like it or not.

And the thing that interests me is not the slogan war that immediately follows all of this.

Not “trans women are literally women.”

Not “common sense has prevailed.”

Not “this is genocide.”

Not “this is just biology.”

Honestly, most of the discourse surrounding this subject now resembles two cults screaming through a hedge at one another while normal people quietly back away carrying Tesco bags.

What interests me is something else entirely.

Trust.

Because society fundamentally runs on trust.

I walk into a supermarket and it would not exactly require Ocean’s Eleven levels of criminal genius for me to pick up a Mars bar and walk out with it. Society functions because almost everyone decides not to.

We stand in queues trusting they will not turn into riots.

We walk down streets trusting strangers will not attack us.

We drive at high speed towards one another separated by painted lines and mutual social agreement.

Civilisation is essentially an enormous distributed trust network.

And there are exceptions to this.

Airports do not run on trust. Anti-money laundering systems do not run on trust. Child safeguarding does not run entirely on trust. Certain edge cases carry such catastrophic downside risk that suspicion becomes systematised.

Fair enough.

But trans women were not historically treated as a catastrophic risk category.

For decades, most trans women simply existed quietly inside society’s ordinary trust model.

Then suddenly we were moved outside it.

And I think it is worth asking why.

Because I do not believe the answer is aggregate evidence.

I do not believe British society woke up one morning drowning in statistically overwhelming evidence that trans women as a population had violated the social contract to such an extent that we uniquely required permanent suspicion.

I think something else happened.

Firstly, the internet happened.

Or more specifically, algorithms happened.

The public did not meet ordinary trans women quietly trying to get on with their lives. They met the loudest, strangest, most performative, most narcissistic, most inflammatory examples imaginable because those were the examples the algorithm selected for maximum emotional engagement.

The internet rewarded outrage, spectacle and category confusion.

And some of the people elevated by that machine were, frankly, ridiculous.

Not representative.

Not typical.

Not even particularly sane in some cases.

But human beings are pattern-matching creatures. If you show people the same extreme examples repeatedly enough, eventually they start believing the edge case is the category itself.

And then, if I am being honest, activists made this worse.

There was a version of this conversation the public was broadly willing to have.

“Please treat trans people kindly.”

Most people could handle that.

“Please allow people dignity.”

Most people could handle that too.

But somewhere along the line, parts of trans activism stopped asking for social tolerance and started demanding epistemological surrender.

People were suddenly expected to affirm things that many ordinary people simply experienced as obviously untrue.

That trans women are literally biologically female.

That sex itself is essentially meaningless.

That there are no meaningful physical distinctions whatsoever.

That anyone questioning any aspect of this framework was motivated entirely by hatred.

And this was catastrophic politics.

Because moderate people who might otherwise have extended ordinary social trust and compassion suddenly felt they were being asked to deny observable reality itself.

Once that happened, the entire debate became poisoned.

And then came what I privately think of as the Holy Trinity.

Women’s spaces.

Sport.

Children.

Every conversation eventually returned to one of these three things.

Now, on sport, if I am honest, I think some activists massively overplayed their hand. Human beings understand physical asymmetry intuitively. Pretending otherwise was never going to survive contact with reality.

But even here, I do not think these issues entirely explain what happened.

I think underneath all of this lies something older, more primitive and much less flattering.

Revulsion.

Or perhaps discomfort is the kinder word.

The discomfort people experience when confronted with category ambiguity.

A trans woman interrupts a deeply embedded social heuristic. Human beings are constantly sorting one another into categories unconsciously and at speed. Male. Female. Familiar. Safe. Threatening. Normal. Unusual.

And when those heuristics become unstable, some people experience genuine psychological discomfort.

I honestly think this resembles, in some ways, the reaction visibly camp gay men once triggered in previous generations.

Not because they were dangerous.

Because they disrupted expected social patterns.

And I think a huge amount of modern “risk language” surrounding trans people is, at least partially, a socially respectable wrapper placed around that discomfort.

Because here is the thing that keeps bothering me.

Liberal societies are supposed to individualise guilt.

We are not supposed to generalise entire populations based upon symbolic edge cases amplified through media systems.

At least, not if we wish to remain liberal.

And yet trans women increasingly became a category for whom ordinary civic trust was suspended.

Not because most people had personally encountered dangerous trans women.

Not because statistical reality dramatically shifted.

But because visibility shifted.

Algorithms shifted.

Activism shifted.

Institutional rhetoric shifted.

And the entire emotional equilibrium around the issue collapsed.

No population is risk-free.

No human category is entirely harmless.

There are manipulative trans people. Violent trans people. Predatory trans people.

There are also manipulative accountants, violent yoga instructors and predatory men called Keith who own jet skis.

That is not the point.

The point is proportionality.

The point is whether trans women, as a class, genuinely forfeited the ordinary trust upon which civil society normally operates.

And I do not believe we did.

The tragedy of this entire debate is that most trans women did not set out to become symbols in a civilisation-scale argument about sex, language and metaphysics.

Most of us just wanted to disappear quietly into ordinary life.

This morning, my Chihuahua puppy, Colonel Chesterton, was standing proudly on top of a stuffed sheep chewing a bone like a tiny Victorian landlord defending inherited territory from peasant revolt.

And I looked at him and burst out laughing.

Because while the internet increasingly demands that every trans person become a full-time combatant in an endless symbolic war, my actual life is here.

It a dog.

Coffee.

Music.

Hair appointments.

Ordinary mornings.

And perhaps that is the thing trans people must remember most carefully now.

Our inner lives matter more than the argument.

Because if we surrender those completely to politics, then the culture war has already taken everything worth protecting.