Keir Starmer has made his position clear: trans women are not women. The man who told The Times in 2022 that “trans women are women, and that is not just my view – that is actually the law” has reversed himself without hesitation. His government now embraces the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that under the Equality Act, a woman is a “biological female.” A decade ago, this sort of categorical distinction was the hallmark of the reactionary right. Today, it is the official position of a Labour government.
This is not a misstep. It is not a misunderstanding. It is the product of a party that governs in the interest of capital and the bureaucratic stability of the state. Starmer’s spokesman was unequivocal: “The Supreme Court judgment has made clear that when looking at the Equality Act, a woman is a biological woman.” When asked if Starmer still believed that trans women were women, the response was blunt: “No.”
The judiciary, far from acting as a neutral arbiter, plays its role within the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. The Supreme Court’s ruling on gender is not a curious anomaly. It is a continuation of the Court’s ideological function: preserving social order through legal fictions masquerading as scientific truths. The “clarity” the Prime Minister praises is not moral or conceptual clarity; it is the clarity of surveillance, exclusion, and bourgeois discipline. The ruling is useful precisely because it reasserts the family, the sex binary, and the bio-political policing of bodies as natural, unquestionable facts.
The judiciary, far from being neutral, functions as an arm of capitalist reproduction—disciplining identity and difference to stabilise the existing order.
A competent government. One genuinely committed to equality. Would have been prepared for this. The ruling did not come from nowhere. It followed years of coordination between right-wing media, TERF lobbyists, and reactionary think tanks, all of whom have been testing legal boundaries with the goal of legislating gender non-conformity out of public life. A Labour government that meant what it said about trans rights would have had draft legislation ready to amend the Equality Act, reasserting gender identity as central to its protections. Instead, it folded. There was no legal rebuttal, no promise of reform, no mobilisation of political capital. Only quiet acquiescence.
Rather than challenge the court, the government treats its ruling as an opportunity to cement the shift. Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson echoed its language, telling Radio 4’s Today programme that single-sex services should be allocated by “biological sex,” and that this would now be “applied across the board.” The EHRC, already reshaped by Tory appointments—will now draft new guidance. What’s being drawn up is a legal architecture of exclusion. And it is being done not in spite of Labour’s promises, but under their authority.
These are not the policies of a party caught in the crossfire. They are the calculated decisions of a party of capital. Starmer’s Labour exists not to transform society, but to reassure its dominant blocs: finance, property, the technocratic class, and the more stable sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. Trans people—like migrants, claimants, and the organised poor—are treated not as constituents but as problems to be managed. The party’s lexicon of “respect” and “dignity” is not rooted in solidarity but in public relations. Identity is a PR challenge, not a terrain of liberation.
Labour has not been captured by the culture war—it is administering it with all the dispassion of a legal firm enforcing eviction notices.
What Starmer offers is not reaction in the vulgar sense, but elite consolidation through exclusion masked as administrative order.
Culture war politics, in this context, is not a distraction. It is a strategy. Anti-trans rhetoric performs a vital function under capitalism: it shores up the crumbling certainties of gendered social reproduction. As work becomes more precarious, housing more scarce, and the future more impossible to imagine, a politics that defines people’s worth by their genitalia allows those in power to reassert a fictive order. Gender identity becomes a scapegoat, its very existence treated as a threat to “real” women, “real” working people, “real” rights.
But this is not merely a symbolic move. Gender regulation is central to the reproduction of labour power. The gender binary helps structure unpaid care, medical norms, education, even the design of prisons and welfare. To challenge it is to challenge the ideological terrain on which capitalist social relations are built. This is why the repression of trans people matters not just to trans people, but to all who seek a more humane society.
Labour could have used its majority to re-legislate. It could have opened up democratic consultation with trans-led groups, rejected the court’s premise, and upheld the manifesto it was elected on. Instead, it has fallen into step with the ruling class and its culture warriors. Many Labour MPs are said to be privately “frustrated.” What good is private frustration when the public face of your government is indistinguishable from that of the right? If there is still a soul left in the parliamentary party, it is very good at hiding.
To defend trans rights is not to indulge an identity, but to challenge the system that demands those identities be erased. That system has always had willing stewards in the judiciary. Now it has one in Number 10.
We must see Labour for what it is: a machine for the management of inequality, not its abolition. The betrayal of trans people is not an aberration. It is proof that this government will not fight for the marginalised when doing so risks political capital. That is not a failing of courage, it is the function of a party that has internalised the logic of capital.
A serious left cannot wait for Labour to change. We must organise beyond it: in unions, in housing campaigns, in trans-led resistance, in every space where collective life still pulses. The point is not to reform the party from within, but to render it irrelevant to the tasks of liberation. And if that sounds too radical, remember this: when the chance came to defend the most vulnerable, Starmer’s Labour chose law and order. It chose the courts. It chose the state.
It did not choose you.
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