TRIGGERnometry - We Proved Trans Women are Men - Maya Forstater

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Maya Forstater is a British gender-critical activist and co-founder of the organization Sex Matters | SPONSOR. We use Ground News to escape the echo chamber and stay fully informed. Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan. SPONSOR 👉 Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/TRIG #rulapod SPONSOR 👉 Listen to the NPR Politics Podcast for daily breakdowns of U.S. politics - wherever you get your podcasts. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 04:55 Why Does Sex Matter? 08:36 What Will Happen Now? 14:15 Why Has Scotland Been Worse Than England On This? 21:52 The Fight Isn't Over 28:33 Will The Government Enforce This? 30:51 The Corruption Of Language 39:30 The Problem Of Schools And Education 41:57 The Concept Of Gender And Gender Identity 45:06 What Does This Ideology Say About Our Society? 50:58 When Maya Lost Her Job 01:00:20 The Impact Of JK Rowling's Intervention Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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? How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. Last night, you spent two hours deciding what to wear to the party. This morning, it'll take you two minutes to list it on Deepop and make your money back. Just grab your phone, snap a few photos, and we'll take care of the rest. The sheer dress and platform heels you'll never. ever wear again, there's a birthday girl searching for them right now. Your one-and-done look is about to pay for your next night out, or at least the right home.

Your style can make you cash. Start selling on D-pop, where Taste recognizes taste. Maya, welcome finally, 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 other. 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's Scotland, which is a grassroots group from Scotland and against the Scottish government on what the meaning of

sex is in the Equality Act. And we, Sex Matters, the organisation that I run was an intervener in that case. So we made legal arguments by evidence and that was part of the willing side. There was also So 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 nation's 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. Do you remember it? 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 recognized 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 and harassment a bit later. harassment, 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 it's 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 there's a part of me going this is embarrassing isn't it it's stupid it's stupid it's a stupid question um and it corrupted every single organization I mean, that's the thing, that the people who won this case were three scrappy little organizations that get called hate groups and, you know, barely until this week could 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 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 Isla Bright, the story of Isla Bryson, 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, where it's like, well, everyone's the same. Everyone is equal. Everyone is, isn't it? 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 don't... They've never really thought about this before. I mean, exactly. say, human beings are mammals. We reproduce sexually. It's an important part of our life. It's shaped 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, you know, is a huge part of life. 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 to violence you're 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 because you know so Helen my colleague Helen has a saying that men are women is like saying one equals zero. And if you think about any equation, you know, 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, a big set of equations. So what they did was they sort of set one equal 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, let's 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 differentiate between people who are telling lies and people who are not, which is important for it. for keeping people safe, you know, how you differentiate between people who are smart and people who are 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 Mike, talk to us about the impact of this because it seems to me, from what I've seen, 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 away 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-radicalisation, 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, 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.

good people. Like you say, they did it in order to accommodate this vulnerable group and 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 for 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 lost my job for, is for saying politely that trans women are men.

But if you're going to 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 networks. They listen to external organisations 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 going to have to find their bolts. 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. You know, 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, 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 shops, 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, you know, 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 an argument that an employer or service providers should be having to get into with somebody. And they can't set rules that say, well, you know, you look good in your makeup, but you don't. Sorry, mate. You know, that's not fair on anybody. 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, it 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 kind of 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 and what the Scottish government wanted to do was to redefine what a man and a woman is in Scotland

which is very mad I mean you think 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 and they 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 enacting, inacting gender self-ID, so treating people as men or women based on what they say. And they've 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. And 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 boards was wrong. And you could see it. So the Supreme Court, which is, you know, it's a panel of itself. And it was three men and two women.

And you could see the two women judges going, you know, they said, well, 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, you know, and the judges on the Supreme Court, they're a bit older than me. You know, 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 lean right led with the Supreme Court ruling is a victory for women. Same story to 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 the link in the description or head to ground.news slash trigonometry for 40% off their unlimited advantage 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. Hey honey, it's mom. Did you know if we switch to Verizon we can get four phones for zero dollars,

plus four lines for $25 a line? Call me back. Me again. That's just $100 a month for four lines on unlimited welcome. Plus four phones, no trade-in needed. Call me. It's mom. America's Best Network, Verizon. That's the one we're talking about. I'll send you text. America's Best Network based on Root Metrics, best overall mobile network performance, US second half 2025. Four two lines on a limited welcome and auto pay. See Verizon.com for details. 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, 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, 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 Tranish 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. You know, and so you had people in Parliament Square with signs saying,

the only good turf is basically a dead turf, you know, a picture of a noose and things like that. You know, this is 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, people have to go back into work. And their employers 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-womanism 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 organizations terrorizing their managers. Well, my favorite thing at 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. I was thinking,

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 it would. 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's back. Francis's common sense has been brought back. Well, 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's 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 pass more successfully than men it's almost impossible for a man to pass as a woman lots of makeup on Instagram possibly

but in person the body the shoulders the voice the height you know that it's 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 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, you know, 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 you, What they were trying to do was make this thing which is fundamentally not secret. You know, it's written into every cell of your body. And also, once you know about, know that about a person, if you know someone's a man or a woman, you never forget it. You know, you might forget their middle name or their birth date or, 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. And 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. It was 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. And then they came back and they had to get a job. 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 cards. So they gave them a card for the opposite. it's sex. And 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 so, 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, you know, 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, you know, seven minute 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,

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. Employer doesn't know any of this. even 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, I mean, sounds sort of a bit techie, but that's really important because that's the machinery. of the state. And at the same time, the government's bringing in this 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. So do you know, they've got a thing on your phone where you can go to, you probably

don't need it, but you go to the 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 to birth, but it shows, you know, you're the person who owns this, this, um, thing. print and you're over 18. But all the data that's built on comes from passports driving license of the NHS. So you're going to be able to say, I'm a woman, look, government says so.

And 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, what they're 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 Labor government ministers who are quite clear in their determination to subvert this entire process. Kiyos Stama 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. I think it needs to be, you know, back for postcard simple. When you have that symbol, the male symbol or the female symbol, you know, 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, you know, hundreds of pages long and it says, you know, think about all these different things and 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. And one of the things you've touched on lightly, but I think it's really important to delve in,

into is how our language has been corrupted. My ex-girlfriend went for 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. It was, it was, there was loads of this stuff. This is going to take a lot of rolling back. Yeah. If you've achieved remarkable things,

but there's a party that thinks that's going to be an even bigger fight. 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 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 around 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 have been suspended. I think there's one particular case, Griege's 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 know if it's retribution, and I certainly haven't seen any apologies yet, and I haven't haven't seen anyone lose their job for this. I think, I mean, a lot of the cases that have been brought were brought on the basis of belief discrimination,

which was 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 called a belief, you know, it's just the law. I mean, it's a reality too, but it's the law.

And so there's the other belief. So when I won my case, there was, 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 the 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. And, you know, we've tamed crazy beliefs before. We know how to do that. We know how to live in a in a plural society where, you know, people keep the madder reaches of their beliefs at home or or on the internet and respect each other at work. 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 organizations that institutions like the NHS and the BBC have let come in groups like mermaid. Stonewall, who were ones 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 damage that was wreaked on people's lives. I mean, and, you know, the biggest damage is 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, you know, 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, you know, turn penises into vaginas.

You can't. But you also have to think about how, 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, wear what you like, call yourself what you like, 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, you know, the harm that's been done to those people, I think, is huge. And is, I mean, that's human rights abuse. Sterilising 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 weightless, high costs, therapists who don't take your insurance, it's exhausting, but it doesn't have to be that way. Ruler is doing something genuinely different. Ruler spelled RU. 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 Rula to support them on their journey toward improved mental health and overall well-being.

Head over to Rula.com slash tree to get started today. And when they ask where you heard about them, make sure to say trigonometry. Go to R-U-L-A dot com slash trig. And take the first step towards better mental health today. You deserve quality care from someone who cares. Excema. as unpredictable.

But you can flare less with ebbglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking ebb glist, achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per 2-millimeter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults

and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epgless, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.com or call 1800-1-800-545-979. people might, 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 other stuff. What is the impact of this ruling and a 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 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 cast 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 you're you're discovering yourself you're you're you know you're making mistakes we're gonna try and make sure that you keep you safe while you you you know, 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 classmates 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 use, but 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 am 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 emoes or whatever, you know, that's 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 going to, you know, they're running sports, they're running changing rooms, they're, you know, they're running trips away. All of all of them. these places they know what sex 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, 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 naft. And, you know, that the kind of trend is, is blowing itself out. 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, you know, this is just a generational thing that doesn't go away completely, but that, you know, 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, tarnets, 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 mammals. You know, we are not the kind of higher beings that we think we are. We're, you know, we're selfish and horny and, you know, prejudiced and, you know, care about our families more than we do about the next person. And yet we also have kind of big ideas about ourselves and our societies. And it's those big ideas that make 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, in every big company. You know, it's why you have corruption. It's why, you know, you always have to be, you know, 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. You know, we can't go back into, you know, living in our little tribes and hating everybody else, you know. And so, you know, the most sort of important, valuable things, I think that we have are our institutions. That's what makes us clever, what makes us wealthy,

it's what keeps us safe, it what stops us, you know, just living by my time. 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

taken over by this 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 a rephrasing Francis 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.

But 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? I think, I mean, 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 hopefully you then are able to, you know, 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 weaponised unreasonably. The metrics drive the thing off in the wrong direction. You know, it's the kind of

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, you know, how policies affect everyone and only looked at how they affect this one. group. And so, you know, that's the big thing for me is like how, you know, 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 they 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 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 Podcasts is well worth your time.

Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcasts, only from NPR, wherever you get your podcasts. I was working for an international development think tank called the Center for Global Development, which is actually US organizations based in Washington, D.C., but I was working in the London office. And at the time, the UK government was consulting on, 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 organisation that 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. And the organisation at first said, oh, this looks a bit controversial, but just put a disclaimer on your tweets,

which was the right thing. You know, just this is you. 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 manals, so lots of men who work in international. development who are generally woke, 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, you know, 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 Pipes-Buntz, Philip Pips, Buntz, who worked at Credit Suisse and who came to work a couple days a week, dressed as a woman, wig and dress, and the other days a week as a man. And I said, well, if it was you and another man and Pips Buntz, would you still say this is a manel? And because I sort of asked it in a personal way, people responded, and we had about a week's worth of, you know, heated debate on Twitter. And that's what I lost my job for, was that. And so it was this 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 manals, you don't have boards

of public institutions that are all men, what if it's a man in a wig? And so you record, you said you were about to say you recorded your... So I recorded the final conversation with the big boss that 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. And I was basically on that call saying, but this is the law in the UK. 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. You know, 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. You know, it's the law. They should have been saying it too. And I, I, you know,

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 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 protected beliefs. So I had to show that this belief that sex is real and immutable 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 basically is on par with Nazism. What? Well, that's what he said. That's what failing the test of being 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, J.K. Rowling tweeted and my life was turned upside down because up to that point, I mean, I had 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, I was kind of villain number one. And every time they wanted to go after J.K. Rowling and say what terrible person she wanted. 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, my aforesaherstata. 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 the democratic society. And that now means that other people can use this legal precedent to protect themselves at work. And so, you know, I have people, 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 an investigation and 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 it's you still need to be able to talk about it and that you need rules and laws based on it. You mentioned JK 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. But what's the positive impact that she's made here? It's been huge. You know, she's uncannceivable and she kept coming back. You know, when she first tweeted about my case, you know, I thought, well, maybe that's it. You know, she doesn't have to carry on talking about this.

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 don't know. I read the essay and I thought, oh, well, that's it. It's over now. Just to 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's 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 Nicholas Sturgeon is a destroyer of human rights.

But, you know, she's just been kind of the queen, really. And my, I'm glad we spoke about J.K. Rowland, 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 governments 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. It's, yeah. 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 pounds 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. And now they're pointing us and they say, oh, you know, their 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 organised to do this. Yeah, Turf Island is showing the way for the rest 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 know, 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, it really, took off in the UK. And then there are things like we had Mumsnet, you know, just this kind of wildcard, 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 organizing anonymously, being able to organise anonymously. And so I think what, you know, What we have done is shown that you can use the law. And my case was based on the European Convention on Human Rights. So 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 other people's human rights. You know, yes, you can keep your sex private and you 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, you know, 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, and UK government said no, and one in court, because they said, no, here we only have male and female. So, you know, 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. 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, no, I think that's definitely true. And 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 substack where our audience get to ask you their questions. But before we do, the question we always end with is what's the one? 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 the stupid topic. 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? A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-flowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world, not just your phone. For 50 years, 1-800-flowers has helped millions of people make memories that'll last a lifetime, with gifts they'll cherish forever. Their expertly curated arrangements and gift baskets shipped nationwide with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

Don't wait for the next big moment. Make it when you visit 1800flowers.com slash Spotify today. That's 1800flowers.com slash Spotify.