Dear Women & Equalities Committee,

I am writing to you regarding the new RSE and Health Education Guidance that was published this week by the Department for Education and the correspondence that you have received from the Secretary of State for Education/Minister for Women & Equalities to support it.

In short, I am rather alarmed by the tone of the guidance, which, rather than educating children on the diversity of people of different sexualities and gender identities in modern UK society, seems instead to reintroduce the language of the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 introduced under the Thatcher government, with the focus in the new Guidance being transgender people. As you know, that awful piece of legislation caused untold damage to generations of LGBTQ+ youth in the 15 years before it was repealed and is a stain on our recent history. It is appalling that this Government is attempting to reintroduce this in our schools.

I speak as a woman who is transgender. I, like all in the community, am fully cognizant of the harmful, toxic state of discourse surrounding transgender people in the UK. It has been aided and fuelled by the media, the judiciary and Government. A common theme has been for hostile parties to characterize this is a debate, with one side being ‘gender ideology’, which is a demeaning phrase used to disparage transgender people, and the other being ‘gender critical’, which is a polite phrase to disguise transphobia. This is dehumanizing and demeaning. It seeks to cast transgender people as a topic for debate, rather than a group of people in charge of their own identity and bodily autonomy.

Too often in the current climate, we are giving credence to people’s “belief” that transgender people are a fiction or simply lying or mental ill, ahead of people’s actual lived experience. It is a denial of existence. Transgender people should be protected under law, and yet we are constantly being weighed off against people who deny our very being. There is no equivalent group who are constantly having to deal with this narrative. Society, rightly, no longer allows a discussion about whether gay or lesbian people exist in education or polite discussion. Nor do we, rightly, invite the British National Party as a point of perspective when teaching about racism in the classroom. Why is this approached relaxed when it comes to transgender people? Is “gender reassignment” a lesser protected characteristic in the UK? Am I a second-class citizen?

The RSE and Health Education Guidance is disturbing in that it platforms this debate, rather than teaching about transgender people. The language has been changed to remove mention of the word “transgender”, which is a very visible sign of erasure.

The Guidance stresses the importance of learning about the “facts” of “biological sex”, although this is a scientifically complex area[1], far beyond the simplistic binary discussed by the media, judiciary and prominent “gender critical” voices.

If we are discussing facts, are students to be taught the facts that the UK is currently on a Red Flag Watch for Genocide issued by the Lemkin Institute for its treatment of transgender, intersex and non-binary people[2]? Or the fact that the same treatment has been “deplored” by the European Commissioner for Human Rights[3] and the UN[4]? Are children to be taught that some people are less worthy of respect and rights than others? Or have we returned to a society where bigots can dictate who others are and how much they are allowed to live in society?

This Government has already cruelly fully withdrawn healthcare for transgender youth. Now it issues guidance that says young people must not be “encouraged to question their gender identity”, whatever that means, and that transitioning may not be an easy route to solving the distress of gender dysphoria. The last is at least partly true. But that is because of the continued effort of the Government, media, NHS and judiciary to make transition harder and make transgender people pariahs in the UK.

I ask you, please, to reflect on these concerns and consider addressing them in your response to the Secretary of State. Transgender people deserve better than this.

Kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

Dr Madeleine Moore

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

[2] https://www.lemkininstitute.com/red-flag-alerts/red-flag-alert-on-anti-trans-and-intersex-rights-in-the-uk

[3] https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/united-kingdom-tackling-poverty-is-crucial-to-protect-children-s-human-rights-a-number-of-other-areas-also-call-for-attention

[4] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/05/un-experts-warn-legal-uncertainty-and-rights-implications-following-uk

Dear [redacted],

I hope you are well. I am writing to you in your capacity as Chair of the Women & Equalities Committee. I confess I am not sure if this is a breach of etiquette, I know that generally contacting my own MP would be the standard, but I am not sure if this extends to Committees. Apologies if it is a breach, I shall also contact my MP [redacted] directly in any case. 

I am writing having watched with interest the appearance of Baroness Falkner and John Kirkpatrick of the EHRC in front of the WEC yesterday (11th June).  

I am a trans woman, so have, unfortunately, found myself greatly impacted and concerned by recent events. I found the Supreme Court ruling itself troubling, as it seemed at odds with what I understood the purposes of the GRA 2004 and the EA 2010 to be.  

However, given the ruling’s somewhat narrow remit, I have been even more alarmed by the subsequent actions of the EHRC, including its hasty publication of ‘interim guidance’  (25th April) that seemed to go far beyond the bounds of the ruling and indeed beyond a ‘proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’, advocating for the forced outing, exclusion and segregation of transgender people from all walks of professional and public life. The subsequent suggested Code of Conduct published for consultation has only reaffirmed the EHRC stance that exclusion and segregation should be the norm henceforth. 

To that end, I was encouraged by the WEC’s questions yesterday. I thought there were many insightful and important issues raised, although I confess I was not sure that the EHRC provided adequate responses. It struck me as rather incongruous that the EHRC were reticent to say why they had decided to go so far beyond the ruling. Their evasion of a coherent response to the innocent question of whether a women’s only walking club who want to be inclusive of trans women was allowed under the proposed Code was concerning. I struggle to see how we should have statutory guidance that makes this impossible.  

I do not wish to sound absolutist here, I strongly believe there should be caveats and exemptions possible to inclusion, decided on a case-by-case basis for e.g. refuges or where prisoners are housed. But these exemptions were already possible prior to the ruling, and I believe that this should not have changed substantially post-April. I do not think the likes of walking groups, book clubs or, indeed, toilets and changing rooms should fall into these categories, and I am worried about a society that starts to segregate these everyday services or activities. 

I was further concerned by the EHRC’s answers surrounding questions of enforcing their segregationist policies, which appeared to suggest that it would be impossible and rely on ‘social honesty’ or convention. When pressed by yourself, they admitted that it was essentially impossible to know if someone was trans when asking and that no documentation could be relied upon as support in any such situation. Not that I believe the latter should exist: that is a slippery slope a democracy should avoid. 

This appears on the face of it to be troubling. It places service providers in an impossible position in regard to legal requirements that are forbidding and impossible to police, leaving them at risk of litigation. It places transgender people – and, indeed, all gender non-conforming people – in the awful position of having to choose between outing themselves, placing themselves at genuine risk or at risk of abuse and harassment for using the correct facilities for their sex. I am quite far through with my medical transition and certainly would feel unsafe using a men’s toilet. It also seems to advocate for the general public to self-police facilities, leaving the door open for more abuse, particularly for bad-faith actors. These all seem undesirable. 

But perhaps the most alarming response from yesterday was the suggestion of Baroness Falkner that transgender people lose their ECHR Article 8 right to privacy when it comes to gender policing services. There are many things I find alarming about that statement. First, following from the above comments that it is not possible to tell who is transgender, Baroness Falkner failed to note that it would be all people losing their privacy rights when it comes to being questioned about their sex. Second, I do not think it is the place of the EHRC to decide when and to whom they can disapply elements of the ECHR – there is only one condition for Article 8 to apply, and that is if you are human. Third, I fail to see how asking intrusive questions about sex, asking for birth certificates or asking questions about GRCs – a very thorny issue under the GRA 2004, which strongly embeds the principle of privacy – can ever not be a violation of privacy rights.  

The EHRC completely failed to allay any of these concerns. I am aghast that the Chair of our equality and human rights body believes that one can pick and choose human rights in such a manner as to promote their exclusionary recommendations. 

The present situation appears to place the UK back to where it was before Goodwin v UK 2002. The European Court of Human Rights noted then that the UK was in violation of the Article 8 rights of transgender people and that facilitated the GRA 2004. Indeed, these privacy rights were fundamentally built in to protections for transgender people when the EA 2010 was drafted, as the meeting minutes, Hansard minutes and testimonies of people involved support. It is why I was surprised at the Supreme Court ruling itself, as it seemed in direct contrast to this evidence and appears to place the UK in breach of Goodwin v UK 2002 again. This was recently noted by multiple human rights commissioners at the UN1. 

I am not a lawyer – only in so much as any transgender person has to be fairly well-versed in the law when the risk of everyday conflict and abuse in such a toxic climate is so high – so perhaps there are nuances that allow the Supreme Court ruling to stand while maintaining the privacy and rights of transgender people. However, I struggle to see what those might be and, indeed, the EHRC ‘interim guidance’, proposed code and general attitude seem to suggest that even if they did exist, such nuances would be ignored. 

To that end, I was encouraged to hear suggestions by members of the WEC that legislation may be needed to fix this mess. I increasingly believe this is the only way to restore the UK to its position pre-April, where the rights for all were respected, with exemptions possible and built in to the Equality Act.  

I would ask you in your position as Chair of the WEC to pursue the unanswered questions from yesterday’s hearing further and to hold the EHRC to account in its obligations of equality and human rights for all. Further, if necessary, to suggest that Parliament seeks legislation to amend this situation that brings anything but ‘clarity’. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter and for your work on this, and indeed all, issues. 

Yours sincerely,

Dr Madeleine Moore

Dear Baroness Smith,

I trust you are well. My name is Madeleine Moore and I am writing to you in your position as Minister of State for Equalities. I am writing as a concerned woman who is also transgender.

It is safe to say that the last month has been one of severe turmoil for me personally, and for the transgender community more broadly. There is a fear and melancholy for the future that I haven’t felt in decades. As a transgender person, I have always been keenly aware of the risks of just being myself in public spaces, of the risk of being verbally or physically assaulted for being so visible. It is nearly impossible to not be visible as a trans woman. You are an easy target. Although, I was lucky: the brick aimed at me two years ago missed. It is rare that anything ever comes of such things. I am not saying this as a request for pity, just for context. The last month has opened the door to normalizing our abuse and othering. I am scared and I am not alone in that feeling.

You do not choose to be transgender, it is something that you are. It is a feeling deep within yourself that is challenging to explain to those who are not. I am a woman. I know that with every fibre of my being. It is perhaps hard to explain what it is like to have come through a daily struggle and distress where you are an alien in your own body. The crushing weight that every day is living a lie. It is hard not to break under that stress. The country is making it harder.

The last few years have been horrific. Waking up daily to countless stories in newspapers, on the radio and TV, primarily negative, casting transgender people as a threat to women and society, a ‘significant problem for a sane world’ as one of those associated with the Supreme Court case so thoughtfully put it. To be cast as an opportunist seeking to gain access to women’s spaces to be a voyeur or assailant. You do not need to be trans to commit such crimes. Why would you want to be transgender? It is a choice between breaking to the internal distress or a lifetime of being looked down upon and jeered by society.

I try not to be hyperbolic, but it is hard not to be. I am well aware that cisgender women suffer from many of the anxieties of going to certain places or running the risk/benefit judgment of certain activities. But transgender people are not that risk. We share those anxieties and those risks. Ours is the same fight. I do think there are discussions about balance that are right to have in certain situations, but the Equality Act 2010 already allowed for these discussions. Now the Supreme Court has undone over 15 years of case law and practice in one, ill-advised swoop.

As I am sure is now clear, the Supreme Court ruling has done anything but introduce clarity. Equalities law is now at odds with multiple other laws, including the Workplace Regulations Act 1992, Human Rights Act 1998 and Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court inexplicably decided to not consider its human rights obligations in its judgment, and is now, rightly, facing challenges to its ruling. Perhaps even more scandalously, the Supreme Court decided to act on removing rights from a minority without even hearing from representatives of that minority, despite hearing from multiple single-issue anti-transgender organizations. How have we got to this place? Placing the judgment and its consequences aside, this cannot be a state of affairs that we should aspire to.

But my current reason for writing is in relation to the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC), its ‘interim update’ and the upcoming consultation. It has been abundantly clear for several years that the EHRC has abandoned its position as a champion for all rights and taken up increasingly aggressive stances at removing the rights of transgender people. This has been aided by appointments both political and non-political who hold public, staunchly anti-transgender views and/or have ties to single-issue anti-transgender organizations such as LGB Alliance and Sex Matters, including the Commission Chair and Akua Reindorf KC. The EHRC has been agitating since 2022 to re-write the Equality Act 2010 so that ‘sex’ may be re-interpreted as ‘sex assigned at birth’, which is both trans-exclusionary; an erasure of intersex and non-binary people; and a gross simplification of the complexity of biology and human identity.

The Supreme Court has now given these bad faith actors the tool they have been seeking. It is abundantly clear given the speed with which the ‘interim guidance’ was released that the EHRC has been waiting for an opportunity to issue trans-exclusionary advice. This is despite the fact that they are meant to be a body that starts with equality as a baseline. As many have pointed out, the advice was ill-thought out and rushed. It contains numerous legal misconceptions and misrepresentations of the Supreme Court ruling. The ruling did not mandate blanket exclusions. The EHRC would have us believe that the Equality Act 2010 was, in actuality, a nationwide bathroom ban that has been in place for 15 years, just that nobody noticed. This is patently ridiculous. It is telling that there are at least three legal challenges to this ‘update’ and the harms it has caused, and it has been less than a month since it was released. The additional use of phrases like ‘sex-based rights’ and ‘group-based rights’, which are not terms that appear in the Equality Act 2010, shows that the EHRC are, in essence, drafting their own legislation to attack the rights of transgender people.

The EHRC should have taken more time to consider the implications and to consult before masquerading the whims of those who would exclude one of the most vulnerable sectors of our society as ‘guidance’ or ‘law’. This was plainly the intention of the announcement.
The initial suggestion that there would only be a 2-week consultation period was scandalous. What else are we to interpret from that other than that the outcome was a fait accompli? I welcome the extension to 6 weeks, although given the many complexities and legal difficulties, I think it would be more appropriate for a full 12-week consultation to take place.

Even in this concession, the EHRC make it clear that the consultation is to be about guidance that is already written and, in what I would argue the important characteristics, that remains unchanged from the maligned ‘interim update’. Indeed, Ms Reindorf has been actively promoting ‘legal’ advice based on the update before the consultation has even begun. Such guidance completely neglects to discuss ways in which service providers and workplaces can be inclusive of transgender people, rather focussing on the ways in which we must be segregated, humiliated and excluded. This is meant to be an equalities body. It is soul destroying. It is simply not the case that the Supreme Court mandated that transgender people must be excluded from single sex services, but that they might be, if it is proportionate. The EHRC advice completely misses this point and fails to note how inclusion of trans people in the facilities for their correct sex is allowed as a positive action.

The proposed guidance is full of transphobic and inflammatory language. As an example:

"13.5.6  ‘A legitimate aim for excluding a trans person from a separate or single-sex service for their own [sex assigned at birth] might be to prevent alarm or distress for other service users’ …"

It is hard to imagine another protected characteristic being able to be discriminated against as it causes ‘alarm and distress’. How far away are we from this being extended to gay people who make homophobic men uncomfortable in changing rooms or an ethnic minority being banned for making racists uncomfortable? It sounds almost ridiculous to suggest. So why is this language appropriate when talking about us?

It is likely that this guidance is (at least) partly illegal. The EHRC seem oblivious to this. But I think it is most telling to consider the case where the advice is legal. How could anyone argue that our equalities law is anything but unfit for purpose if it has reached a point where segregation is mandated? How is it proportional to request that service providers can ask about birth sex, or worse, for proof thereof? How does it functionally matter what your birth sex is, when you have undergone years of hormone therapy and surgery – for those of us who are fortunate enough to have actually accessed some kind of healthcare. A whole separate scandal. A transitioned transgender person is biologically identical to our acquired sex, aside from perhaps a DNA test. How have we reached the point in UK society in 2025 where we are striving for ways to try and discern transgender people at every opportunity just to exclude them?

I would like you in your position as Minister for Equalities to consider how we can fix the mess we are currently in. So far, I - and I know LGBT people more broadly - feel let down by Labour, who have dithered on this issue and allowed the backsliding of rights by inaction and neglect. We have plummeted to 22nd in the most recent ILGA Rainbow Map of Europe, something we proudly topped as a nation just 10 years ago.

Part of this decline has been driven by the toxic culture wars and debate instigated, and indeed, continued by the previous Government and now aped by Reform, aspiring to bring Trump-style politics across the Atlantic. Transgender people are such a small percentage of the population, people who just want to go about their lives, accepted for who they are.

Transgender people are people. Discussions about situations where competing rights are in play can be had, and indeed they were so with the exceptions possible under the previous interpretation of the Equality Act 2010. But now we see a movement for a mass removal of rights and an othering of a whole group of our society. This has not been in response to a recent upsurge in transgender people requesting more and more rights: it has been the culmination of a coordinated campaign that explicitly seeks our erasure.

I would like to say we are not going anywhere, but that is not entirely true. I know many who have decided to start plans to leave or seek asylum elsewhere. What a dire state of affairs for the UK in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I should close with a further question. How can I, as a transgender person, have any trust in my future in this country when the body, the MPs and the Government that are meant to champion my equality and fight for my very existence now advocate for my erasure? Should I also be making plans to leave for my own safety and well-being? Where can I get reassurance that the EHRC and the Government are entering this consultation in good faith?

Transgender people are not an illness or a fad or a shame on society. We are people. We deserve to be treated as such, and I am not convinced the current Government is listening.

Thank you for your time and patience in reading my letter.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Madeleine Moore

Dear [redacted],

My name is Madeleine Moore and I am a constituent residing in [redacted]. I am writing to you to urgently request a meeting to discuss the ruling of the Supreme Court on the interpretation of the term ‘sex’ in The Equality Act 2010. Both the ruling itself and how it was reached have left me with a feeling a significant depression, anger and sadness. The ruling terrifies me. Despite clearly being both legally incorrect and, arguably more importantly, morally wrong, this ruling appears designed to ostracize an already vulnerable and persecuted minority. Worse, the ruling also appears to be setting women’s rights back for a generation. That the Labour Party appears to be all too willing to embrace this staggers me – when did the Labour Party aspire to take the ‘Nasty Party’ crown?

I am a woman. I am a University Lecturer in Mathematics. I am married. And I am transgender. I have known I was transgender since I was about 10 and then spent the best part of 25 years fighting that every day of my life. I finally sought help when it became clear that to not do so would, to be blunt, have killed me. I started my transition in 2020, and publicly in 2021. I have used women’s facilities for over four years without comment or incident.

I am lucky in many regards. I am lucky I have a very supportive wife, who has known for over 10 years and was willing and eager to support in any way she could. I am lucky that both my previous and my current workplaces have been incredibly supportive throughout, it has been simple to, for example, change names and to live in my acquired gender in everyday life. I am lucky that my family and friends have, overall, been very supportive. I am lucky that we are financially comfortable enough that I was able to forgo the nearly decade-long wait for even a first appointment at an NHS Gender Clinic and seek private diagnosis and treatment for gender dysphoria. I am lucky that my GP has, to date, been supportive and agreed to shared care. Most transgender people are not this fortunate.

I am unlucky in other regards. I am unlucky have been verbally insulted in public multiple times – probably on average at least once a month. I am unlucky that I have had a brick thrown at me on my walk to work because I am transgender. The police won’t do anything because the police don’t have the resources and don’t care about transgender people. I am unlucky that I have had colleagues and collaborators stop working with me or talking with me because of their views. I am unlucky that, because I am transgender, I have had to constantly fear confrontation and argument if I want to use a public bathroom. I have to balance between avoiding that risk, not eating or drinking or, bluntly, being forced to wet myself. I am unlucky that I wasn’t brave enough to start my transition sooner – I know I will never really pass in public. I am always going to be hypervisible as long as I live. Most transgender people are more unfortunate than this.

As I said above, last week’s ruling terrifies me. I already am constantly aware of the possibility of confrontation if I need to use the bathroom in public, now I am worried of being detained or prosecuted just for what should be a basic right. Or, worse, being forced into the facilities of the sex I was, falsely, assigned at birth and being at risk of humiliated, abused or assaulted. I am worried that all the cisgender women that I know and love, and those that I don’t, who don’t conform to a gender stereotype that was ‘last century’ in the last century will suffer the same. I am frightened that we all may be strip searched by male police officers just on the off chance we might be transgender. How does this make women safer?

On top of this, if a cisgender woman says that they are not transgender how are they to be believed? Who is policing this system? Do women need to carry around their birth certificates just to use a bathroom? Are we employing people to inspect genitals or to perform a chromosome test on every street corner? Are we putting transgender people on a list or making them wear a badge, so they are easy to spot? It may sound hyperbolic, but it doesn’t work. This ruling solves nothing and just invites an easier ride for bigotry and hate. How does this make women safer?

The ruling also terrifies me from a legal perspective. How have we entered a world where a hearing on whether or not to remove the rights of a minority is engineered so that five anti-transgender groups are allowed to provide evidence, and yet no transgender voices are heard and, indeed, are explicitly rejected? If you replace the word ‘transgender’ with any of protected characteristic, it becomes completely inconceivable and yet this is what has happened. The legal standard of audi alteram partem has been violated when it should be sacred. In addition, why were these groups allowed to present new evidence that was unchallenged and untested in this proceeding? That the Supreme Court chose to allow this is unforgivable. How can we trust the rule of law in this country when the ultimate arbiter of that breaks fundamental and basic legal principles? How does this make women safer?

Beyond this, I am staggered that on such a fundamental ruling on acts that were written relatively recently, the Supreme Court did not even hear from the people who drafted the Equality Act. As we have seen in the days since the ruling, civil servants who were involved in the process have said that the Supreme Court’s ruling contradicts the Act’s original intentions. Surely rather than guessing the Court should have been hearing from these people.

There is perhaps the even more egregious fact that the Supreme Court ruling spends multiple paragraphs arguing what the legislators of the fifty-year old Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 meant by ‘man’ and ‘woman’ by contrast, the explanatory note of the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 (GRA) that explicit legislative intent of the GRA  was to include transgender people and override the 1975 Act is then completely dismissed and ignored in paragraph 81 of the ruling. We have entered the realm where our Supreme Court has overstepped interpretation of legislature and begun legislating itself. How can we retain faith in a country where the Supreme Court is allowed to rewrite the law? How does this make women safer?

The ruling tries to claim that it does not negatively impact the lives of transgender people and should not be viewed as a victory for one side over the other. How on earth can a body that has not even spoken to or heard from transgender people think to speak for us? Our lived experiences are what matters, and I can tell you that it is already making my life worse. I am afraid of going out into society. The ruling has given free reign for hate groups and the media to use language designed to harm. Language we do not allow about other minority groups, but because it is transgender people it is now allowed. How has Britain become a place where hate is being encouraged? How does this make women safer?

I want to finish with what is perhaps the most terrifying to me. Even in the context where the ruling has happened and cannot be reversed, I am appalled at how the ruling is being wilfully and deliberately misinterpreted. The ruling is about the definition of the word ‘sex’ in one act. Importantly, the ruling explicitly does not oblige public bodies to provide single-sex spaces, such as toilets or changing rooms, only that it now makes it easier to exclude transgender people from them if they so wish.

And yet, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the body that is supposed to oversee the law with respect to protecting minorities, has publicly announced that it is going to bring in mandatory statutory guidance that blanket bans transgender people from said facilities. This is completely legally ungrounded. Even more appalling, the head of the EHRC goes further and, on national radio (BBC Radio 4, April 17th) tries to place the onus on transgender people to advocate for businesses and services to provide a ‘third space’ for them. This is a ridiculous assertion. Unisex or gender-neutral facilities are scarce as it is, even before the previous government’s legislation to try to ban the latter. The facilities simply don’t exist. Are we meant to be taking every individual place to court if we are not provided for? Who is paying for these legal costs? How are businesses going to afford to change? Most aggravatingly it is the responsibility of the EHRC to be advocating and demanding these ‘third spaces’ if they wish to pursue this legally incorrect, foolish and bigoted agenda.

To make matters worse, I see this morning (April 22nd) that Bridget Phillipson MP, Minister for Equalities, has preached the same, false interpretation of the ruling in the national media. How can we trust Labour when it claims to want to support and protect transgender people when it blithely attacks us like this, as if it hasn’t any actual understanding of what the legal situation is. Or indeed, how anything is to work in practice. We are falsely told again and again that the ruling has provided clarity when it has done the opposite. How does this make women safer?

The most insidious effect of these false claims from the EHRC and from the government is that, on the ground, in everyday life, ordinary people don’t know what the law is due to understandable ignorance. It leads to more confrontation and to transgender people and cisgender women being uncomfortable and at risk of verbal and physical assault.

Upwards of 30,000 people marched through London – and many more nationwide – on Saturday 19th April to protest this ruling. Feminism that does not include transgender people is the patriarchy and sets back the cause of women decades. And yet, had not some people defaced some statues, you would have had a hard time knowing the protests happened at all from the mainstream media, which has been hostile to transgender people for years. Descriptions are always of ‘activists’ and not just ‘people’. People who are angry that their rights or those of their friends and families are being taken away. People who are worried about what comes next or whose rights are next. People who look at a system that thinks that statues are more important than people and are scared by what that means. How does this make women safer?

I can forgive the government for a lot of what has happened since last summer. The previous government left this country in a ruinous state, and it will take a lot of time to fix that. But I cannot forgive the government for continuing or escalating the culture war started by the previous government. The Labour Party I grew up with would not have stood for that, and I would like to believe that the current Labour Party doesn’t either. Convince me that is true.

Thank you for your time in reading and considering this letter. I would very much like the chance to meet and discuss the issues raised herein with you. I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Madeleine Moore