In North West Bylines

It has been clear for some time that this general election, when it came, would see Conservative politicians attempt to whip up a storm around sex and gender. Targeting poorly understood minorities is standard play for the party when it’s in trouble, and lately it has been drawing heavily on the tactics of the US evangelical right, which has found transphobia a useful tool through which to start radicalising people. Kemi Badenoch’s latest move, however, isn’t just transphobic – it’s unworkable.

Of course, the right has always hankered after the days when ‘men were real men and women were real women’. It’s not for nothing that Rishi Sunak chooses to pose on the exercise machines he rarely uses while Liz Truss prefers to sit beneath a tree in a walled garden wearing a dress that makes her look like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Faced with fictive claims about schools teaching there are 72 genders, and other such nonsense, one can understand why the average person might feel a bit confused and might long for the simplicity of the past. But sex was never simple. It just looks that way through a veil of ignorance – and when laws are based on ignorance, they don’t work.