‘We don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.” The first time I heard that sentence was in August 2015: I was meeting one of my editors at The Guardian, where I then worked, before going on maternity leave. Along with the usual banal pregnancy chat — did I feel ready? Of course not, you never do! Etc etc — I suggested that maybe the paper should be careful about running too many columns by male writers insisting “trans women are women”. Should men define what a woman is, I asked, especially in a newspaper that prides itself on its feminist bona fides? That’s when I got hit with the wrong-side-of-history smackdown for what would be far from the last time.

“The wrong side of history”: it’s how Mridul Wadhwa, then chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), justified describing female rape victims as “bigoted” in 2021 if they asked for a female counsellor rather than a male one who identified as a woman (like Wadhwa). And it’s why advertisers including Barclays pulled their money out of Mumsnet when the women’s website dared to allow its users to discuss their concerns about how trans rights were conflicting with women’s rights.

Last week the Supreme Court ruled that the wrong side of history is not where a lot of people believed it to be, when it came to the unanimous verdict that a woman is a biological fact, not a fantastical feeling. Whither the wrong-side-of-history folk now? Well, Wadhwa resigned last year from ERCC after an investigation found he failed to prioritise the needs of rape victims, despite that being his literal job. Only weeks after Mumsnet’s founder, Justine Roberts, learnt her site had been blacklisted “by Barclays’ top brass” for committing crimes of feminism, the bank’s then boss, Jes Staley, resigned following an investigation into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.• Let’s not downplay this triumph for womenIt is entirely unsurprising to me that so many of those who signed up to this flat-Earth ideology and insisted women should shut up and let men do whatever they wanted should turn out to be so morally bankrupt. Because who else would take such a stance? What kind of man would insist on competing in a sports match against women, despite their obvious discomfort, or tell women they knew what a woman was better than them? To give in to the activists’ demands was no big deal, women were told, but to refuse was fascism. I’ve been writing about the effects of gender ideology for more than a decade, and in that time I’ve had to leave a job I thought I’d have for ever, I’ve been publicly denounced by people I thought were friends and I’ve been blacklisted from more events than I can count.Of course there are lovely trans people, but the activists who have dominated this discussion for the past decade are bullies. Those who caved in to them — politicians, the NHS, the liberal media, the police, schools, publishers, journalists too scared to cover this issue properly — are cowards and stooges. In their absence, extraordinary women such as Susan Smith, Trina Budge and Marion Calder, better known as For Women Scotland, whom I have interviewed this week for The Sunday Times, stepped in to stop the wholescale theft of women’s rights.And what did they get for their trouble? A lot of abuse. From David Lammy to David Tennant, the roll-call of right-side-of-history men who enthusiastically denigrated women for saying primary school-level scientific truths could fill a phone book. The LBC radio presenter James O’Brien couldn’t even grasp why women would be happy about Wednesday’s ruling: “Do you pause and ask yourself, how did I end up on the same team as [Trump]?” he smirked, his brain audibly leaking out of his ears. Well, James, how’d you end up on the side that accuses rape victims of bigotry when they ask for a female counsellor?Trans people are still protected from discrimination by the Gender Recognition Act 2004, but the ludicrous era of self-ID and male “lesbians” and “trans women are women” is over. Activists insist — with no evidence — the verdict makes trans women “unsafe” and their “existence is threatened”. Women who have been in abusive relationships will recognise the tactics: say what I want or I will hurt myself, or you. They claim the result is “an overreach”, but if those same activists hadn’t overreached themselves and insisted biological sex is irrelevant, and any woman who disagreed should be screamed at, cancelled and pushed out on an ice floe, none of this would have happened. Their tactics have hurt women, children and trans people. No wonder the formerly ubiquitous Stonewall and Mermaids are now noticeable only by their absence.So now it’s April 2025, and what we knew 10, 20, 1,000 years ago has been confirmed: a woman is a woman. What a terrible waste of time, money and energy this has all been. On the other hand, how clarifying: now we know who believes in reality and who doesn’t. Who is brave and who isn’t. Who thinks men can magically become women and children can be born in the wrong body, and who doesn’t.Maybe every generation has its witch-hunt, its Joe McCarthy era, when innocent people are denounced for unimaginably bizarre reasons, and we’ve now lived through ours. I’ve lost friends but I’ve gained so many funnier, smarter ones, women — gay and straight — I never would have met were it not for all the men screaming that trans women are women. That’s how I explain the past decade to myself: this was a test. Some passed. A lot more failed.