What is a woman? An adult human female. A simple question with a simple answer. But not if you’re part of the bloated class of pallid politicians and pandering public figures who have thrown women under the giant transgender bus in their own craven fear of the lunatic fringe.
The repeated, squirming failure of a staggering number of political leaders to answer this simple question would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious.
It is a sign that their loyalties lie with the movement that views both sexes as an optional identity-based mulch and will glibly sacrifice women’s rights and separate spaces to prove it.
Being progressive used to mean fighting for women to have the same opportunities as men. Now it means fighting for the eradication of women as a concept. Somewhere along the way, lobbying for equal rights for transgender people turned into accepting that women’s rights should be eroded in the process.
We reached the brink of a social disaster because of this cowardice. We are now successfully fighting back from that brink because of a formidable counter movement, led mostly by pissed-off middle-aged women who fought valiantly for the very rights that have insidiously been stolen back. And by Donald Trump who, in his inauguration speech as president, declared that only two genders can formally exist – male and female.
None of this is complicated. Trans people deserve rights and equality and safety – but not at the expense of the rights and equality and safety of women. That means women get to keep separate spaces, separate medical services and separate sports.
All those things exist for the protection of women, who make up 50 per cent of the global population, as compared to the 0.1 per cent who have undertaken complex surgery to change their sex.
The rapid rise of the gender identity movement, which argued that sex is essentially irrelevant and that gender is merely a social construct, led to a kind of kamikaze empathy. Anybody who couldn’t be persuaded that demolishing traditional gender norms was anything other than total insanity was dismissed for spouting Right-wing bluster or smeared as ‘transphobic’.
Some brave women have been punching back hard, led by counter revolutionaries such as Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has weathered vicious attacks on her character for speaking out but defiantly chose to barrel through them and stay true to her principles.
She is no great friend of mine. We had a furious public spat a few years ago sparked by my friendship with Trump (suffice it to say, she is not a fan) during which she called me a ‘fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologising celebrity toady’.
Despite this, I have vocally defended her for her views on women’s rights in the face of hysterical name-calling and worse.
‘JK Rowling has weathered vicious attacks on her character for speaking out but defiantly chose to barrel through them and stay true to her principles,’ writes Piers Morgan
Piers Morgan recalls Ms Rowling calling him a ‘fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologising celebrity toady’
A survivor of horrific domestic abuse and sexual assault, she of all people understands the life-and-death importance of women being and feeling safe in women’s spaces. The whole campaign against her began when she spoke up for a woman who was fired from her job at a think tank for tweeting – accurately – that transgender women cannot change their biological sex.
Rowling posted: ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?’
But the young stars of the Harry Potter movies, including Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, shamefully trashed her views, planting their fangs squarely into the hand that has so generously fed their otherwise distinctly peckish careers.
But opinion is turning. It seems that Rowling – accused by critics of being ‘on the wrong side of history’ on this issue – is now on the right side after all. And her dramatic defiance of the cancel culture mob is a revealing yardstick for exactly how far we have come.
A documentary in which she respectfully and incisively explained her position was a chart-topping smash hit. A huge new Harry Potter TV show was commissioned. Lucrative ‘Harry Potter experiences’ have sprung up at theme parks from London to LA and Riyadh. The hordes of people waiting in line don’t seem bothered that she’s been cancelled for transphobia.
Similarly, when the video game Hogwarts Legacy was released, activists called for a boycott to stop her ‘profiting from her anti-trans views’. But it rocketed to the top as one of the fastest-selling games in history, raking in almost a billion dollars in a couple of weeks.
I wish more people had the guts to follow their own common sense. Instead we’ve had years of performative hogwash and intelligence-insulting nonsense, which has been quietly alienating everyone who has a functioning brain.
Defining a woman became a brain-melting riddle for some of the most important people in the world. Instead of simply saying what we all know to be true, they dance around the answer like prima ballerinas until they are painfully contorted into all kinds of back-breaking shapes.
Take Nicola Sturgeon – at one stage the most powerful female politician in the UK as Scottish First Minister. When asked to define a woman, she snapped back: ‘I’m not going to. I’m just not going to get into this debate at a level that’s about simplified and lurid headlines.’
It’s not a debate, it’s just a word – Woman! You are one Nicola – and that’s OK!
Sturgeon was far from alone in skipping round the question. British Labour MP Sarah Owen appeared on BBC Woman’s Hour – a woman-fronted show that’s made for women and dedicated entirely to women’s issues – shortly after being appointed Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. Surely she of all people knows what a woman is?
When asked, her answer should have been: ‘Adult human female. Next question!’ Instead she rambled: ‘I think it’s really sad that we have boiled down people’s fears or concerns to body parts, because basically we are so much more than that. What a woman to me is, somebody paid less than their male counterpart. Somebody less safe walking down the street.’
My jaw hit the floor as I listened, and by the time she had finished it had gone through the basement and was tunnelling rapidly towards the molten core of the earth.
As for Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s Prime Minister, he has had a ‘woman’ problem for years. His answer to the million-dollar question was to waffle that 99.9 per cent of women ‘haven’t got a penis’ (the correct stat is 100 per cent) and condemn a female member of his own party for saying that only women have a cervix.
Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, waded in to declare that women ‘quite clearly’ can have a penis.
Starmer won the UK election comfortably, but not before a screeching 180-degree turn that began with ‘clearing up’ his definition of a woman as ‘an adult human female’ in a BBC interview. He later declared that women’s private spaces should be for women only, but only when the UK’s Supreme Court made its landmark ruling this year that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ can only refer to biological sex, did he say with total confidence that men can’t become women.
‘I think it’s very important that we’ve now got real clarity, which is going to be really helpful for everybody, going forward,’ he declared.
It may be helpful for you, going forward, Prime Minister. Most people have had real clarity on the matter since the beginning of human civilisation.
The same thing, of course, played out in the US. At the very peak of the woke bubble – just as it was inflating to bursting point – I interviewed US singer Macy Gray, a charming, soulful pop star who has a lot of thoughtful things to say about the world.
I asked her: ‘What is a woman?’
‘A human being with boobs and a vagina,’ came the reply. ‘Just because you change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman. Sorry!’
That was clearly her honestly held opinion and one that most women I know in real life would agree with. But she was bombarded with torrents of abuse online and then branded an ignorant bigot and a transphobe.
Ms Rowling faced a backlash even from the former Harry Potter trio, Rupert Grint, Daniel Radciffe and Emma Watson (pictured here together in 2001)
US singer Macy Gray told Piers: ‘Just because you change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman. Sorry!’
Rolling Stone magazine wrote: ‘Gray’s antiquated, misguided and hateful rhetoric surrounding trans people is the type of sentiment that has had deadly consequences.’
Oh, come off it. Deadly consequences? For saying women have BOOBS? We learn that part of the anatomy as toddlers, just before we learn about the boy who cried wolf. Trans lobbyists have been wailing it at the top of their lungs for years now and we are no longer listening.
JK Rowling was one of the few celebrities to speak up for Macy. But Macy herself went on television to issue a humbling apology – no doubt under orders from her panicked publicists.
This is why people don’t stand up for women when it matters most. They get bullied and barracked until they submit to the vicious and vocal minority – even as the sane majority agrees with them.
Not, though, comedian and former sitcom star Roseanne Barr, who’s had more cancellations than St Pancras Station.
‘A woman is me,’ she said on my TV show. ‘A woman is somebody whose breasts hang down to her stomach and who has a prolapsed uterus from giving birth to five ungrateful little b**tards who have never had to work for a thing in their goddam life. That’s what a woman is!’
For some, though, just the word ‘woman’ has become toxic and never to be spoken. Not content with simply chewing it into mush, they have tried to dispose of it altogether. It may be alluded to – but never actually said. Inconveniently for them, it refers to half the world’s population, which can make banning it quite difficult.
Inclusive linguistic innovators have come up with many alternatives which are apparently less offensive: birthing people; menstruators; bodies with vaginas; individuals with a cervix; chestfeeders. These are all real examples of supposedly serious alternatives proposed by academics or deployed in health communications with the apparent aim of protecting trans people’s feelings.
My personal favourite is: ‘Womxn’. Wom-inx? Wom-exxon? Womex? How do you even say it? I have no idea.
Michelle Obama, the former US first lady, used it in a post about abortion rights, with a complaint that ‘state lawmakers will have the power to strip womxn of the right to make decisions about their bodies’. As I said on my show the next day ‘There is no “x” in woman, Michelle.’
What made this so absurd is that her post was supposed to be supporting women’s rights. Instead, she trampled on them by pandering to a tiny minority of people who get upset when they hear a word that’s been used for centuries to describe the people who aren’t men.
The term ‘womxn’ is apparently a mark of respect to trans people who identify as women. But what about the disrespect it shows the vast majority of women who just want to be called women? Where are their rights in all this virtue-signalling, language-mangling?
Reducing half of the world’s population to an unpronounceable letter salad does nothing but deride women and draw mockery to the trans cause.
It can be dangerous, too. Cervical screening saves thousands of women’s lives every year and could save thousands more if only more women knew about it. Yet the Government of Jersey felt it OK to run a social media campaign that said: ‘If you are a transgender man, a gender non-conforming person, or assigned female at birth and with a cervix, you can book your free cervical screening today.’
The only word missing from its exhaustive list was the only one that needed to be on it – woman! A bearded man in a grey suit was the sole protagonist of the promotional photograph.
Michelle Obama, the former US first lady, wrote in a post about abortion rights: ‘State lawmakers will have the power to strip womxn of the right to make decisions about their bodies’
What is more absurd than a strapping biological man, with all of the physical benefits of a male body, identifying as a woman and crushing biological women in their own sports?
There’s a serious reason why people get worked up about this issue and it was laid bare by the shocking case of Isla Bryson, the violent, convicted double rapist who later decided to self-identify as a woman and demanded to serve an eight-year sentence in an all-female prison. Sturgeon publicly backed authorities when they allowed a convicted biologically male sex offender to move into an all-female facility, packed with potential new victims.
Bryson’s case spurred genuine fury about a separate Sturgeon-backed law allowing Scottish citizens to legally change their gender without needing a medical diagnosis of any kind.
JK Rowling led the charge, branding Sturgeon ‘a destroyer of women’s rights’.
A few days later, Sturgeon resigned as Scottish First Minister in disgrace. She was facing a slew of controversies at the time, but she had burned her political capital and shed many of her supporters over gender madness.
One of the fiercest and most successful female leaders in the country sacrificed her career at the altar of identity politics.
Shortly after this repugnant charade I had an all-female panel on my show to mark International Women’s Day. So far, so woke. But during a heated debate with an arch-liberal panellist who was attempting to justify limitless self-identity, I asked her: ‘Why can’t I say – I am Piers Morgan and I am a black lesbian?’ She called me ‘absurd’. My response was that the real absurdity is allowing anybody to put their hands in the air, declare womanhood and suddenly claim all of the rights and protections that women have.
And what is more absurd than a strapping biological man, with all of the physical benefits of a male body, identifying as a woman and crushing biological women in their own sports? Find me a parent anywhere who wants their young daughter kicked on a sports pitch by a male – or wants their son to do the kicking. Find me a sports fan anywhere who wants to watch men obliterating women. It will be a long search.
The scandal of biological men in women’s sports has never really been about trans rights. It’s about what should always have been screamingly obvious. Fairness! Sport lives and dies on fairness.
Athletes born with balls have irrefutable physical advantages over those born without them. They’re stronger, have bigger bones, greater natural stamina, more muscle mass and bigger lungs for endurance. There is no amount of surgery that can change that. Trans women in female sports is cheating on steroids – or hormonal therapy, anyway.
It flies in the face of feminism and the fight for equality of the sexes, including the right to compete in professional sports at all, and the simple right to privacy and safety from harassment by men. Now someone born a man can choose to enter those female sports, demolish all the women and demand the right to be in the room where they get undressed.
And this is a totally one-way violation because women who identify as men have no such potency in male sports – nor would they be remotely intimidating in the changing room as men might be. No wonder feminists are hopping mad.
There is a ubiquitous ‘transphobia’ barb that a phobia is an irrational fear. But I’d say it is completely rational for a woman to feel uneasy when a 6ft figure with a penis is roaming around a room of naked women.
American swimmer Riley Gaines put her objections forcefully when she said on my show, Uncensored: ‘I don’t want to see a naked man’s genitalia. I’m married. Do you think my husband wants me seeing another naked man who gets to simultaneously, non-consensually, see me naked? No way. That goes against my values.’
She was inevitably accused by another guest of discrimination, to which she snapped back: ‘It’s discriminating against us on the basis of our sex.’
How can anybody honestly say she is wrong? Trans people do exist but they should exist in their own trans category in elite sports – or compete as their birth-determined sex. Identity is complicated and personal, but biology is just fact.
US swimmer Riley Gaines is a vocal advocate against trans athletes competing in women’s sports
In all this, trans people are not the problem. Any adult who suffers genuine dysmorphia and goes through a multi-year ordeal and major surgery to transform their bodies has clearly put some thought into it. They should absolutely have the same rights to fairness and equality as anybody else, as well as our respect.
The problem is really the people who wage self-serving virtue wars on their behalf; pushing ridiculous extremes that end up eroding the rights of women.
In a free society you can choose to identify and label yourself as you please. But women’s rights have been very hard-fought and we have to fight to defend them too. That begins with knowing and saying what they are.
There’s a long-standing myth that women need to behave more like men to get ahead in the workplace. In my experience, the opposite is true.
A team of excitable men needs nothing more than a dose of female orderliness and calm.
The laudable drive for women’s equality has been remarkably successful at breathtaking speed but has negative consequences too.
We have encouraged the idea that women who want to prioritise their families over their careers are somehow traitors to their gender. That finding fulfilment in motherhood is somehow less valuable to society than scaling corporate ladders.
But surely the point of equality is to give women equal choice and opportunities, not a command? Some women choose to prioritise their personal attainment. Some still choose to prioritise home-making. Both things are fulfilling and valuable.
From my vantage point the ‘have it all’ myth has heaped undue pressures and burdens on women because it actually means ‘do it all’.
The rush to prove that women can do anything men can do has generally resulted in them having to do the things men can’t do as well.
There certainly are kickass female leaders who work an 80-hour week while raising four children in a spotless household, alongside mastering yoga. It’s a feat usually made possible by a team of nannies, housekeepers, personal trainers and chefs. For everyone else there is stress, burnout and anxiety.
And neither sex is benefiting here. Nobody is happy. Women in their 40s are increasingly dependent on anti-depressants.
My personal favourite of the crimes against feminism is being beautiful: the theory being that our concept of beauty was crafted by men and the only possible incentive to look good is pleasing men.
Total nonsense. Many women feel good when they look good and that’s a perfectly valid reason for doing it. Amping up the allure breeds confidence, swagger and energy. How outrageously sexist to suggest they’re only doing it for male benefit!
Women have many distinct natural qualities, just as men do. The ability to read emotional undercurrents, to build consensus and to nurture are not consolation prizes.
Until the gender wars began, it was innately understood that all of humanity is based on the complementary inter-play of our combined forces. Now, do you need me to open that jar?
Adapted from Woke Is Dead by Piers Morgan (HarperCollins, £22), to be published October 23. © Piers Morgan 2025. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to 18/10/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 29
