Trans rights activists defaced a statue of Millicent Fawcett during a protest over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman.
Thousands of protesters marched through central London on Saturday in an “emergency demonstration”.
Draped in blue, pink and white, they chanted calls for trans liberation, blocked traffic and held up placards which read “No feminism without trans women” and “Biology is not binary”.
At least two statues in Parliament Square were daubed with graffiti during the rally, with “f– rights” and a heart painted on the banner held by the suffragist, and “trans rights are human rights” sprayed on the pedestal bearing a memorial to South African military leader and statesman Jan Christian Smuts.
A statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett was defaced during the trans rights protests on Saturday – Andrew Matthews/PA
Joanna Cherry KC, a former SNP MP who opposed the party’s trans policy, said the activists had shown “appalling misogyny”.
She posted on X: “Anyone doubting the appalling misogyny of trans activists need only look at this evidence. The handmaidens should hang their heads in shame.”
Fawcett campaigned tirelessly from a young age to get women the vote. In 1866, when she was 19, she helped collect signatures for the first suffrage petition.
She was involved with the push for women’s votes for more than five decades and led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, though her commitment to peaceful tactics led to a split between her moderate movement and the more radical suffragettes.
Fawcett also campaigned for women’s rights in many other areas, including access to university. She died in 1929, a year after women achieved full equality at the ballot box.
The statue was unveiled in 2018 in a ceremony attended by the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Theresa May, who was then Prime Minister.
Mr Khan posted at the time on X, then known as Twitter, that “her legacy as a champion of women’s suffrage 100 years ago is an important reminder of the work that still needs to be done to achieve true gender equality”.
Trans rights activists in Parliament Square
Feminist campaign group For Women Scotland, which raised the Supreme Court case against the Scottish Government, criticised the defacing of Fawcett’s statue.
The group posted on X: “No doubt the organisation which bears her name will condemn this”.
The post referred to the Fawcett Society, a charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights, of which Labour peer Harriet Harman is chairman.
Both the Fawcett Society and Baroness Harman have been contacted for comment.
The protection of single-sex spaces has become a highly contested issue during the debate.
Wednesday’s ruling said that if a space or service is designated as women-only, a person who was born male but identifies as a woman does not have a right to use that space or service, which has caused many public bodies to review their gender policies.
Protesters at the march argued that this was little more than a distraction and had little to do with female safety.
Earlier in the afternoon, before the statues were vandalised, Mijke van der Drift, a tutor at the Royal College of Art, said: “Spaces get safe if you have good practices against violence.
“Cis women can be very violent, but they can also be our allies, our friends, and our lovers. But if you want safe spaces, you need to have anti-violent practices.
“Because honestly, people are raped by their uncles, are raped by their family members, by their exes. Women are murdered by their ex-partners. They’re not murdered by some unknown trans women.”
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