There’s a particular pattern which will be familiar to anyone who’s spent a few years in the trenches of the so-called “terf wars”. From the moment you take your first tentative step into battle — apologetically coming out in support of female-only rape crisis centers, or nervously venturing that you don’t actually like being called a “menstruator” — you will find that the problem is not just that trans extremists consider such positions actual violence.

Plenty of people don’t, but that doesn’t mean they will support you — at least not yet. These “reasonable” people will tell you they’d be happy to at some point, but right now it’s too toxic. They’d like to leave it a few years, if that’s okay with you. Once it’s safe for them to repeat the things you were saying back in 2016, they’ll be straight onto it.

This has essentially been Labour’s approach to the sex and gender debate of the past 15 years. The Government’s announcement at the weekend that it will be considering an overhaul of equality laws, in order to resolve some points of contention regarding sex and gender, might at surface level look promising. Yet it glosses over a history during which Labour politicians have actively ignored the abuse of gender-critical feminists and stubbornly insisted that women can have penises. Meanwhile, the more “voice of reason” types — such as Prime Minister Keir Starmer — have fretted over both sides “throwing bricks at each other”, while promising to bring “more light, less heat” to the discussion.

In practice, this has meant that they will take on board the arguments of feminist groups only after these women have taken all the hits, and clarify laws only after ordinary women have crowdfunded legal cases to show there was a problem to begin with. There’s an argument which says if we get there in the end, that’s the main thing. Even if you’re remembered as a bigot for speaking up first, isn’t it worth it if women-only spaces are protected?

This is true, up to a point. Indeed, this is likely how women’s rights groups may be expected to respond to the Government’s new announcement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has submitted a revised version of its Statutory Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations. Recommendations include compelling organizations to define the difference between sex and gender, and requiring trans people to present Gender Recognition Certificates when seeking access to single-sex spaces. This is, we are encouraged to believe, a move towards protecting women’s rights.

Yet it is hard to feel too celebratory. If all this had been proposed 10 years ago, when Stonewall was poised to start misleading employers by insisting on the primacy of gender identity over biological sex, it could have nipped many issues in the bud. Now, however, things appear less sure.

The trouble with a “wait until it’s safe to say it” approach is that the world moves on while you’re sitting it out. Just a decade or so ago, it might have been possible to think that trans women were a tiny minority with a very serious, mysterious condition called “gender dysphoria”, and that there would be no real impact on the definition of “woman” from indulging a legal fiction. It is not possible to think this now.

The failure of politicians and rights organizations to engage with what women were saying, and act accordingly, has allowed a culture of male entitlement to women’s spaces to flourish. Women’s rights can only be clawed back now by being absolutely clear that sex, not gender, matters at all times. It is not enough to “differentiate” if we still insist that both things can signify “woman” all the same.

Women cannot count on behind-the-curve politicians for this. It’s still grassroots women’s organizations, such as For Women Scotland in its current case against the Scottish Government, which are focusing on the here and now. It’s better than nothing, but Labor has a lot of catching up to do.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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