An NHS trust has updated its policy on single-sex spaces in light of last year’s Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’ — in defiance of the judges. West London NHS Trust has said it will allow patients to use single-sex facilities based on their “legal gender”, a concept specifically rejected by the court.

It’s clear from the Court’s judgment that trans-identified men with a gender recognition certificate are legally male, and have no more right to use single-sex facilities intended for women than other men. But it seems they will be permitted to do so in establishments run by the trust, regardless of how women feel about it.

If other trusts follow suit, it will be an indictment of ministers’ inaction. Wes Streeting made sympathetic noises about the issue when he was Health Secretary, meeting the Darlington nurses who were awarded £187,000 in compensation last week after being told to share facilities with a trans-identified male.

But Streeting didn’t follow through by telling NHS trusts to follow the law, and the chances of his successor, James Murray, showing more guts are vanishingly small. Murray claims to have changed his mind about gender ideology, saying shortly after he was appointed that he no longer believes that trans women are women. But last week he voted in the House of Commons to allow a controversial puberty blockers trial on children as young as 10 to go ahead.

NHS trusts up and down the country have got the message: despite the ruling, it’s business as usual for captured organisations, while female staff and patients who don’t want men in single-sex spaces will be forced to contemplate going to court.

No one should ever underestimate the degree to which gender ideology has infiltrated the NHS. Hospitals in west London are a warning of how easily trusts gave in. West London NHS Trust has a history of currying favour with trans organisations, boasting in 2023 that it had won Stonewall’s bronze award for “leading LGBTQ+ inclusive employers”. It regretted that it hadn’t made Stonewall’s list of top 100 employers that year, but said it had “undertaken significant strides towards creating an inclusive working environment”.

The trust is based mainly in Acton, Brentford and Ealing, and shares some facilities at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith, where it offers mental health services. The hospital is administered by a neighbouring organisation, Imperial College Healthcare Trust, which stopped offering “feminising” surgery in 2021. However, patients arriving for X-rays or to visit sick relatives in 2022 still had to walk along a corridor bearing the message: “If I hadn’t transitioned, I wouldn’t be myself or even alive.”

It should have been obvious to the Government last year, following the judgment, that NHS leaders who had allowed such nonsense to proliferate would not give up without a fight. But trusts haven’t even needed to do that. When there’s a conflict between the rights of the female half of the population and a species of magical thinking, they know which side ministers are on.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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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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