The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the term ‘woman’ relates to biological sex in a landmark judgement delivered on Wednesday morning.
Supreme Court judge Lord Hodge announced that the Equality Act’s definition of a woman relates to “a biological woman and biological sex,” not acquired gender, as the court unanimously allowed an appeal by the gender critical campaign group, For Women Scotland.
The grassroots Scottish group, which has been backed by JK Rowling, took the case against the Scottish government. The years-long legal battle focused on legal constraints around the statutory guidance issued by the Scottish ministers on the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018. The legal fight was crowdfunded by For Women Scotland, with more than £230,000 of public donations having been raised.
The Supreme Court ruled on how ‘woman’ and ‘men’ are defined for the purposes of the law. For Women Scotland had argued that the Gender Recognition Reform Act 2004, which allows a male with a gender recognition certificate, to be recognised as a woman, was contrary to the definition of ‘sex’ as it appears in the UK-wide Equality Act 2010.
Wednesday’s ruling recognises that transgender women are not legally women, with gender-critical campaigners hailing the outcome as a victory for common sense, and declaring that gender “self-ID is dead.”
Lord Hodge told the court: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the definition of the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”
However, he counselled against reading the judgement “as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not.”
The court, in its lengthy ruling, also said that the “concept of sex is binary” under the 2010 Equality Act.
The Supreme Court ruling was welcomed by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).Baroness Kishwer Falkner, its chairman, said: “Today the Supreme Court ruled that a gender recognition certificate does not change a person’s legal sex for the purposes of the Equality Act.
“We are pleased that this judgment addresses several of the difficulties we highlighted in our submission to the court, including the challenges faced by those seeking to maintain single-sex spaces, and the rights of same-sex attracted persons to form associations.
“As we did not receive the judgment in advance, we will make a more detailed statement once we have had time to consider its implications in full.”
For Women Scotland, taking to social media in the wake of the ruling, said that they were “absolutely jubilant,” tweeting: “#WeKnowWhatAWomanIs” as they opened a bottle of champagne outside the Supreme Court to celebrate the outcome.
The group’s director, Trina Brudge, told Sky News: “Now we have clarity over what a ‘woman’ means in law. Trans [males] never had a right to access women-only spaces. That was an overreach on their part.”
“Today, the judges have said what we always believed to be the case, women are protected by their biological sex – that sex is real,” the group’s co-director Susan Smith said in a statement delivered to the media.
“We are enormously grateful to the Supreme Court for this ruling.”
Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch described the ruling as “a victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious.”
“Women are women and men are men: you cannot change your biological sex,” she said, reacting to the ruling.
“Saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact, and now isn’t true in law either,” she said, adding: “The era of Keir Starmer telling us women can have penises has come to an end. Well done to For Women Scotland!”