U.K. Top Court Says Trans Women Are Not Legally Women Under Equality Act

[Polybius]

Source: NY Times

The Supreme Court in Britain ruled on Wednesday that trans women do not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation.

The landmark judgment, which said that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, is a blow to campaigners for transgender rights. It could have far-reaching consequences for the operation of single-sex services like domestic violence shelters, as well as to equal pay claims and maternity policies. And it comes amid intense public debate over the intersection of transgender rights and women’s rights.

However, the five judges involved in the ruling emphasized that they were not commenting more broadly on whether trans women are women, saying it was not the role of the court to adjudicate on the meaning of gender or sex. Instead, the judgment is limited to the precise meaning of language in the 2010 Equality Act, which aims to prevent discrimination.

The decision will likely be welcome news for Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain. Some legal scholars had theorized that the court might refuse to rule and instead force his government to weigh in on a thorny and divisive issue. The government said in a statement Wednesday that it had always supported the protection of “single-sex spaces based on biological sex” and that the ruling brought “clarity and confidence” around the provision of services in hospitals, domestic violence shelters and sports clubs.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/world/europe/uk-supreme-court-woman-definition-trans.html

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Unanimous decision

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. Billionaire J.K. Rowling

has bought herself a decision.

[mathematic]

3. This was not a bought decision. This is the common view of the issue in the UK.

It's only been relatively recently (or, more accurately younger) british feminists begun to view trans issues more like americans. There's a reason why people call Great Britain "TERF island".

[unblock]

2. Political considerations aside, this seems a wrong read of the actual act.

I took an admittedly quick read of the uk 2010 equality act.

The law protects against discrimination based on, among other things, sex or being transgender.

The definition of sex in this act refers to "man" and "woman" (which unfortunately excludes non-binary) but does not clarify if this is meant to refer to gender, dna, birth certificate, or whatever.

The definition of transgender is:

"7 Gender reassignment
(1)A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex."

This clearly makes reference to the notion that sex can be "reassigned". I.e., someone assigned male at birth who transitions to female is not simply adopting characteristics of the other sex, they are actually having their sex reassigned, I.e., changed.

It seems clear to me that the intent of this definition is to say that a transgender person has the sex they transitioned to, not their "biological sex" (which is not a defined term in this act, and an ambiguous term if you get into the biological details).

There may be some ambiguity as to exactly *when* during their transition a transgender person is officially reassigned, but it seems clear that a change of sex is contemplated by this definition.

In short, trans women are indeed women by this act.

I believe the judges erred in this case, even ignoring the politics.

[kelly1mm]

4. All 5 of the judges were in error? (it was a unanimous decision) This is the UK's highest court. Is there a

reason to give credence to your opinion, like do you have some specialized training in UK law?

The entire 88 page opinion with the unanimous ruling that explains their reasoning can be found at the link below:

https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042

[unblock]

6. I have over a quarter century experience dealing with international contracts and statutes,

Many of which are interpreted under uk law.

That said, I'm not a lawyer, and my experience is limited to trade and finance contracts and compliance statutes. So I'd say I'm more expert than most here on du, but I'm certainly not claiming to be more expert than those who wrote the opinion. I'm just expressing mine.

Thanks for the link. The decision appears to largely rest on the definition of sex from earlier legislation, rather than this act in particular.

Separately, they note that one can indeed officially change one's gender in the uk, and a formal gender reassignment certificate can be obtained to evidence this.

They then argue that treating sex as something other than biological sex would cause "incoherence", for instance in that protections regarding pregnancy were surely intended to apply to trans man, so those biologically female.

My problem with this logic is that first, it ignores the incoherence of having an entire process for gender reassignment, then effectively stating that it doesn't really change anything, and also that clearly, as regarding pregnancy, the key characteristic is something like "those who can get pregnant" and in that context any descriptor such as "woman" is a mere convenience.

They also include reference to practical problems such as that trans women would then be included in lesbian-only spaces and groups, women's sports, etc. some of this is in the clearly bigoted category.

I'm not qualified regarding whether previous laws' definitions should prevail, but I can say having reviewed it, I still think it is in error.

[kelly1mm]

7. Fair enough! Thanks for your reply. It does seem to suggest that 'sex' is unchangeable

but 'gender' is changeable.

It then goes into protecting 'single-sex' spaces based on the determination that sex cannot be changed. That is not surprising based on UK public opinion being much more TERF-y than the USA.

[unblock]

11. I don't know much about that aspect of uk politics,

I do know that genuine feminism is much bigger in Europe generally than in the USA, and of course we all know about jk rowling.

Here in America, I've noticed that for most self-proclaimed terfs, the 'f' part is missing in any meaningful way. Mostly, they just seem to be trans-exclusionary radical dicks, or "terds".

[angrychair]

5. Legalized hate

So now it's apparently legal to hate trans people in the UK. So not everything is better in Europe

[mwooldri]

8. Ummm... Nope.

Shady Vance is trying to get Starmer to agree to get those hate speech laws off the books so hating on "minorities" would be legal. But this isn't that case.

My understanding is the courts trying to figure out what a woman was, and they went strictly on biology. I have a sneaky feeling that Labour will introduce legislation to shore things up but this verdict wasn't anything about legalising hate against transgender folk.

[unblock]

10. They are still protected against transgender discrimination

So maybe not a complete loss, though if they still are treated based on biological sex, and can therefore be institutionally misgendered, that certainly limits the protections against transgender discrimination....

[Jose Garcia]

9. The simple solution is for Parliament to fix the law