The Supreme Court Judgement was met with great celebration by women across Britain and indeed around the world.
Deciding the case between campaign group For Women Scotland and the Scottish Government, judges made clear that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a ‘woman’ is a woman in the ordinary meaning of the word. In other words, a woman is a biological human female.
Many will be wondering why we need a panel of eminent judges to tell us something that is so obvious to us all. All societies in history have understood the differences between males and females, and the significance of those differences. For important reasons such as safety, dignity and reproduction, humans are highly evolved to be able to identify whether someone is male or female at first glance; even toddlers know the difference between men and women.
Yet over the last twenty years, gender ideology—the idea that someone’s sense of their own ‘gender’ trumps their biological sex—has taken hold in many of our institutions.
Many prominent and influential people have claimed that a woman is anyone who says they are a woman, and that transwomen—men who dress and try to act as women—are just as ‘female’ as actual women, i.e. people who are registered female at birth.
For many, gender ideology has been a source of great amusement and ridicule. The idea that there are multiple genders, or that woman can have penises, has given rise to millions of internet memes.
But gender ideology has had serious and sometimes catastrophic consequences for women and girls. If a man who says he is a woman is treated by society as if he really is, all the decades and even centuries of legal and social structures that have been developed to protect women are suddenly meaningless.
If men can access women’s changing rooms, if men can compete in women’s sports, if men can conduct intimate examinations on women who have requested a female clinician, then women’s dignity, safety and privacy are eroded.
Who can forget the case of ‘Karen’ White, a trans-identified male rapist who was placed in a woman’s prison and sexually assaulted female inmates.
Normally, we might expect the law to protect us from such mad and dangerous ideas.
British law, after all, is based on fact and centuries of wisdom and tradition. Yet one small Act of Parliament in 2004 changed all that, introducing for the first time the legal fiction that a man can become a woman.
The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) enabled people who want to ‘change gender’ to register that change by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) and changing the legal sex on their birth certificate. Importantly, it is not necessary to undergo any ‘gender reassignment surgery’ in order to qualify for a GRC.
At the time, many thought the GRA would have minimal impact, applied only in rare and extreme cases to allow transgender people to live more fully in their acquired gender (and to marry or remain married to someone of the same birth sex, something that was illegal at the time).
But after the passing of the Equality Act in 2010, it became clear that the GRA had introduced a profound confusion into British Law.
The purpose of the Equality Act is to prevent public sector bodies from discriminating against someone on the basis of one of their ‘protected characteristics’.
These characteristics include race, religion, sex, marital statues and disability, and much of the Equality Act replaced or enhance existing laws such as the Race Relations Act 1976.
But as well as banning most discrimination, the Equality Act also set out circumstances in which it is legally acceptable to discriminate against someone on the basis of their sex, in order to protect single sex spaces and services. In other words, it is lawful to prevent men from accessing women’s toilets, changing rooms, sports, hospital wards, prisons etc.
So far, so sensible. But the problem with the Equality Act is that it came after the Gender Recognition Act, which had created the possibility for a person to change their legal sex.
So, when an organisation sought to deliver a single sex service, for example a woman’s refuge, a legal question arose over whether it was lawful to exclude a man with a GRC from accessing the service given that—legally at least—it could be argued that he is a woman.
And this is exactly the legal confusion that gave rise to this week’s case in the Supreme Court. In 2018, the SNP-controlled Scottish Parliament passed a bill to ensure a gender balance on public sector boards and included guidance stating that a man with a GRC should be counted as a woman.
The campaign group For Women Scotland challenged the lawfulness of that guidance in the Scottish Courts and lost the case, with the judge ruling that sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex”.
For Women Scotland appealed against this judgement, and the case has been finally settled this week in London’s Supreme Court. The Court’s judgment was clear; for the purposes of the Equality Act, a woman is someone who was born female, regardless of whether or not they are in possession of a GRC.
In response to the ruling, many organisations will have to reassess their policies on single sex spaces and provisions.
Many prominent and influential people have claimed that a woman is anyone who says they are a woman, argues Miriam Cates
PA
Now that we have legal clarity, schools, hospitals, and sports organisations will no longer be able to claim that it is lawful for them to allow a male to use female services, whether or not he has a GRC. This is a relief for the many women who have lived for years in fear of unexpectedly encountering a man in a changing room or hospital ward or rape crisis centre.
But even though the confusion over single sex provisions is now—hopefully—settled, the Gender Recognition Act remains on the statute.
Individuals can still lawfully change the sex marker on their birth certificate, effectively rewriting history on what is a historical and legal document and a matter of public record. No one is allowed to alter their place of birth or the name of their mother on their birth certificate, so why should it be lawful to change one’s recorded sex?
And one of the principle reasons for introducing the Gender Recognition Act — to allow a transwoman (man) to remain married to a woman—is now redundant following the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The GRA must be repealed. And the government should legislate to ensure that all legal documents such as passports and driving licenses must reflect a person’s birth sex, not their ‘gender identity’.
The Supreme Court Judgement has not been welcomed by everyone. Supporters of trans rights have claimed that trans people are no longer ‘safe’ and that their ‘right to exist’ is being denied.
I certainly don’t want anyone to feel ‘unsafe’ and there should be no justification whatsoever for abuse targeted against trans people or anyone else, but we must return to the truth.
If a man truly believes he is a woman, or a woman believes she is a man, they should be treated with compassion and receive psychological help.
But in biology, in fact and now in law, there is no third category of people called ‘trans’; human beings are either male or female. Many people may feel very strongly that they have been ‘born in the wrong body’ but this does not alter the truth of their biological sex, just as an anorexic believing she is fat does not alter the truth of her rapidly falling body weight.
Many people have been frightened or manipulated into repeating politically correct mantras such as ‘trans women are women’ or believing that it is ‘kind’ to allow transwomen to use women’s bathrooms and play womens sports.
But this isn’t kind, it’s dishonest, and just like when those living under Soviet rule were forced to repeat the lies of communism, it is destructive to society.
Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple said: “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small…
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity…
"One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
In a free society, adults can wear whatever they want. But in law, as in biology, we must be clear about a person’s true identity. A person’s sex matters enormously; we must stop pretending otherwise.
