Victory for Women

The UK Supreme Court's Historic Ruling on 'What is a Woman?'

It is hard to overestimate the importance of today’s UK unanimous Supreme Court ruling that “the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to a BIOLOGICAL WOMAN and BIOLOGICAL SEX.”

It is a victory not just for women but also for common sense in a civil society. This verdict is far more than a matter of semantics. It relies on science and biology and affects everything from the accuracy of statistics and research on women’s health to protecting single-sex facilities, including hospital wards, public bathrooms, prisons, and women’s sports. Or, as author and activist J.K. Rowling put it on X, the ruling protects “female prisoners locked up with male rapists, ill women requiring intimate care, girls forced to share changing rooms with males, sportswomen cheated out of their life's goal, [and] lesbians under attack for being same sex attracted.”

“It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them,” wrote Rowling, “to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls…”

The court’s 5-0 verdict involved the interpretation of a 2010 law and whether a man who identifies as a woman should be considered a woman for equality purposes under the legislation. A 2018 law passed by the Scottish Parliament required that all boards of public bodies in Scotland should be at least 50% female. That law was broadly written to include any man who identified as a woman and obtained a so-called “gender recognition certificate.”

A women's rights group, For Women Scotland (FWS), challenged it. FWS argued that the redefinition of woman exceeded parliament's powers. Other rights groups, including

Scottish Lesbians

and LGB Alliance, intervened in support of For Women Scotland. Women’s rights advocates, led by J.K. Rowling, donated to fund the litigation.

"Not tying the definition of sex to its ordinary meaning means that public boards could conceivably comprise of 50% men, and 50% men with certificates, yet still lawfully meet the targets for female representation," said Trina Budge, the FWS director.

Aidan O'Neill, an FWS attorney, told the Supreme Court judges — two women and three men — that under the Equality Act sex should refer to biological sex as the word is used and understood “in ordinary, everyday language. . . . Our position is your sex, whether you are a man or a woman or a girl or a boy is determined from conception in utero, even before one's birth, by one's body. It is an expression of one's bodily reality. It is an immutable biological state.”

Amnesty International argued in favor of the Scottish legislation, contending that excluding transgender people from sex discrimination protections conflicted with human rights laws. The court, however, addressed that concern in its ruling. It added that its verdict “does not remove protection from trans people.”

We are both looking forward to the day when the U.S. Supreme Court addresses this issue in a challenge to several state laws that have codified that men can simply identify as women to gain access to female-only spaces and women’s rights protections. Today’s UK Supreme Court victory should serve as the template for other courts going forward.