UK High Court Rules On Whether Men Pretending To Be Women Are Real Women

The Supreme Court in Britain ruled Wednesday that men identifying as trans women are not legally regarded as women under the nation’s equality legislation.

The judgment comes after a long legal battle over whether men identifying as trans women can be considered female under the nation’s Equality Act 2010, which seeks to prohibit discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and other protected attributes. The ruling was greatly awaited due to its potential to significantly impact the application of laws concerning single-sex spaces, maternity policies and the categorization of rights for transgender-identifying people in Britain.

“The unanimous decision of this court is that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex,” the deputy president of the court Lord Hodge said, according to the New York Times.

“Trans people are protected from discrimination on the ground of gender reassignment,” the press summary of the ruling reads. “They are also able to invoke the provisions on direct discrimination and harassment, and indirect discrimination on the basis of sex. In the light of case law interpreting the relevant provisions, a trans woman can claim sex discrimination because she is perceived to be a woman.”

“Saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact and now isn’t true in law, either,” Member of Parliament Kemi Badenoch wrote on X on Wednesday. “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.” (RELATED: Teacher Fired For Not Using Student’s Trans Pronouns Wins Settlement)

A feminist group called For Women Scotland Ltd brought the appeal related to Scotland’s Gender Representation on Public Boards Act of 2018, which mandated that half of a public board’s non-executive members had to be women. The Scottish parliament later clarified in 2022 that the definition of “woman” was the same as the Equality Act 2010 — but also included biological males who had “a full gender recognition certificate” declaring their “acquired gender is female.”

For Women Scotland argued the clarified guidance was in error, and the UK high court agreed.

In the UK, one can apply to change their gender legally and receive a recognized Gender Recognition Certificate, (GRC) bestowed upon them by the Gender Recognition Panel government office.

“Sex as used in this provision must mean biological sex notwithstanding that there is no reference to biological sex in this provision,” the Wednesday ruling reads. The ruling does not declare that anyone with a GRC must now be considered as their biological sex.

“The issue here is only whether the appointment of a trans woman who has a GRC counts as the appointment of a woman and so counts towards achieving the goal set in the gender representation objective, namely that the board has 50% of non-executive members who are women. In our judgment it does not,” the court wrote.

The court’s judgement added that there may be Scottish boards where it is “important for trans people of either or both genders to be represented in order to ensure that their perspective is brought to bear in the board’s deliberations.”

The British embassy did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect more information from the UK Supreme Court’s judgement.