UK Supreme Court says legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t
Posted by sjw_7
UK Supreme Court says legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t
Posted by sjw_7
27 Comments
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When are they ruling on the legal definition of a man?
Or is it just male to female transgender people this is targeting?
The UK Supreme Court have just been permabanned by Reddit.
RIP the supreme courts Reddit account. All that karma down the drain
So genuinely don’t understand how this works with the whole Human Rights commitments, as the whole point of the GRA 2004 was:
> The European Court of Human Rights ruled on 11 July 2002, in Goodwin & I v United Kingdom [2002] 2 FCR 577, that a trans person’s inability to change the sex on their birth certificate was a breach of their rights under Article 8 and Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Following this judgment, the UK Government had to introduce new legislation to comply.
So what’s the actual point now of a getting a GRC and how is someone even meant to tell that someone is trans or not, as they mentioned in the judgement asking for proof is a violation of Privacy.
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Edit:
Just to add, does this not basically open a court case could go to the European Court of Human Rights and certify based on this ruling that the requirements of the Goodwin ruling have not been met and compel the UK government to add/amend the law?
the ruling’s still being read as I type, but it looks like this is far from the TERF victory the headline invokes
> Gender certificates make Equality Act read in ‘incoherent way’ published at 10:15
> Lord Hodge says the predecessors to the Equality Act used definitions of biological sex, and gender reassignment was added as a separate protected characteristic.
> He tells the court that, after “painstaking analysis”, including people with a Gender Reassignment Certificate in the sex group would make Equality Act read in an “incoherent way”.
> He says that issues relating to pregnancy and maternity can only be interpreted as referring to biological sex, while other parts of the Equality Act refers to “certificated sex” as well.
Editing This as the ruling’s being updated on the live reporting page:
> Lord Hodge outlined nine reasons why the judges ruled as they did.
> The first is that the Equalities Act (EA) provides group-based protections against discrimination on the grounds of sex and gender reassignment.
> The second point was that the EA must be implemented in a “clear and consistent” way.
> The third point was that interpreting sex as ‘certificated sex’ would create “heterogenous groupings” by cutting across definitions of man and woman in the EA in an “incoherent” way.
**waiting on the remaining six reasons**
Edit: Another three
> Lord Hodge continued his nine points by saying the fourth point is that “as a matter of ordinary language” cases relating to sex discrimination can “only be interpreted” as referring to biological women.
> The fifth point stated that the court rejected the suggestion that words like women can be “variable”. If references to pregnancy were “only” for biological women but other references in the legislation were for “certificated sex” then the “coherence” of the legislation would be undermined.
> The sixth point states that the Scottish government’s interpretation of the Act would “create two sub-groups” with trans people possessing a gender recognition certificate having more rights than those who did not. There would be “no obvious means” of distinguishing between sub-groups, as details on who had a certificate would be private, he said.
(That sixth point in particular seems like a good point)
**things come in threes on the BBC**
Edit: apparently not because the last three still aren’t up
This bit feels downright negative
> The judgement reads: “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.”
And /u/DukePPUk has a fantastic write-up below with more quotes from the ruling which…yeah. My initial reaction was cautiously optimistic that the EA was simply needing updating, but now it feels much more like we’re going backwards.
If anyone gives this 2 seconds of thought they will realize it makes sense. Because laws were written with clear expectation of that being the case.
This is not a judgement for it being right or wrong, but if you want to do something about it you can’t just change the legal definition of a woman. You need to go back to every law that mentions “woman” and re-write it to fit our modern standards and knowledge.
“the unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex. But we counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not”
The Supreme Court’s statement in full.
>”The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
>Lord Hodge, Supreme Court
Well, this certainly makes the Equality Act 2010 interesting reading.
>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.**
So the Supreme Court has just ruled that under the Equality Act 2010, anybody who is undergoing or has undergone gender reassignment treatment has changed their biological sex.
It basically reaffirmed the status quo: they are defining woman biologically but also clarified certain rights applying to biological sex also apply to gender changes. It’s hardly an unequivocal win for TERFs. It basically just means there will have to be further legislation to clarify any changes in the future. The law, as it reads now, offers unique protections to cis people and trans people.
“This shouldn’t be seen as a triumph” says the judge
Microseconds later…
Honestly the reaction kind of makes me sick. Trans people are still protected from discrimination in the ruling so it’s not all doom, just the cheering is a little gauche in context or everything.
I just felt a door sliding.
Quoting the BBC commentary
The Supreme Court ruling, delivered by Lord Hodge, concluded that the meaning of the terms “sex”, “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to “biological sex”.
It said that any other interpretation would make the Act “incoherent and impracticable”.
The summary read: “Therefore, a person with a Gender Reassignment Certificate in the female gender does not come within the definition of a ‘woman’ under the Equality Act 2010 and the statutory guidance issued by the Scottish ministers is incorrect.”
I mean this is really hard to argue against. What else could the courts have done?
Does this now mean fully transitioned trans men can go into women only spaces then?
The court let three TERF groups argue their case, but didn’t let one trans group speak
I don’t think any amount of the judge saying ‘By the way this doesn’t mean you can discriminate’ is going to make up for how much of a disgrace this ruling is
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Huh, didn’t expect it to go that way.
Does create a weird situation though. We have a whole legal process for legally changing your legally recognised gender on everything including government ID,
But now they’ve just ruled that all that doesn’t actually matter when it comes to discrimination under the equality act.
What’s the point in being able to legally change it if it’s not going to be legally recognised?
I predict that this will not prevent one single argument.
This will definitely hurt women, like that female boxer at the olympics, any woman not deemed feminine enough will be accused of being trans
We have an incredible legal system in the UK. Sex and gender is binary, following the science, but the rights all individuals (not just some) are protected, and all people may live their lives in a way they choose as long as it doesn’t harm others
Can’t say fairer than that
By the backdoor this seems to neutralise a Gender Recognition Certificate then?
Essentially also prohibiting transitioning at all? If the requirement to qualify to transition is that someone must live as the other gender and use services for that gender *before* being allowed to access surgery; while it is simultaneously the case that services are limited to natal sex.
– Judges say the “concept of sex is binary” while cautioning that the landmark ruling should not be seen as victory of one side over another.
That sentence just doesn’t make sense, no matter where you fall on this debate and honestly I feel little comments like this from the court completely undermine every single point they’ve made previously about the need for clarity in the debate.
End of the day, they’ve clearly landed on one side of the debate and making statements saying they’ve legally annihilated peoples identity and then following it up by saying this isn’t a victory for either side is just confusing.
Edit. Just read some more and the entire ruling is absolutely covered in this exact same double speak. Purely from a legal standpoint, they’ve gone out of their way to make this as confusing as possible for the average person.
The ultimate result of this will mainly be more cisgendered women being harassed for not looking feminine enough, as always.
But how is biological woman defined? What does this mean for intersex people?
*”Please have your genitals ready for inspection by the toilet authorisation team, thank you!”*
This is, to be blunt, the judiciary defying Parliament.
The Gender Recognition Act is clearly written. Supreme Court decided it doesn’t apply.
The Equality Act is more muddled, but the idea it actually reduced rights for trans people (by, in effect, revoking Croft v Royal Mail) is very obviously wrong.
The ECtHR, whose jurisprudence is written into UK law via the Human Rights Act, is also clear that trans people deserve to be treated as their lived gender.
The Supreme Court has disregarded that.
This is the Supreme Court revoking trans civil liberties over the express laws passed by parliament.
Worse, this judgement is functionally unworkable. They excluded trans people from intervening, welcomed hate groups, and as a result they’ve reached the following nonesense ideas.
– A lesbian who dates a trans woman is now not a lesbian. Yeah…what?
– A trans woman can be excluded from breast cancer services because men don’t need them – never mind that trans women have just as much need of these services as cis women because risk follows volume of breast tissue not birth certificate
This judgement starts and ends with ‘what would the law have to be for us to treat trans women as men and trans men as women, and takes a tortured, nonsensical route to get there.
The average level of comprehension is similar to an 11 year old. That is very evident in this thread
> Judge Lord Hodge said the decision was not “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another”.
However you feel about this case one way or another it cannot be denied that this ruling will be directly used to harass and denigrate trans people for decades to come (legitimately or not, but this will be brought up going forward in basically every single trans story or comment).
This attempt in the summary to suggest this won’t be the case is frankly disgusting. I believe the people on this panel know full well this judgement is going to have a direct, negative effect on a minority group. I think this comment being included in the summary points to shame and guilt the panel feel about the judgement knowing how it will be used by some parties going forward.