The United Kingdom’s highest court on Wednesday announced that transgender women do not fit the legal definition of “woman” that’s laid out in a major nondiscrimination law.
Judges unanimously agreed that the term “woman” in the Equality Act of 2010 refers to biological women and that the term “sex” refers to biological sex.
The U.K. Supreme Court’s ruling is a significant development in the country’s ongoing battle over LGBTQ+ rights, although its immediate impacts are not yet clear.
Even after the decision, transgender women remain protected by a different part of the Equality Act, according to The New York Times.
And many sex-segregated spaces in the U.K., like domestic violence shelters, already have policies based on biological sex.
Case background
The new ruling resolves a conflict that emerged in 2018 after the Scottish Parliament passed a law aiming to increase the presence of women on government agency boards.
“As part of that legislation, the government said that trans women could count toward the target,” per The New York Times.
An organization called For Women Scotland sued to force changes to that guidance, arguing that transgender women should not count as women.
As a result, the Scottish government updated its policy, although not to the extent that For Women Scotland wanted it to.
Officials said that transgender women count as women if they have a “gender recognition certificate” from the government.
“Gender recognition certificates are legal documents granted by the British government to people meeting various requirements, which include having lived in their acquired gender for two years and intending to do so for the rest of their life, and being diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” The New York Times reported.
For Women Scotland kept fighting for additional changes, and its case made it all the way to the U.K. Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor on Wednesday.
Reactions to U.K. ruling
The U.K. Supreme Court’s ruling sparked mixed reaction and debate over how significant it will turn out to be.
Supporters of the decision said it will protect biological women by limiting access to single-sex spaces, while opponents emphasized that the Equality Act’s ban on discrimination against people who have had gender reassignment surgery remains in place.
“In some ways, it’s quite a specific judgment turning on a particular point of statutory interpretation,” Colm O’Cinneide, a professor of constitutional and human rights law at University College London, told The Washington Post, emphasizing the narrowness of the decision.
The British government said in a statement that the ruling will change little about day-to-day life in the U.K.
“This ruling brings clarity and confidence, for women and service providers such as hospitals, refuges, and sports clubs. ... Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government,” the statement said, according to the Post.
Similarly, the deputy president of the U.K. Supreme Court downplayed the significance of the decision as he unveiled it on Wednesday.
“We counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not,” he said, per The New York Times.
U.S. lawsuits on transgender issues
The U.K. Supreme Court ruling comes as U.S. courts continue to wrestle with issues related to medical treatments for transgender people and transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports.
The Trump administration on Wednesday announced that it will sue Maine over its refusal to ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports. The administration previously said it would cut off the state’s access to certain types of federal funding if it didn’t follow new guidance on gender and sports, according to ESPN.
The U.S. Supreme Court, meanwhile, is currently preparing its ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which centers on Tennessee’s effort to restrict access to gender-related medical treatments. The court’s ruling, which could come as soon as Thursday, will likely lead to nationwide policy changes, as the Deseret News previously reported.
The U.K. ruling also calls to mind a similar U.S. Supreme Court case from 2020, which asked whether the Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination in the workplace covers sexual identity- and gender identity-based discrimination.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with gay and transgender workers, embracing a broad definition of sex discrimination.
“Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in the majority opinion.
U.S. Supreme Court versus U.K. Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court and U.K. Supreme Court both fill essentially the same role as the highest court in their respective legal systems, but the U.S. Supreme Court has a higher domestic profile, according to the Law Society of Scotland.
One reason for that difference is that while almost all major legal battles in the U.S. end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.K. Supreme Court must sometimes defer to the Court of Justice of the European Union or to Parliament.
“In the absence of a written constitution setting out clear constraints on the role of the UK Parliament, (the UK Supreme Court’s) constitutional role is limited in comparison to its American counterpart,” the Law Society of Scotland reports.