Trans Women Are Not Women: UK Supreme Court

The UK's top court on Wednesday ruled that the legal definition of 'woman' excludes transgender, in a landmark judgement which is set to define how equality laws are applied in the country. 

The British Supreme Court ruled that the definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 of the UK constitution refers to "a biological woman and biological sex." However, the court added that transgender people still have legal protection from discrimination.

In an 88-page ruling, the judges ruled, "The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man. Persons who share that protected characteristic for the purposes of the group-based rights and protections are persons of the same sex and provisions that refer to protection for women necessarily exclude men."

"Although the word 'biological' does not appear in this definition, the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman," they said.

The court made the judgement while deciding on a petition whether the trans women with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) are protected from discrimination as a woman under the nation’s Equality Act 2010. The petitioners in Scotland had argued that the rights protecting trans woman should only safeguard cisgender women. 

However, the Scottish government had maintained that trans woman with a GRC, which offers legal recognition of someone’s female sex, is legally a woman and should therefore be afforded the same legal protections.

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