Since emigrating from the US 20 years ago, I have watched the UK absorb only the worst ideas from my country of origin. The Brits could encourage a better snow removal culture, make ice in soft drinks standard, or adopt robust funding for women’s sports at the collegiate level. Instead, they choose to import our absolute bullshit, such as manipulation of the courts by unscrupulous billionaires who want to shit on vulnerable minority groups. Here’s today’s manifestation of this horseshit: a specious, weaselly and unanimous decision by the UK’s Supreme Court ruling that the only valid “women” are “biological women,” and that trans women with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) are . . . some other thing.
This court case was brought by a group called For Women Scotland, which is supported by Harry Potter creator (and notorious transphobe) J.K. Rowling. She is crowing over on X about all the HR manuals that will have to be “pulped” in the wake of this decision. Suffice it to say: fuck her and the broom she rode in on, and fuck the UK Supreme Court.
But what does this mean for trans women in the UK? Legal analysis that isn’t mealy-mouthed bothsiderism is difficult to come by, but one thing is clear: no actual transgender people or organisations were consulted in the court case. Just “gender-critical” organisations.
Jolyon Maugham leads the Good Law Project, which is pro-trans. He posted a thread that’s worth clicking through to read the whole of, but this stood out to me:
The Supreme Court accepted the submissions of the GC orgs before it that bringing trans people with a GRC within the definition of man or women would create absurdities. But it refused to hear from anyone pointing out the absurdities of excluding them – that’s why trans representation matters.
— Jolyon Maugham (@jolyonmaugham.bsky.social) April 16, 2025 at 10:29 AM
Writing for QueerAF, journalist Jess O’Thomson pulls out some of the more worrying impacts of this decision. First, there’s the fact that transgender people with GRCs can now be excluded from single-sex spaces, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, clubs, and prisons. Transgender women also cannot make equal pay claims in the workplace, in spite of the fact that they are also subject to pay gaps like their cisgender counterparts—in 2023, US-based news site The 19th reported that trans women earn 60 cents for every dollar earned by the average American worker. Transgender men can, but on the basis of their being “biological women” rather than their being trans.
The ruling also uses very biased language when discussing the issues. From O’Thomson:
At one point, the judgment explicitly refers to a trans woman as ‘a man who identifies as a woman’.
In its analysis of the Equality Act 2010, the Court placed great emphasis on certain provisions, claiming that a definition of sex which included trans people holding a gender recognition certificate would be inconsistent. One element the Court relied on to make this argument was that of pregnancy. The Equality Act 2010 refers frequently to pregnant women, but because trans women cannot get pregnant, but some trans men can, by referring to ‘women’, it says Parliament must have intended ‘woman’ to mean ‘biological female’, as only ‘biological females’ can become pregnant.
The Court also emphasises the idea that to include trans women within women as a class would render it a “heterogenous” grouping, rather than the “distinct” group of biological women and girls with “their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group”.
In a stark illustration of how transgender rights affect all of us, the ruling also defines what a lesbian is. Again, from O’Thomson:
