16 April, 2025
In a long awaited judgement, the UK Supreme Court has announced that it has ruled on the question of ‘What is a woman?’
To most people’s astonishment they decreed that a woman is a woman. Yes, they said that a woman is someone whose sex at birth was that of a biological female.
Women’s single sex spaces are now protected and theoretically not open to transgender people, even those with the appropriate certificates. It does not allow members of the trans community to be discriminated against in the matters of employment, etc, in exactly the same way that anti-discrimination laws currently apply to every other group, sector or those with protected characteristics.
Lord Hodge, sitting with Lords Reed and Lloyd-Jones alongside Ladies Rose and Simler, said the ‘central question’ is how the words woman and sex are defined in the 2010 legislation.
He continued: “The terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”
The Supreme Court has ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, in a decision which could have far-reaching implications for who can access single-sex services and spaces.
It came about after the Scottish government included transgender women in quotas to ensure gender balance on public sector boards. Campaign group For Women Scotland argued that sex-based protections should only apply to people born female.
The judges were tasked with deciding on the correct interpretation of “sex” and “woman” in the main piece of legislation setting out sex-based legal protections.
Specifically, they ruled that the definition of sex as used in the Equality Act 2010 is “binary” and decided by biology – a person who was not born as a biological female cannot obtain the legal protections the Act affords to women by changing their gender with a Gender Recognition Certificate.
It’s important to note that the act still provides transgender people with protections against discrimination, and that the judges said it was not their place to weigh in on those definitions in the wider public debate.
Elsewhere in the 88-page ruling, Lord Hodge, Lady Rose and Lady Simler write: “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.”
And they say: “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.
“These are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation.”
The language is strikingly at odds with the campaigning cry of trans rights activists: “Trans women are women.”
That was seized on by the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who said: “Saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact, and isn’t true in law either.”
There was little sign of groups taking the opposite view outside the hearing, apart from a solitary protester who shouted: “Trans rights are human rights.”
Source: BBC 16 April 2025.
In a blow to the trans movement, a very quickly organised, unscientific poll summed up the public mood when 98 per cent of respondents agreed with the decision.
This judgement also prevents the ludicrous situation where a batter in a women’s cricket team could be observed wearing a protective box!
This is going to cause problems for Sir Keir Starmer as he has always avoided giving an answer when asked in interviews, “What is a woman?”
It is apparent that the political winds are beginning to blow in a different direction as the citizens are tiring of the wokeness that has been infecting the UK.
The next target will be the police, who have been guilty of over enthusiasm in applying the law relating to hate crimes and alleged non-crime hate incidents on social media. A mother was arrested this week under suspicion of theft when she confiscated her two daughters’ iPads so that they would concentrate on their homework.
A history teacher has said she was arrested and blocked from seeing her daughters after she confiscated their iPads.
Vanessa Brown, 50, described her “unspeakable devastation and trauma” after spending seven-and-a-half hours in a cell on 26 March after a claim that she had stolen two iPads.
She was later released with bail conditions that barred her from speaking to anyone connected to the investigation – including her children – until the case was dropped.
Brown told LBC she had taken the iPads to encourage her daughters to focus on their schoolwork. Surrey police tracked the devices to Brown’s mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey, and later accepted the devices belonged to her children and she was “entitled” to confiscate them.
“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Brown said.
“At no point did [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her [own] iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.”
Source: the Guardian 11 April 2025.
In the immortal words of Katie Hopkins: only in Batshit-Bonkers Britain could this happen.
