Supreme court ruling

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/16/uk-supreme-court-rule-legal-definition-woman

How do we think this is going to pan out? My feeling reading the piece is that the court is going to side with GC women.....hope so but we will see.

I’ve spent the whole day reading this thread

i found this board a few years ago and I’ve learned how to articulate my feelings on single sex spaces etc so thank you all

and of course thank you FWS

such an important ruling

I can’t keep up with the multiple happy threads, but am hugely relieved by the outcome. I thought the judgment was clear and thorough. I particularly liked their emphasis on the importance of clarity of the law as being essential to maintain the fundamental constitutional principle of the Rule of Law. And I loved the judges’ reference to no-one being sexually oriented towards the possession of a certificate. Such a relief. Well done to those who had the determination and energy to fight this all the way.

At last, someone required it all to make sense, and when it didn't, said so.

I’m catching up on the six o’clock news on R4 - it’s incredible that this, usually dismissed as ‘culture wars’ and far too unimportant for proper news reporting, is the top news story, and to hear FWS and other supporters actually given the chance to speak. Glorious sunlight!

I see BBC Scotland news has Ellie Gommersall on. Only seen the trailer so far, but Gomersall seems to be saying the SC has overturned a 20-year-old understanding. This would be the same Ellie Gomersall who during the Gender Recognition Reform debate said that a GRC gave a trans person nothing except the right to get married and buried in their 'acquired gender'.

It’s only gradually dawning on me what this is going to mean. I know they were specifically judging on those with a GRC and on the EA, but it gives us absolute clarity on the legal situation that men legally remain men, whatever steps they take, and whatever they believe or claim.

Most UK stealth self-ID protocols have been based around Stonewall et al’s misrepresentations of the EA, so this represents the undoing of all that activity.

Those men who are currently telling the media they are simply going to carry on might find themselves in a position they aren’t expecting. They assume that women haven’t spotted them, or that women accept them as women, but the reality is that many of us don’t, but would have been afraid to speak up, because the law was unclear.

The law is no longer unclear and women are now more likely to speak up.

I was thinking about hospitals, which for me is probably the most likely time this would come up. I probably wouldn’t have spoken up before as I know what women who did speak up went through. Now I know that the law is on my side.

I am also delighted to understand that this clarification is about what the law has always been and not just about how it has to be from now on.

So we now have a clear judgment that states that Stonewall law has been wrongly applied throughout. The so-called “rights” that men claim they are losing were never rights at all.

I hope that all the obfuscation can now be put to bed and that, in the UK at least, transactivists can return to square one, stop trying to “identify into” groups where they don’t belong and try to work out how they can integrate into society based on who they actually are and what they really need to coexist without taking away women’s rights.

Just to add another hoorah and thank fucking god.

SOOOOO Fckng mad that women need a Supreme Court ruling to determine that they are women. Men don't need a court to agree their sex ... why do we????
Rights "granted" are not rights. They are "granted' or "allowed" by someone else. As such, they can just as easily be rescinded.
I refuse to be grateful for being allowed to be a woman.

Once again..we have facilities based on 'Sex', not Gender. Most places still retain single sex facilities...if they want to make any changes, that would be to add in an additional gender neutral facility....not to turn women's provisions mixed sex. Some places already provide this.

Just listening to this evening's News Agents and the sad music they've chosen to go under some of the quotes at the beginning is finishing me off.

It's funny, because on my work forum there were loads of blokes (male dominated industry) saying how terrible the ruling wás, how we're swinging to the right, pondering whether it was done to help get a trade deal with the US... and I can't say anything, because it'd still be professional suicide.

I can't say, "A lot of left wing women have concerns about male bodies in female spaces", or "There's actually been quite a few cases of supposed trans women sexually assaulting women in female spaces, but that's probably not even registered on your radar because it's not something that personally affects you", or "Why is transgenderism widely accepted, but trans racialism is taboo?", or "Sex is binary - the variations in chromosomes in intersex folk are classed as disorders, not a normal variation like hair colour", etc etc.

I fully believe genuine transgender folk should be treated with kindness and respect, with a greater provision for third/gender neutral spaces in addition to sex specific ones, but not blindly ignoring biological reality.

Its jawdropping isn't it?

The tragedy of women having legal rights and equality.

Sadface. Sadmusic.

Wtaf are they all on?

I was very pleased to hear the BBC Radio 4 earlier which in my view is often biased on these issues refer to the developing views on these topics or words to that effect ie at least some kind of acceptance that a woman might be a woman etc. They would not even have mentioned the topic a while back, The Times newspaper's early work on this topic has been very useful when no one else in the main media was prepared to cover it.

It’s incredible. All the posters on here that would try to dismiss and scoff.

Finally front and centre coverage.

Fucking hell, I'm fucking doomed. Not only do I have short hair, I'm also 5'11". I've never (knowingly!) been misgendered in a public loo. In fact, I don't recall ever being misgendered to my face (I am regularly by email at work as my shortened name is used, which confuses people, despite my longer version also being in my signature!).

Never to use a public loo again. 😩😭😩😭

Just listened to BBC Scotland's coverage and wondering if I either misunderstood the ruling or dreamt it! All very much "it doesn't change anything" including on Sandies' current ET.....

I wonder if legal professionals will also use the correct toilets (if defined as single sex) for their actual sex going forwards.

Same here!
Normally it’s Lewis Goodall that makes me want to tear my hair out, but today it was Jon Sopal saying “this ruling affects a tiny number of people”. Excuse me? It affects WOMEN, Jon. 51% of the population, you ignorant twat.

Very much ‘Maya is not entitled to…’ flavour

The claims that we are ‘swinging to the right’ misunderstand what the case was. It reviewed what the law intended in 2010 when the EA was written. It is clear as day that it was written to protect people according to their sex class and to protect people with trans identities. It’s difficult to see this as a swing to the right, and it was written by a Labour government.

People talking about ‘going backwards’ on trans rights……this reflects a misunderstanding of what rights had been provided for in law. Nothing has gone backwards or forwards for anyone in terms of rights. The rights that were established in law have been clarified.

Any ideas on what the 'we have always been pro single sex spaces' government are going to do with the GRA?
Those days of 'all women' are now done with

I was misgendered (mis sexed?) in Pret while buying a sandwich,as a) I have a low voice, b)I had a cough and c) the guy at the till hadn't looked up when he first spoke to me. He was mortified when he did. I wasn't upset but laughed and said 'no worries' to his apology. As I really wasn't bothered.

@PriOn1 I am also delighted to understand that this clarification is about what the law has always been and not just about how it has to be from now on.

I think this is particularly important. This has simply clarified how the EA was intended to operate. Trans people haven't lost any rights today - this judgement makes clear that they never had them in the first place.

Yes, Stonewall have done everyone a dis service (esp transpeople) by lying 'transwomen are women' and men who say they are women can access female spaces, with total disregard to the human rights to privacy and safety of the women there!

Apologies for a mammoth post. I have been around FWR (under a different name) pre Jenni Murray/Spartacus, and I feel v emotional posting here today.

I totally understand why a parent might go down the line David Tennant took. I didn’t, and my (young autistic adult) child cut off all contact with me.

I couldn’t honestly say that I saw my child as a girl, which is what my child wanted, because I think girl = young female human and I didn’t know how to ‘see’ girlhood in any other way, unless I redefined girlhood as a set of stereotypes. I’ve spent a lifetime asserting that the full range of gender expression should be available to everyone, while also believing that sex matters while we live under patriarchy.

I told my child my acceptance of them was unwavering, and that I wanted to understand what it meant for them to be a trans girl and how I could support them in exploring their identity, but that wasn’t what my child wanted/needed to hear. I needed to literally say ‘I see you as a girl, and there is no material difference between you and my other daughter’, and I couldn’t, because the words ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ still have work to do. Because we need language to describe the class oppressed on the basis of their sex, not their gender.

I tried to make myself believe what my child wanted me to believe, but I couldn’t. I was (and remain) curious about their experience, and why being seen as a girl/young woman was so critical to their sense of self, and how I could support them to explore ways of getting comfortable in the body they live in. I could go quite a long way, but I could not lie.

My ex couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just say what our child wanted to hear, whether I believed it or not.

I used to think (naively) that estrangement only happened to shit parents. I wasn’t shit. I was shit sometimes, and I was amazing occasionally, but I was good enough, most of the time. Estrangement is just constantly shit.

I worry so much about how my child will be treated, and how unsafe they will feel (because of the most vulnerable/most unsafe narrative that’s peddled rather than because they’re actually any less safe than they were yesterday). My LinkedIn feed is full of people in uproar on behalf of their trans family members, and I understand why. I want my child to be treated with kindness and dignity. Obviously.

BUT

I am a lesbian. I am a feminist. I have fought my whole life to dismantle sex-based oppression and gender-based stereotyping. I have worked with vulnerable women who needed single-sex spaces. I was written off as a crazy conspiracist by so many people (not on MN) when I started raising the alarm about the implications of redefining ‘woman’ as an identity rather than a sex class.

Because of my family situation, I’ve had nothing left in me for a public fight, but I’m so relieved by the judgement, while also feeling sick because my child will feel attacked and beleaguered.

I feel like a casualty, not a winner, but I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has fought so hard for this outcome. Thank you 🙏🏻