The supreme court knows what a woman is

The landmark decision has been announced; reality has prevailed.

If the law is an ass, the culture war is a bigger one. How else can one explain the phenomenon of judges at the UK supreme court gathering to determine the definition of a ‘woman’? This landmark case was heard in November, and today the verdict has been reached: ‘The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex’.

So there we have it. We now have confirmation that a person’s sex does not change under the Equality Act simply because he or she holds a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). It is curious to think that this decision could have gone either way. When the Equality Act was penned fifteen years ago, not a single legal mind in the land would have entertained the notion that its references to ‘sex’ and ‘women’ would one day cause confusion. Surely these most unambiguous of terms could not have been open to challenge?

The casual observer might have assumed that the judiciary has gone mad, but there are good reasons why this case was raised. It has come about because of the Scottish government’s view – enshrined in its guidance on the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 – that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to ‘gender identity’ rather than, you know, an individual’s potential to produce large or small gametes. From the SNP’s perspective, anyone could be a woman so long as they hold a GRC. But this legal fiction – created in the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 – has created problems, not least that some of those so certificated now seem to believe that this should grant them access to women-only spaces.

The court’s decision could never have altered reality, of course. Human beings cannot change sex, no matter what the law says. The legal fiction of ‘gender’ has emboldened various campaign groups over the years to rewrite the law inside their own heads, which is why Stonewall was found to have been representing the law as it ‘would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is’. As a result of this activist meddling, many organisations and even schools have been operating under the assumption that anyone who claims to be female should have access to women’s toilets and changing areas, but this has never been the case. Nor has it ever been true that self-identification exists in law, in spite of claims to the contrary by genderists.

For Women Scotland was able to make this challenge because the Scottish government has a duty to comply with the Equality Act in its guidance and legislation. By arguing that a GRC could make a man a woman for the purposes of the 2018 Act, they were effectively prohibiting women from assembling without men. This is a scenario that has already been playing out in Australia, where lesbians are no longer permitted to hold female-only events, because to exclude any man who believes himself to be a woman would be illegal discrimination. In the recent case of Sall Grover, we even had a judge ruling that ‘sex is changeable’. Reader: it isn’t.

For those in any doubt at the absurdity of this debate, here is an excerpt from the submission to the supreme court by Scottish Lesbians, The Lesbian Project and LGB Alliance:

‘It barely needs stating that lesbians are females who are sexually orientated to the bodies of other females. Again, it barely needs stating that there are anatomical differences between males and females. The defining characteristic of a lesbian is that she is not sexually attracted to male bodies, including penises, testicles, male body mass and shape. Nor is she sexually attracted to certificates.’

Anyone seriously attempting to argue against this is irretrievably detached from reality.

The task of the supreme court was interpretative, and their interpretations of the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act should settle many of the more frustrating debates of our times. Ultimately, that we have reached this point at all tells us all we need to know about the careening lunacy of the culture wars. Such has been the power of activists that they have been able to reduce the judiciary to a laughing stock. Their war on women has also been a war on language and reality, and the fact that even the highest judges in the land have been dragooned into the fray is some indication of the extent of their power.

It is reassuring that the supreme court eventually settled on the side of reality, but this war will doubtless continue to rage. Activists have made clear that they consider the law an enemy, and this ruling will not change that. In this most deranging of times, it is worth reiterating the basic facts. No human being has ever changed sex. Men cannot become women and women cannot become men. Trans women are, by definition, male. Trans men are, by definition, female. There is no such thing as a ‘trans child’. ‘Non-binary’ is a fashionable form of self-classification, not an inherent characteristic worthy of protection in law. These are facts that will not bend according to the whims of those who wish to run roughshod over the rights of women and gay people.

Men who wave their GRCs around like magic wands and believe that it transforms them into lesbians are deluded. Thank goodness the judges understood this incontestable truth.

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