by Susan Pickard, The Critic
The Supreme Court judgment on sex and the Equality Act is still being opposed and undermined
Following the verdict of the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland case live on the news back in April 2025, I remember jumping up and screaming with joy and relief. In the Edinburgh courthouse itself, women who had a moment before been waiting nervously, hands over their mouths, whooped “yes!” and punched the air.
The judgment confirmed that the terms “man”, “woman”, and “sex” within the 2010 Equality Act refer strictly to biological sex (the sex registered at birth) rather than “certificated sex”, that is, sex according to gender recognition certificates (GRC). It also gave service providers, employers, businesses and public bodies a clear statutory grounding to restrict access to single-sex spaces based on birth sex, without needing to make complex case-by-case exceptions for GRC holders. The advice that Stonewall had given organisations like my own for the past fifteen years was, as many of us had suspected, unlawful. It was undoubtedly a victory for gender critical feminists: according to the ruling, trans women were not “women”. From now on, whilst upholding trans rights under the 2010 Act, this could not be done at the expense of women’s sex-based rights.
For years, my own University had accepted uncritically and wholesale the claims of gender activists about the precedence of “gender identity” over “sex”. This was embedded in University policies, EDI frameworks, and the accolade of being a “Stonewall Diversity Champion”. The latter was particularly important in that it provided guidance for the University that rested on certain key ideological beliefs. These include the idea that everyone has an internal gender identity, that language in the UK Equality Act 2010 that defines sex strictly as “male” and “female” is outdated, and that there should be a non-formal/non-medical acceptance of trans identity beyond the strict GRC definition. Among the recommendations given to institutions such as my own was the encouragement to allow trans and “non-binary” individuals to use the single-sex facilities that conform to their gender identity.
Read also: Trans activists are realising gender law is not on their side by Josephine Bartosch, UnHerd