Men who claim to be “transgender” should not be legally defined as women, the UK’s Supreme Court has ruled.
In a landmark ruling on whether sex-based protections should only apply to natural-born women, top judge Lord Hodge said that the terms “woman” and “sex” in existing equality legislation refer to biological sex, not self-defined gender identity.
He told the court:
The unanimous decision of this court is that the definition of the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
However, the judge added:
But we counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not. As I will explain later in this handout speech, the Equality Act 2010 gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in their acquired gender.
The ruling will likely have widespread political implications for Britain.
