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A Transgender Pride March in London in 2023
Some worry it will affect trans rights in the U.S. and other countries.
U.S. activists are joining their counterparts in the United Kingdom in denouncing the U.K. Supreme Court’s ruling that transgender women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
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In an 88-page decision announced Wednesday, the court’s five judges said the “concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.” The case was brought by an anti-trans group in Scotland, which is part of the U.K. but has a semi-autonomous government. The group lost its case in Scotland, but Wednesday’s decision overrules the Scottish court’s decision.
Judge Patrick Hodge said trans people are still protected from discrimination, but the U.K. government did not say how it would secure trans rights in like of the ruling.
“This decision is a serious blow to the ongoing struggle for the human rights of trans people and for gender equality around the world,” said a statement from Imara Jones, a Black trans woman who is CEO of TransLash Media.
“In the United States, it provides a legal road map for those who wish to block legal equality for trans people,” she said. It “will likely boost American efforts to narrow legal concepts of gender — both legally and through regulations” and will undoubtedly be cited in U.S. court cases and state legislatures and “ultimately before the Supreme Court, perhaps even as early as the upcoming Skrmetti ruling,” Jones continued. That case, L.W. v. Skrmetti, challenges Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for trans minors.
She said it also “sets back gender equality for more than 2.7 billion people around the world” because the U.K. Supreme Court is “either the final legal arbiter or critical court of reference for the 56 nations of the Commonwealth of Nations,” a voluntary association of countries, originally with historical ties to the British Empire but now open to any country. “This is especially true for the Global South in Africa, Latin America, and Asia,” Jones said.
However, Laurel Powell, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, pointed out that “there are real differences between the United States and United Kingdom’s legal system and decisions. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County — and lower courts have repeatedly affirmed — that our federal sex discrimination laws extend to transgender people. In addition, the U.K. court affirmed in its ruling that transgender people are still protected under many of the U.K.’s nondiscrimination laws.”
She added, “My heart goes out to our trans siblings in the United Kingdom on this difficult day. Today’s ruling does not change the fact that trans women are women, that trans men are men, and that they deserve to be recognized and protected for who they are. That was true yesterday, and it will be true tomorrow.”
Jones noted that the U.K. ruling “also shows the incredible effectiveness of U.S. groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, in shaping the debate in the United Kingdom through pseudoscience and narrative disinformation. This effort has allowed them to find common cause with U.K. feminists, and even queer activists, to weaken the idea of human equality and to gain the legitimacy required in the public imagination to make today’s ruling be widely accepted. And it strengthens their affiliation with far-right political groups and parties such as Reform UK.”
“The fact that these groups are able to export their anti-trans ideas abroad, gain traction outside the United States in substantiating them, and then reimport them with the sheen of foreign validation only adds fuel to the fire to deny trans equality in the United States,” she continued. “Today’s ruling will reverberate for years, if not decades, to come.”
