The highest court in the land was set the task of determining: what is a woman? Today it gave its answer: sex in the Equality Act 2010 is biological and immutable and cannot be altered by a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The Supreme Court should be commended for securing women’s sex-based rights – rights to which they have should always have been entitled as a matter of law.
It will come as a surprise to many that a question with such an apparently obvious answer had to be settled in the Supreme Court. But such is the influence of gender ideology on policy that women’s legal rights have often been trampled underfoot.
This legal dispute dates back to 2018, when Scottish ministers issued statutory guidance which claimed a person whose ‘acquired gender is female’ could be understood as a woman. After the campaiging organisation For Women Scotland challenged this judgment, and after their case was rejected by the Inner and Outer Courts of Session, it reached the Supreme Court.
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