UK Supreme Court Rules that Trans Women Legally Aren’t Women

There’s a sort of inside joke in the trans community of referring to the United Kingdom as “TERF Island,” partially for its tendency to pass anti-trans laws and the predominance of big-name transphobic celebrities like Joanne Rowling and Graham Linehan. Granted, the United States is hardly a trans-rights paradise these days, so maybe we shouldn’t speak, but recently it seems like the U.K. is living up to their nickname following a terrible ruling on Wednesday from the U.K. Supreme Court that trans women aren’t legally women.

According to Al-Jazeera, the case was based around a law passed in 2018 in the Scottish Parliament, the Holyrood’s Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018, that stated that half of all non-executive members of the boards of Scottish public bodies must be women. This opened a legal dispute about what constitutes a woman, despite the fact that the act itself defined transgender women as women.

A TERF group called For Women Scotland argued that the act didn’t have the right to redefine what a woman is, and that the act failed to follow the terms spelled out in the UK Equality Act of 2010. A Scottish court ruled in 2022 that “woman” isn’t defined by biological or birth sex, but For Women Scotland, which was reported to have received as much as 70,000 British pounds from Joanne Rowling, kept appealing it until the five judges of the U.K. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the existing UK Equality Act of 2010 defined women by biological sex, and thus that it is legal to prohibit trans women from certain single-sex spaces.

In a disgusting display of pure bigotry and avarice, Rowling tweeted a picture of herself on a yacht celebrating with a cigar with the text “I love it when a plan comes together. #SupremeCourt #WomensRights.” It’s sickening to see someone once hailed as an LGBTQ+ ally to turn such traitor that she’s celebrating the disenfranchising of an already discriminated-against group. Even for Rowling, this is a new low.

But sadly, too many news outlets are going along with Rowling’s rhetoric. Even as I turned to Al-Jazeera, a news organization that I’ve long thought of as one of the most reliable places to get original coverage on important international issues, I found that the article incorrectly framed the debate as being between “feminist groups” and “trans groups.” That’s an infuriating framing and it demonstrates a bigotry in its own right. Trans groups are not opposed to feminism. In fact, a group of people trying to exclude a particular class of women, namely trans women, from the rights given to other women is a better example of something that is opposed to feminism.

And if Al-Jazeera’s coverage is that insultingly inaccurate, then I don’t even have the emotional fortitude to read what Fox News or The New York Post had to say on the topic. The media definitely needs to learn how to talk about trans women, and the first thing they need to learn is that this isn’t about trans people versus feminism. This is about trans rights versus transphobic bigotry.

And to the trans people who are in distress right now, especially those in the U.K. who will be most affected by this horrendous decision, please remember that no matter how much money she has, Joanne Rowling cannot write us out of history any more than she can write a main character in one of her novels who isn’t white.

Photo courtesy of tupungato