UK Supreme Court: Trans Women Are Men

TERF Island lives up to its nickname

The Metro “is given out for free on buses and trains across the country,” Hazel Appleyard explains in a thread on X. “Everyone who travels on public transport will be seeing this headline today.”

For the last 24 hours, the biggest news in Britain has been their Supreme Court deciding in a nuanced, but clear ruling that men are not women, even if they call themselves ‘trans women.’ Today, the whole island has gotten the news: ‘trans women’ are not women. They are men.

“UK’s top court says definition of a woman is based on biological sex and excludes transgender people,” reads the Associated Press headline. Despite some problematic wording straight from the AP Style Manual, which was captured by the trans lobby years ago, it is a fairly balanced and factual article. That’s good, because most American news outlets will simply republish or crib their article.

Five judges ruled that the U.K. Equality Act means trans women can be excluded from some groups and single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, homeless shelters, swimming areas and medical or counseling services provided only to women.

The court said the ruling did not remove rights for trans people still protected from discrimination under U.K. law. But it said certain protections should apply only to biological females and not transgender women.

Like the court, most Britons — and most Americans — are fine with laws that protect the rights of people to have a job, find housing, and access public services. What brought this case on, however, was a 2018 Scottish law which required half the board members of all public bodies to be women, defined as both women and trans women (men). The court has ruled that this was sex discrimination.

“Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ... and, thus, the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way,” Justice Patrick Hodge said in summarizing the case. “It would create heterogeneous groupings.”

While the women who challenged the Scottish government “uncorked a bottle of champagne outside the court and sang, ‘Women’s rights are human rights,’” a trans “campaign group” was “shocked and disappointed.” Maggie Chapman, a Green Party MP in the Scottish Parliament, was worried for “some of the most marginalized people in our society.”

“Trans people have been cynically targeted and demonized by politicians and large parts of the media for far too long,” she said. “This has contributed to attacks on longstanding rights and attempts to erase their existence altogether.”

Of course, by “longstanding rights,” Chapman is referring to the phenomenon of ‘Stonewall law,’ in which the former LGB organization-turned-trans lobby extorts businesses and government entities to pay them for terrible legal advice. Following their very bad advice has led to very bad decisions that have already cost millions of pounds in settlements and judgments.

The most famous such litigant, Maya Forstater, declared on X this morning that “‘Transwomen are men’ is not only biologically true, and worthy of respect in a democratic society, it is the law.”

She appeared on Sky News last night to declare that “somebody who’s a man, that wishes he was a woman, is not a woman. And I’m sorry if he feels excluded, but we need to have clear rules in order to protect the people those services are intended for.”

Forstater acknowledged that “people who identify as trans” would find the decision “disappointing, because for the last fifteen years, they’ve been told by organizations which misunderstood the law that they have the right to access spaces where other people depend on them for privacy, for safety, and for fairness in terms of sport.”

For their part, Stonewall called the decision “incredibly worrying for the trans community.” To be clear, when Stonewall say the words “trans community,” they refer to their line of business in extorting companies and agencies to pay them money for terrible legal advice that leads to massive judgments and settlements in employment tribunals.

If criticism of gender ideology is a ‘right wing’ phenomenon — which it is not — then the ‘right wing’ has been right all along about this, and ‘the left’ will just have to learn to live with that, or else pay through the nose, forever. The Labour Party has sensibly declared the decision “brings clarity and confidence” and vowed to protect single sex spaces.

Reporting for The New York Times from London, Michael Shear writes that the ruling is part of a “legal assault on trans rights” that “is being waged on both sides of the Atlantic” by “a broader anti-trans movement.” Shear is factual. His coverage is balanced. Still, there is the emphasis on a vast conspiracy against the transes.

The justices cited concerns about a need to have separate spaces in public life, including changing rooms, hostels, communal accommodations and medical services — echoing the spirit, if not the aggressive language, that Mr. Trump and many Republicans have used for years when discussing trans people and those public spaces.

“Similar incoherence and impracticability arise in the operations of provisions relating to single-sex characteristic associations and charities, women’s fair participation in sport, the operation of the public sector equality duty and the armed forces,” the court wrote.

This neat rhetorical trick of correctly describing a commonsense ruling by a foreign high court interspersed with a reference to Donald Trump and Republicans is to be expected, but it is misleading. Shear does not examine his priors on this point. He quotes both sides, yet he makes sure to use the most alarming quote from the losing side to reinforce the sense of partisan urgency.

“We’re seeing a really global, organized, anti-L.G.B.T. backlash,” said Jess O’Thomson, who is writing a Ph.D. on trans rights and laws at the University of Leeds. “Reducing women, the category of women, down to just biological sex is harmful to all women, not just trans. Britain tries to be more polite in its transphobia, but the content isn’t that different.”

CNN quotes the concerns of Stonewall and Amnesty International, another gender-captured NGO, about the ruling. They add “Ella Morgan, a British trans advocate,” who “was deeply fearful over how the outcome would impact ‘mine and other transgender women’s futures.’” A man is upset that he won’t be able to barge into the ladies’ loo.

“I had a feeling these changes would be implemented in the UK following the US news, I hoped that deep down I would be wrong. Today for the first time, I am scared about walking out of my front door.” Among the genderwoo-afflicted, drama is always the first response to setback.

On the left side of the Atlantic, the newspapers of record amplify the concerns of genderwoo activists that the poor men will no longer be free to impose themselves on women, boo hoo. Those activists have credentials from an academy filled with circular citations to support political superstitions, such as the nonexistence of human sex.

Their conspiracy theory is absolute trash. Yet theirs is the dominant framing of the story in the US today: evil right wing baddies are hurting trans women, waaaah! Meanwhile, across the pond, most outlets seem to have reported the news with more honesty. TERF Island has earned its moniker.

So proud of all you TERFs over there. Scottish women did not wheesht

Conservative outlets were of course different. The New York Post framed the story through J.K Rowling’s celebratory tweets. Fox News was mostly positive, though the network still uses the phrase “trans women” in its coverage, and ends with an advocate lamenting the court decision as “wounding.”

Of all the national coverage I have read so far, the most surprising is in the Washington Post. Under the headline “U.K. Supreme Court defines ‘woman’ by biology under equality law,” Donald Trump’s executive order bears mention; so does the 2020 Bostock ruling by the US Supreme Court.

Yet Annabelle Timsit still provides a fair, factual article, the balance of which explains the ruling and the case brought by For Women Scotland clearly and coherently and without bias. Jeff Bezos may be blasting women into space, but not ‘trans women,’ apparently.

An AI-generated “conversation summary” of comments on the article shows that they “largely support the U.K. Supreme Court's ruling that defines ‘woman’ based on biological sex, emphasizing the protection of single-sex spaces for women.” Imagine that, the ruling is … popular with American readers? Just like Trump’s executive order?

Many commenters express relief and agreement with the decision, viewing it as a return to common sense and a necessary step to safeguard women's rights. Some comments acknowledge the challenges faced by transgender individuals but argue that these should not override the rights of biological women. There is a strong sentiment that the ruling is a victory for women's rights and a pushback against what some perceive as the overreach of transgender activism.

(My excellent friend William Ferguson has the best coverage of all.)

I said at the beginning of the year that we had turned the corner, that 2025 would be the year that the gender fever breaks. It will not happen everywhere all at once, and in fact some areas of the world will be worse than others for a longer time.

But transgender advocacy has created too many conflicts of rights, demanded too much, made too many mistakes for anyone to stake out a ‘middle ground’ anymore. The consequences are here, and time has run out to sneak the full agenda past the public under the guise of a civil rights movement.