Responding to today’s Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, Helen Belcher, Chair of TransActual, said:
“Trans communities are devastated by today’s ruling. The Supreme Court chose not to hear from any trans people, preferring instead to listen to exclusionary groups. As a result, instead of bringing clarity, the Supreme Court has made a ruling which appears to contain a number of contradictions. Irrespective of the small print, the intent seems clear: to exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society. Today, we are feeling very excluded.
“Yet, we have come through worse before and are not going away. Whatever the world throws at us, we will be back, each time, stronger and bolder than before.
“The Supreme Court answered one question with many more. It has drawn a distinction between “biological” sex and “certified” sex. But no definition is provided of either. Indeed, any definition of “biological” always ends up with what is on a birth certificate. Instead the Court takes the anti-scientific, Trumpian line that sex is clearly binary and this requires no explanation. In doing so it defies all evidence and expert consensus.
“It says that trans people are still protected under the Equality Act. Yet, by saying that trans women are men and trans men are women, with or without legal gender recognition, it also appears to have undermined the Gender Recognition Act. In so doing it poses more questions than it answers.
“It talks too of women’s spaces. However, it is unclear whether these mean ‘any space where you tend to find a lot of women’ – or spaces specifically defined in exemptions to the EA. It speaks of and over lesbians and tells them how to run their spaces and communities. It repeats anti-trans talking points that do not reflect the views and practices of most LGBTQ+ people.
“This ruling has no real purpose beyond ideological objection to the existence of trans people. There is no evidence of harms arising from the system of rights and protections which have been in place since 2010, only increasing hostility and hypothetical fears being leveraged to enable anti-trans discrimination.
“The Court’s insistence that this should not be taken as siding with any one group is an insult while they aid an anti-civil rights agenda.
“Perversely, today’s ruling may also have broken the Equality Act beyond repair. We await clarification from our lawyers on that. We now need a new and comprehensive approach to equalities law that places on a sounder legal footing the rights of all to freedom of gender and rights to dignity and privacy for all people, including trans, non-binary and intersex people.
“In the short term, it is inevitable that the national press will jump on the bandwagon, and muddy the waters. They will declare trans people no longer permitted to access certain spaces, whether the letter of the law means this or not. Many of those in charge of such spaces will go along with that either because they are not interested in taking or cannot afford to take further legal advice – or because they have long been waiting an excuse to exclude trans people wholesale.
“Society will divide more sharply into queer-friendly and queer-hostile spaces, and it will be the poorer for it.
“We call on the UK government to reaffirm their commitment to protecting the rights to safety, dignity and healthcare of all trans and non-binary people in the face of these attacks.
“We call on the Scottish government to appeal this clearly biased ruling.
“We call on all allies to resist those who would treat this as license to discriminate, and to respond by making it explicit that trans and non-binary people are welcome everywhere in the UK.
“And we call on LGBTQ+ people to continue to stand together, strong and defiant, as we enter a new era of our long struggle for equality and civil rights.”
Further information
For further information, contact jane fae on press@transactual.org.uk