On the 16th of April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, ‘sex’ refers to birth-assigned sex. The Court called this ‘biological sex’, ignoring that trans people change their biological sex characteristics in the process of medical transition. While claiming that ‘it is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex,’ the ruling poses a grave threat to trans people’s privacy, safety and dignity by making it much easier for organisations to exclude them from gendered spaces such as toilets and changing rooms. This exposes trans people to forced outing, humiliation, harassment and violence and limits their ability to participate in public life.
In reaching its decision, the Court refused to hear from the trans people who applied to intervene in the case and gave heavy precedence to submissions made by transphobic organisations. This act of epistemic violence is only the latest example of the systematic exclusion of trans knowledge from decision-making processes concerning trans lives. The pseudoscientific Cass Review, used to justify both the UK’s ban on puberty blockers for trans youth and a host of anti-trans actions internationally, had already excluded trans expertise while centring trans-hostile voices. An ongoing review of adult trans healthcare may be set to do the same.
While the organised transphobia that has given rise to these developments has been at pains to present itself as a grassroots movement, it is in reality driven top-down by figures with privileged access to political and media platforms and a disproportionate ability to shape public discourse. Despite this organised attack on human rights and democracy, both the UK Government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have made clear that they have interpreted the Court’s decision in the most harmful way possible, declaring not only that trans people may be excluded from spaces aligned with their lived gender but that they must. This far exceeds the requirements of the ruling.
We now await a new statutory code of practice that will inform the future provision of women-only and men-only spaces. Once it is published, organisations will come under intense political pressure to implement these new rules in as transphobic a manner as possible. Some have already indicated that they intend to do so; for example, the British Transport Police immediately announced that following the ruling trans women would be strip searched by male officers. Yet neither the Supreme Court ruling nor its political interpretation can totally eliminate the scope that organisations themselves have in interpreting and implementing the law.
The RPRN stands in solidarity with trans and non-binary people and believes that it is the responsibility of researchers and academics to hold our institutions to account to defend trans equality and dignity on their premises. As such, we will do our utmost to support and facilitate the fight back.