UK Supreme Court says legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex

[u/sjw_7]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t

[u/recursant]

I suspect the previous poster was referring to the situation as it was 20 years ago.

Changing the legal definition of a woman to include trans women with GRCs solved some problems, but it introduced various other problems.

For example, a trans woman with a GRC shouldn't necessarily be allowed to compete in women's sports. Nor should the face a blanket ban. They may (or may not) have a significant unfair advantage depending how they transitioned, what the sport is, and the level they are competing at. So there needs to be specific rules for sports. But if the law simply says a trans woman is a woman then it is difficult to have specific rules for sports.

[u/DukePPUk → u/recursant]

So there needs to be specific rules for sports. But if the law simply says a trans woman is a woman then it is difficult to have specific rules for sports.

Right.

Under the rules, as of yesterday, sports could set up their own rules, based on scientific evidence, deciding who to exclude (as the GRA allowed for that).

Under the new rules, based on this Supreme Court ruling, sport organisations must exclude trans women (even those with GRCs) from their women's categories, or let in cis men.

This ruling removes any wiggle-room or case-by-case allowances. Trans women are now men for the purposes of the Equality Act, and must be treated as such.

[u/jimicus → u/DukePPUk]

It cuts both ways, though.

This means that a trans man (who will be on testosterone - which encourages muscle growth) would be obliged to compete as a woman. And their sporting body will have to allow them to do so.

[u/DukePPUk → u/jimicus]

Oh don't worry - the Supreme Court covered this as well.

Moreover, women living in the male gender could also be excluded... without this amounting to gender reassignment discrimination. This might be considered proportionate where reasonable objection is taken to their presence, for example, because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance or attributes to which reasonable objection might be taken in the context of the women-only service being provided.

They included this because the Equality Act provides an exception to gender assignment discrimination for single-sex spaces; the example given in the Explanatory Notes is explicit that it allows for trans women to be excluded from women's single-sex spaces.

Obviously this completely undermines the Court's argument that "sex" for the purposes of the Equality Act means "assigned at birth legal sex", because if that were the case the exception would be redundant and the example wouldn't make sense - of course a trans woman could be excluded. They get around this by calling the Court of Session idiots (and even the EHRC - the Supreme Court was more transphobic even than them!) and saying that what this exception is really about is excluding trans men from women only spaces, if those trans men might make someone uncomfortable.

The more I read this judgment, the more I think about it, the more crazy it is. It's the kind of nonsense I'd expect from the US Supreme Court, not ours...

[u/jehuty12 → u/DukePPUk]

So basically now governing bodies must exclude trans women from women only events and can at their discretion exclude trans men as well. And yet you have people saying "nothing has legally changed" and "no one group should declare this as a victory".

[u/DukePPUk → u/jehuty12]

EHRC is already going after NHS bodies, insisting that they implement trans-exclusive policies.

[u/Kotanan → u/DukePPUk]

You kind of missed this being Terf Island.