"We were always right, and we knew it"
The Supreme Court says 'woman' means 'biological sex' - and for women like me who were attacked for the exact same view, it's bitter-sweet.
Imagine losing your career, your livelihood, your friends and your prospects over saying something like:
“Sex is binary”
“Biologically, you are either male or female”.
“Erasing the reality of sex could cause problems for women’s rights”.
“Single sex spaces are important for women’s safety”.
“The meanings of words matter”.
Today, the landmark judgment from the Supreme Court said all of these things.
It stated that, for the purpose of the Equality Act 2010, the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’, and ‘sex’, mean BIOLOGICAL SEX. Not the sex a person has purchased a certificate declaring them to be. Not the sex a person wishes they were or identifies with. Simply their biological sex.
This is a massive win for women’s rights, meaning that our right to hold and maintain women only spaces, clubs, groups, panels and shortlists has been confirmed - and that ‘women only’ means, and in terms of the Equality Act has always meant, only those who are biologically female. It also means that trans people continue to be protected from discrimination by the Equality Act’s characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’.
It’s funny how this judgement brings up mixed feelings among those women who, like me, have been absolutely vilified for stating and maintaining very similar principles to those outlined by Lord Hodge on behalf of the Supreme Court. In my own case, such comments caused Birthrights, an organisation I’d publicly supported for nearly a decade, promoted everywhere I could, and donated nearly a thousand pounds of my own money to during the pandemic, to denounce me and disassociate from me.
Their then CEO, Amy Gibbs, wrote to me in an email that comments I’d made on social media that ‘people can only be male or female’ were ‘harmful and distressing and ‘not compatible with a rights based approach’. My views, that sex mattered, that language mattered, and that clarity of language mattered, were framed by Birthrights and others as bigotry, and my name was dragged through the mud. When asked by my legal representative, Peter Daly, to publicly clarify that I was not transphobic and correct the many falsehoods in their public statement, Birthrights refused, stating that by publicly outing their behaviour to me I was, “purposefully trying to damage (their) organisation for the sake of self-publicity”.
I am by far from the only woman who has experienced similar treatment for simply saying: sex is real, and it matters.
I spoke to a few such women today, noticing a pattern in the way that they responded: amidst the celebration, the judgement is also somehow salt on the old wounds.
