LONDON — In an issue with big stakes for the working class, the Supreme Court of the U.K. here ruled April 16 that the words “sex,” “woman” and “man” refer to biological facts. The group For Women Scotland challenged the decision of the Scottish government that interpreted equal rights legislation to mean that men who identify as women are women.
The ruling registers progress in the fightback against assaults on women’s rights.
Protections fought for and won by women and the workers’ movement over decades, such as women-only sports, have come under attack as anti-scientific notions about a multiplicity of “genders” have been recognized by capitalist institutions and peddled by bourgeois politicians. Women’s studies courses were replaced with gender studies. Attacks on free speech and thuggery directed at defenders of women’s rights accompanied these developments.
The Supreme Court’s verdict says that only the biological understanding of the words “sex” and “woman” allows for an accurate reading of the 2010 Equality Act. It says this definition facilitates the provision of women-only hospital wards and changing rooms, medical services such as cervical cancer screening, domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centers, and for the organizing of women’s sports.
The court underlines that the Equality Act protects transgender people from discrimination and the new ruling does not eliminate this.
Labour Prime Minster Keir Starmer was asked whether he still held to the views he previously stated that men who identify as women were women. Starmer’s official spokesman replied, “No, the Supreme Court judgment has made clear that when looking at the Equality Act, a woman is a biological woman.”
Last year Labour Member of Parliament Rosie Duffield quit the party after being subjected to death threats and an investigation by the party’s National Executive Committee for expressing the view that only people with a cervix should be described as women. She’d been shouted down in Parliament by Labour MPs when she raised concerns about women’s rights.
The National Health Service in Fife, Scotland, says it has noted the high court ruling. Last year, nurse Sandie Peggie was suspended from her job at a hospital there for objecting to having to change in the women’s locker room in the presence of a transgender male doctor who identified as a woman. Peggie is fighting to get her job back.
Separately, five women nurses launched a legal case last year against County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust after being forced out of a changing room when they complained about having to share it with a man who identifies as a woman.
The positive impact of the ruling can be seen elsewhere. In a change of policy, the Football Association said that men who identify as women would no longer be allowed to participate in the women’s game in England. England and Wales Cricket Board and England Netball authorities have said the same.
“It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls across the U.K.,” author J.K. Rowling said after the ruling.
Rowling has faced threats and calls for her books to be banned for speaking out against the unscientific claim that women and men are subjective categories that can be changed at will.
Members of For Women Scotland received death threats following the ruling, although they say the well-wishes they’ve received far outnumber these. “It would never occur to us to send messages like this or to call our opponents ugly,” one of the group’s founders, Susan Smith, told the press. “But we get this every day.” Opponents of the ruling say they will take the government and Supreme Court to the European Court of Human Rights.
Accepting the reality of the biological difference between men and women is essential if workers are to advance the fight for women’s emancipation and defend our class interests. Under capitalism, bosses use women’s second-class status to divide the working class, superexploit women and drive down the wages of all working people.