On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court handed down what will likely be remembered as one of the most regressive decisions of the decade, a ruling whose immediate target was trans women but whose real beneficiaries are far more powerful. In the case brought by For Women Scotland, a self-described “grassroots” organisation with links to gender-critical lobbyists and reactionary culture warriors, the court ruled that the legal definition of “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refers only to individuals born female. Trans women, even those with a Gender Recognition Certificate, are to be understood, in law, as something else entirely. What that “something else” amounts to, and what rights they may still claim under the now contorted structure of equalities law, is left deliberately vague.
The case revolved around Scotland’s modest Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, which required that 50 per cent of non-executive public board members be women, including trans women with legal recognition. In its ruling, the Supreme Court not only struck down the inclusion of trans women in this quota, it effectively wrote them out of the legal category of womanhood altogether. In doing so, the court offered a powerful legal precedent to reactionary forces that seek to redefine public space—legal, cultural, institutional—as closed terrain, to be patrolled and policed in the name of “biological truth”.
That some of the worst men in the country are now celebrating this ruling should tell you everything you need to know. The Elon Musk–booster commentariat, YouTube’s disinformation barons, “free speech” grifters and anti-woke MPs have barely been able to contain their glee. JK Rowling and her band of reactionaries have now opened Pandora’s box. What will appear, we are still unsure—but it will not be good. You can’t hand language like “woman means adult human female” to the right and expect them to stop at public board quotas. They will take it to every institution, every space, every school, every home. They already are.
“What will appear, we are still unsure—but it will not be good. You can’t hand language like “woman means adult human female” to the right and expect them to stop at public board quotas. They will take it to every institution, every space, every school, every home. They already are.”
We should be clear about what has happened here. This is not a blow for feminism. It is a victory for reaction, and one made possible not in spite of feminism but through its most ossified, institutionalised and carceral variants. The gender-critical movement cloaks itself in the language of women’s rights while functioning, in practice, as a rear-guard action against any serious material transformation of the social order. It sees patriarchy everywhere except where it actually resides: in the structural power of the state, in the coercive apparatuses of capital, and in the systems of classification that divide us by race, sex, class, ability and conformity. For such a movement, the question of who counts as a woman is not a matter of lived solidarity, but of boundary enforcement.
This ruling will have consequences far beyond Scotland’s public boards. Already, gender-critical activists are calling for the revocation of trans inclusion in NHS women’s wards, domestic violence refuges, sports leagues, toilets and changing rooms. The law has handed them a cudgel. The formalist language of judicial restraint—“we make no comment on wider social policy”, “this decision merely interprets existing law”—conceals the fact that this is a political decision, made in a highly politicised environment, with the effect of consolidating a deeply reactionary worldview: that biology is destiny, that deviation is danger, and that the state must step in to defend the boundaries of the “natural” social order.
“…this is a political decision, made in a highly politicised environment, with the effect of consolidating a deeply reactionary worldview: that biology is destiny, that deviation is danger, and that the state must step in to defend the boundaries of the “natural” social order.”
For the British left, this should be a wake-up call. Liberal institutions, from the Supreme Court to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, are not neutral arenas. In moments of crisis, they side with capital and its cultural auxiliaries. And make no mistake, we are in a moment of crisis. The far right is ascendant across Europe and the United States; the Labour Party under Starmer offers little more than managerial technocracy with a dash of wartime nostalgia; and the British state, facing a collapsing welfare system, ecological breakdown and a restive underclass, seeks ever more symbolic battles through which to shore up its legitimacy. Trans people, like migrants, have become convenient scapegoats.
There is a grim logic at work here. The more material forms of solidarity become precarious or impossible—unionisation, collective welfare, public housing, decent healthcare, the more the state turns to symbolic policing of identity. It is a logic that leads, inexorably, from austerity to authoritarianism, from cultural grievance to legal repression. In this landscape, trans rights are not merely a niche social issue. They are the front line of a broader struggle over the meaning of equality, the scope of democratic life, and the right to self-determination against the tyranny of the “natural order”.
It’s worth recalling that the Equality Act itself, so often brandished as a shield, was passed in the dying days of the New Labour project, a technocratic compromise that folded equalities into the logic of individual rights and managerial inclusion. It has now been weaponised by those who wish to use its categories not to protect but to exclude. This is not a flaw in the system; it is the system functioning exactly as intended. The great trick of liberal law is to offer a language of progress while entrenching power.
None of this is to deny the reality of misogyny, nor the need for women-only spaces. But these must be defended on a materialist, not essentialist, basis. The dangers women face, in the home, in the workplace, in institutions of care, are not alleviated by legal hair-splitting over chromosomes. They are alleviated by solidarity, by funding, by freedom. And these are precisely the things the reactionary feminists aligned with For Women Scotland are silent on. One wonders how many domestic violence refuges their campaign has funded. How many wage gaps it has closed. How many rape convictions it has secured. None, of course. Its purpose is not liberation, but restriction.
In times of social fracture, the dominant class must find new enemies, new distractions, new culture wars to fight in place of the class war it fears. Trans people, in this context, become not just scapegoats but symbols. Their very existence is a challenge to a reactionary order that craves fixed roles, fixed bodies, fixed meanings. The Supreme Court has sided with that order. The rest of us should resist it.
Book Review (47) Books (51) Britain (15) Capitalism (9) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (33) Elon Musk (8) Europe (8) Film (10) France (13) History (8) Imperialism (13) Israel (9) Labour Government (17) Labour Party (8) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (11) Palestine (9) Protest (13) Russia (10) Suella Braverman (8) Television (7) Ukraine (8) United States of America (62) Verso Books (7) War (15) Work (7) Working Class (8)
