The UK Supreme Court is expected to rule today on the legal definition of “woman”—a decision that will be remembered not only for what it says, but for what it attempts to erase. Even before the judgment has landed, the shape of the debate is clear. This is a case about exclusion masquerading as clarity; a narrowing dressed up as protection.
At the heart of the case, brought by the campaign group For Women Scotland, is the claim that including trans women with Gender Recognition Certificates in the legal category of “woman” somehow infringes upon the rights of cisgender women. Their argument is less legal than ideological, less concerned with the practical application of the Equality Act 2010 than with reasserting a rigid and biological definition of sex that ignores the material conditions of trans life. It is, fundamentally, an effort to legislate vulnerability, to claim that trans women are a threat in spaces designated for protection.
Should the court rule in favour of this narrowing, rejecting the Scottish government’s more inclusive interpretation, it will conclude that sex, for the purposes of the Equality Act, is defined biologically, and that the presence of a Gender Recognition Certificate does not alter that status in contexts where single-sex exemptions are applied. That is, trans women, even those recognised by law as women, may still be excluded from women-only spaces.
Such a ruling would be devastating. Not just for what it says, but for what it enables. It would open the door for a wave of administrative exclusions, from shelters to changing rooms to political shortlists. It would legitimise suspicion. And it would give further legal cover to institutions already under pressure from a hostile press and a resurgent anti-trans lobby.
It would also deepen the already perilous material conditions faced by trans people in Britain. Trans women are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness, abuse, mental ill-health and unemployment. Access to women-only services, especially in times of crisis, is not an abstract right but a material necessity. To deny access is not to draw a line on a legal page. It is to push someone closer to death.
The rhetoric of safeguarding, so often deployed by those seeking exclusion, is not neutral. It is the language of social control, a form of carceral feminism that redefines liberation as the policing of borders: the female body as territory, womanhood as checkpoint. But no one is safer when suspicion becomes law.
We have been here before. In the 1980s, Section 28 deployed the language of child protection to stigmatise and censor gay and lesbian people. Then as now, reactionaries invoked the fragility of a group to legitimise the repression of another. Today’s case is part of a broader authoritarian drift, one that seeks to codify exclusion under the guise of fairness. It is not about protecting women. It is about defining womanhood as a closed caste.
As socialists, as feminists, as people who understand that liberation is never a zero-sum game, we must insist that solidarity means expanding who counts. We cannot let the terms of the debate be set by those who fear a world more complex, more just, more free. Trans women are women. The law may soon say otherwise. Our politics must not.
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