Women of Dorset is delighted that For Women Scotland won their case at the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday, 16th April. The review into the definitions of the words ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the context of the Equality Act 2010 was triggered after controversial plans by the Scottish Government to include men who identify as women in quotas for board membership, where Scotland is attempting to increase the numbers of women on such boards. The ruling will apply to the whole of the UK.
The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that for the purposes of the EA10, woman and sex refer to one’s immutable sex at birth—and even men who have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), which allows them to legally change some documents to say they are female, are still regarded as men for the purposes of the Act’s provision of single-sex services and spaces.
Jenny Murray from Women of Dorset, a grassroots women’s campaign group, said, “It feels like there is light at the end of the tunnel for women to regain their dignity, privacy, and safety in facilities provided for women. For too long women have felt uncomfortable when men are in their spaces, as they have seen the treatment meted out to women who complain. The judgement clarifies the law for organisations and workplaces and means that women can once again assert their rights to their own spaces away from men—however those men choose to present themselves in public.”
The Equality Act 2010 brought existing anti-discrimination laws together under one piece of legislation. This includes the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which allows men and women to have certification that, for legal purposes, they are the opposite sex. A GRC costs £6 and was designed to alleviate the discomfort that some people with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria feel when trying to navigate their lives when they feel incongruence towards their natal sex. Ms. Murray said, “Much of the confusion over the definition of such basic terms as ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ has come about because the GRA 2004 created a ‘legal fiction’ that you can change sex. Conflation of the words sex and gender adds to the confusion, and when women complain about men in their women-only facilities, it can be easy to think that we have self-ID in the UK from the backlash they receive—despite having the law on their side. Women of Dorset is looking forward to seeing organisations in Dorset implementing policies that uphold women’s hard-won legal rights.”
