What do women want?
Sarah Tanburn
On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled on a case brought by grassroots campaign For Women Scotland against the Scottish Government. (Nation.Cymru covered it at the time, here and you can read the whole document for yourself here.)
The Court unanimously ruled that in the Equality Act 2010, ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘sexual orientation’ refer to biological sex, and those meanings are not changed by certification or the assertion of a gender identity.
The Judgment covers Wales as well as England and Scotland.
What needs to happen here now?
Shock headline: men, including men who identify as women, are more important than women.
Noticeably absent from media coverage or vitriolic protest has been the experience of women who welcome the clear statement of their rights.
You might be unlucky enough to need a refuge, a hospital ward or a prison: in any of them you should be safe from assault, expect fairness and be able to protect your dignity and privacy.
The same is true of lesbian spaces, changing rooms and the playing field.
A legitimate single-sex space must be just that – founded on sex.
How did we get here?
Also missing till 29 April was any comment by Welsh Government.
Two weeks after the Judgment, Cabinet finally issued a statement. The only references to women in their comment are those citing the Supreme Court itself, and lesbians do not get a look in: ‘reassuring the trans community’ takes centre stage.
Clearly, the protected characteristics of sex and sexual orientation are lower in the hierarchy. Wales has not taken the bravura route of the SNP-controlled government at Holyrood, but make no mistake. The assertion that certificated sex and gender ideology matter more than biology is deeply embedded in our politics.
No self-respecting ‘feminist government’ should have issued such a commentary.
Just 15 years ago, everyone knew what a woman is.
The Judgment spells out that the Equality Act of 2010 refers to biology. No other interpretation makes sense. But for at least ten years, politicians of (nearly) every stripe have claimed the question is confusing and has led to such nonsense as intelligent people claiming a man can grow a cervix. (Diolch i David Lammy for that one.)
Plenty of doctorates will be written about the way the discourse was chivvied and changed and many organisations adopted policies and organisational development schemes which flouted the law of the land.
Policy has been shaped by advocacy groups rather than open political discussion or statistically valid evidence. Last year, I wrote about the damage caused by an ossified layer of unscrutinised lobbyists in Wales.
Now is the time to change our approach to civil society. Welsh Government needs to open their doors and ears to those of us trying to talk about the experiences of women including lesbians, gay men and others who know that sex is real, immutable and important.
Lots to talk about
Sexual orientation is not the same as gender identity. The figures in the Cass Report show that many gender confused youngsters will grow up to be homosexuals: in 2016, the statistics provided by the London-based Gender Identity Service (GIDS) said that 89% of girls and 81% of boys on their treatment pathways were either homosexual or bisexual.
The often-recited alphabet construction is misleading and the Supreme Court is sadly spot on in recognising the ‘chilling effect’ that identity politics have had on lesbian communities.
Nonetheless, despite strenuous objections, in 2022 the Welsh Government adopted an ‘LGBTQ+ Action Plan’ which rests firmly on false notions of homogeneity and ‘inclusiveness’. The Plan makes sweeping recommendations designed to influence all decision-makers to embrace the gender mantras. It now behoves the Government to withdraw the entire document, based as it is on the legally incorrect assertion that ‘trans women are women’.
Alongside the Action Plan, gender identity has become deeply embedded in the curriculum from three-year-olds onwards. I strongly support age-appropriate education in RSE, which must be based in the reality of our bodies as well as addressing the common discomforts associated with puberty, unwanted sexual attention and more.
Medicalisation of puberty and encouraging social or medical transition to escape adulthood is not a success of inclusion but a tragedy of our times.
Local authorities and all others working with youngsters must also review their approach to safeguarding.
For example, Urdd runs regular residential courses for young people and might be expected to ensure that accommodation is now categorically single sex. Instead, they have issued a statement for ‘trans friends’ and no reassurance for parents.
We have not seen the Children’s Commissioner or anyone else reflect on the implications.
Even a Northern Irish council, not covered by the Judgment, has been more proactive.
Health services, too, are infected by the push to dismiss sex as a central fact of our biology.
Cass report
Welsh Government signally failed to welcome the crucial report by Dame Hilary Cass into the over medicalisation of young people experiencing gender-related distress, but the NHS in Wales has begun to take account of reality.
For example, the Women’s Health Plan now recognises that sex is recorded (not assigned) at birth – a small but mighty step forward.
Alongside such developments, perhaps adequate investment in child and adolescent mental health services would serve our troubled young people well.
Data is another key area in the long list of topics. The Office of National Statistics has led the way in confusing sex and gender, further distorting the bases of policy. We have also seen a pattern of studies informing policy despite not meeting the most basic standards of research and many completely fail to consider lesbians as a separate category.
Last month, Prof Sullivan’s review offered a robust way forward, which Welsh Government should adopt.
Where now?
It is not difficult for Government or institutions to take the next steps. As a bare minimum, they should make a new statement recognising the law as clarified by the Court protects the rights of women and lesbians as well as those conferred by gender reassignment.
Recent protests – including in Welsh cities – have called for the burning, hanging and mutilation of people (like me) who support the judgment: is it too much to ask that a responsible government would condemn such language?
Alongside withdrawing the ‘LGBTQ+ Action Plan, Ministers need to meet with the community groups who have tried for years to discuss their concerns. The many references in this short article show the growing body of evidence suggesting that the clichés of ‘affirmation’ and ‘kindness’ have done more harm than good. Maybe then we can all work together for that welcoming, fairer Wales we would all like to see.
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I think Welsh government are heading for a very heavy fall here, unless they take responsibility now, as the writer suggests. They’ve been in thrall to a relatively small group of activists who have lobbied for an extreme version of transgender rights. Now we’ve had the Cass Review, we’ve had the Supreme Court ruling (which Stonewall, one of said lobbyists, didn’t even try and take part in, presumably because they knew their legal arguments would be blown apart). Wales has been pushing doggedly in the wrong direction in the area of sex based rights v gender identity. Including the bizarre… Read more »
You are spot on. Children of 11 are also being taught that gender is a ‘spectrum’.
I objected to that in my school and was treated like a pariah!
Well you are one, people should be free to be themselves, explore who they are. In my sons school, the word gay is banned, rather your schools approach of open freedom.
Totally agree, children should be able to explore… BUT encouraging them to believe in a fantasy that humans can literally change sex! This is not healthy. You mention gay, well over 80% of children transed by the Tavistock clinic would have grown up lesbian, gay or bisexual (Cass Report).. but instead these young people had their puberty stopped and went on to cross-sex hormones and surgery. Their lives destroyed and facing double incontinence, brittle bones, sexual dysfunction, sterility, lowered IQ – it’s all there. So explore, yes, but stop feeding them dangerous lies of the gender ideology cult.
I very much doubt the word ‘gay’ is ‘banned’ (unless the school has, rightly, been clear it will not tolerate the use of the word ‘gay’ as a term of playground abuse). People should be free to be themselves, and to explore who they are. But kids should not be misled into thinking they can change biological sex, or that feeling unhappy in your own body – as many teenagers are – means they are somehow born in the wrong body.
The Welsh Government have welcomed the Supreme Court ruling. I think you are getting worked up by old news
No – the Welsh gov have said, in yesterday’s statement (so hardly ‘old news’) that they ‘respected’ the Supreme Court’s judgement. They didn’t ‘welcome’ it.
Shame they didn’t acknowledge the damage they have done to women and girls and lesbians… an apology would have been very welcome for the many years that we have been bombarded with the nonsense that ‘Trans Women are Women’ – just for the record, ‘Trans Women’ are actually men. I don’t think many people actually realise that. and over 80% of these men do not have any surgery. The law is right and it must be implemented with immediate effect.
I am a gender critical male but please can you point to the evidence of damage the Welsh Government “have done to women and girls and lesbians” and where they “bombarded with the nonsense that ‘Trans Women are Women’”.
You could start by reading the Welsh Government LGBTQ Action Plan, where the entire basis is that trans women are women. Also the Welsh Government RSE code, which is compulsory in all schools in Wales, and the attendant ‘Agenda Packs’ for primary and high school children, endorsed by Welsh Government. This conflates sex and ‘gender identity’, and specifically says that children as young as three can know they are transgender.
An excellent article. So good to read something that actually addresses the importance of clear language. The Welsh Government has been ruled by political lobby group Stonewall Cymru to the exclusion of anyone else. They have embedded their ideology and Stonewall Law, (not the actual law) into every policy document in Wales. They have also cost the tax payer thousands, and will cost thousands more to re-write vast amounts of policy to re-introduce women, girls, lesbian and gay. Remember this is the government who adopted non-sexed language, removing words mother because it wasnt seen as inclusive. It will be so… Read more »
Really disappointed in NC’s coverage of this. The people really being silenced here are trans people, who you wouldn’t know exist from how the media excludes them, and women who support trans people or just aren’t bothered, who are by far the majority. The fact that a vocal political hate group, funded by billionaires, has been allowed to get away with painting a vulnerable minority group as “ideology”, while nobody else is allowed to get a word in, is ridiculous, pathetic, and frightening. You certainly wouldn’t ever know from the media that the vast majority of lesbians support trans women… Read more »
On this issue maybe – but generally the trans issue by no means lacks coverage: the mainstream media seems to talk about nothing else, and it’s been that way for years. Neither are they ‘vulnerable’: they are widely lauded over and above everyone else in society.
Agreed. How dare woman be allowed to voice an opinion that is different to yours? They should be banned at once.
Despite these efforts, trans people are going to continue to exist. I know this will come as a blow to many of you.
Nobody has denied ‘trans’ people the right to exist, nor any other right. What they’re (rightly) being denied is the privilege of forcing others to believe things that are objectively untrue. Under the Equalities Act, a Christian employer cannot not force his employees to state their belief in God: this is no different.
It’s not about ‘existing’. It is about the overreach of false entitlement to women’s spaces, services and sports. You know how when a driver is told they can’t park in double yellow lines outside a school, and then starts yelling that there’s a ‘woke war on motorists’? That.
What’s your advice to someone struggling with their gender identity?
Honesty – that they are the sex they are born as, but you can dress however you want and love whoever you want. But taking drugs and having surgery will only make you sick. You can never medicalise out of your sex because it’s in your chromosomes
If biological sex is all that matters and gender – a social construct – isn’t important then single-sex facilities should be outlawed where there isn’t a biological justification.
They are only provided where there is a need.
And they will still lie about trans people, like they once did to those gay. Accusations of being rapists and other vile discrimination. People need to mind their own business sometimes, if they have no kindness.
How is it kind to deny a rape victim the right to be examined and supported by women? To call her a bigot if she wants, in her trauma, to be in a women only environment? Not one where a male identifies as a woman, and insists everyone else must call him a woman? Where is the kindness there?
True, there will be transsexuals and transvestites, and these people have rights too in the Equality Act. What they don’t have is the right to colonise women, girls, lesbian and gay people’s rights and spaces. We have boundaries for very good reasons. White people can’t go barging into spaces and take over the rights of Asian, or African people for example, even if that white person ‘identifies’ as black or Asian. You see, you can’t just ‘identify’ into someone else’s human rights. Women have been objecting for years, we have been discriminated against for years – so an apology and… Read more »
Many companies, organisations, and politicians (Hello Sir Kier!) have entwined themselves so tightly into this topsy-turvy nonsense that they’ll now find it almost impossible to make an about turn. The Welsh Government is one such institution. Recognising what the supreme court has ruled; what 99.9% of people knew all along, will be an admission that they have been speaking and behaving like delusion idiots for a number of years. Many will not be able to face that, and I believe that a succession of court cases will follow as a result.
Keir Starmer won’t struggle. He U-turns on most issues so quickly Ed Milliband has declared the PM a source of renewable energy and connected him to the grid!
I would say that I am a gender critical male. However, I think it is ridiculous that fully transitioned trans women and men have to use the toilets of the sex they were born with. Secondly can we stop the rank hypocrisy in sport of “gender critical” politicians and commentators attacking those born as women like the boxer Imane Khelif and Castor Semenya being able to compete as women. This strikes me as bizarre and cruel.
What do you mean by a ‘fully transitioned trans woman’ – is that someone with a certificate or someone with full surgery removal of the penis? Cross-sex hormones. As a biological female I know a man when I meet one, the voice, the body shape, the size of feet and hands and height, the bulk, the smell – yep all of those things – we are animals, our instincts don’t lie. Do you remember little red riding hood – perhaps we all need to remind ourselves of the story – not that every man is a danger – but if… Read more »
So if a man fully transitions. Has no penis, etc. what harm is that person using a female toilet? I am not talking about a person with just gender recognition.
The voice of reason at last. All those who say “most ……… support trans people” could now find that this is far from the truth and most people support biological sex as the truth. It’s becoming safe to tell the truth now. The bullying and intimidation won’t stop for a while of course and this is why our leaders should unequivocally support the law as set by the Supreme Court on 16th April. But sadly the main reason that government, councils, NHS etc will have to follow the law is the cost of litigation not a moral and ethical stance.… Read more »
This article is spot on as are the Supreme Court. And agreeing doesn’t make anyone a transphobe or any other sort of “phobe”.
By narrowing the legal definition of woman to pure biology, aren’t single-sex facilities now as inappropriate as single-race facilities.
And one more thing. Does misogyny still exist? If that’s hatred of women, now defined biologically, then hatred based on gender as a social construct won’t make the grade. Has Andrew Tate become free to spout his warped gender ideology?
Andrew Tate was a misogynist yesterday, and he’s still a misogynist today. Nothing has changed there, don’t you worry.
Andrew Tate doesn’t hate based on biology, he hates based on his definition of gender roles and targets those that don’t adhere to them. Similarly the threats men pose to women aren’t down to biology they’re down to gender. It’s taught behaviour, cultural not biological.
And yet Tate knows exactly who to rape and forcibly prostitute. Women. The biological kind. Where you go wrong with your understanding of Tate and co is that they link strict gender roles – stereotypes – to males and females. And they hate females who don’t behave in a very stereotypical way. Ditto men. You don’t fix that by saying that biology doesn’t exist. You can fight gender stereotyping though. Sex matters. Not least for the rights of same sex attracted men and women.
I didn’t suggest biology doesn’t exist. But having the law state that gender doesn’t exist – or at least is not a protected characteristic – is going to create unintended consequences. What happens when someone defends their hatred or discrimination on the basis that it targeted a person’s gender not their biological sex. Since gender is no longer a protected characteristic when previously it was synonymous with sex, there may be no case to answer. This might lead to previous convictions being successfully appealed. The only remedy will be to add gender to the list of protected characteristics which almost… Read more »
You have no idea what the Supreme Court ruling means. You should read it. The protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ still exists and has not been changed in any way. It exists on a par with sex, and with other protected characteristics. A trans person has both the rights that are protected under ‘gender reassignment’, and also ‘sex’. So a trans man who becomes pregnant and is fired as a result has the legal protection of their sex. If they were also abused in a transphobic way, they would have the protection of ‘gender reassignment’.
I’m not talking about trans people or gender reassignment. I’m talking about gender versus sex. Gender is not listed as a protected characteristic.
‘gender’ has never been a protected characteristic.
It was synonymous with sex for legal purposes. If it wasn’t the supreme court case would not have been required.
That is not what the Supreme Court case was about. Gender has not been legally interchangeable with sex as a category. You’ve completely misunderstood it. The case was about the interaction of the Equality Act with the Gender Recognition Act.
From the BBC: >> “Lord Hodge said the central question was how the words “woman” and “sex” are defined in the legislation. He told the court: ‘The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.'” << That's as clear as day that gender is excluded from the definition of sex, and therefore unprotected by equalities legislation, and subject to future test case this will likely be extended to all legal definitions. A male boss is now free to only award generous bonuses to… Read more »
There is no mention of ‘gender’ being the same as sex there. That’s not what the article or the Supreme Court judgement said. At all. You are wholly wrong. Sex is a protected characteristic, and so is gender reassignment. The ruling stressed this. No rights or legal protections have been taken away from anyone. Quite the opposite. The example of the fictional boss you give is wrong and has nothing to do with equality law.
You stated “the case was about the interaction of the Equality Act with the Gender Recognition Act” and the judge stated “the central question was how the words ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ are defined in the legislation”.
Correct. That doesn’t mean – at all – that ‘gender’ has ever been synonymous with ‘sex’ as a legal category. ‘Gender’ has never been a protected characteristic. Mate, you need to read the ruling.
What this is really about is returning to an era when men and women were defined by their biology and nothing else. Where the purpose of women was to have children and the men existed to be the hunter gatherers providing the means to raise those children. That’s why some get so upset by the divergence of gender roles from the biology that’s been “insidiously” allowed to happen since the suffragettes. How can someone be a women if they can’t have children? That’s the fundamental issue that upsets and confuses so many. It’s all very Handmaid’s Tale.
What on earth are you talking about? Keeping women’s refuges female only has nothing at all, whatsoever, in common with racial segregation. But do keep going. That’s the kind of approach that has done so much to put the general public off gender extremism. Nice one.
Biological sex and race are both protected characteristics so why the difference?
Well, they’re different protected characteristics, Hal. As is disability. Do you think that disabled parking spaces are as ‘inappropriate’ as ‘race-segregated spaces’?
Positive action allows additional help to be provided for groups of people who share a ‘protected characteristic’ (for example, race, sex, or sexual orientation) in order to level the playing field.
It’s clear that providing parking spaces or disabled toilets is necessary to level the playing field for disabled people.
It’s not clear what the justification now is for segregated toilets. Any previous arguments about safety and dignity are based on gender not biological sex and no longer apply.
No, ‘sex’ has always meant ‘biological sex’. That is literally what the Supreme Court said. Arguments about safety and dignity are very much based on sex. You just don’t understand the ruling, I’m afraid.
There is nothing in biology that jeopardises someone’s safety or dignity based on their biological sex.
If there was a biological justification for separate toilets we would not have gender neutral facilities on aircraft.
Oh dear. There is a single, lockable room on aeroplanes, for use by either sex, for reasons of space. But men and women do not use them at the same time. They do not share the room in that way. They use it one at a time. However, mixed sex facilities in general do increase the risk of harm to women. The vast majority of violent sex offenders are male. The majority of victims of violent sex crime are female. Feel free to check out stats from the MoJ, or the ONS. So yes, males are a risk to females.… Read more »
There are no doubt statistics that suggest some races are more at risk from harm than others. Does that make it acceptable to have toilet facilities segregated by race in the local shopping centre?
The facilities you describe can all be replaced by secure individual safe spaces anyone can use.
No, they can’t. The comparison between spaces for males and females, where both sexes want privacy, and racial segregation is wholly false. It is also a myth that individual lockable spaces that can be used by either sex are the universal answer. They bring their own risks (eg people falling ill, collapsing, self harming etc are much more at risk in completely enclosed spaces). As a design, they take up far more space than say a large single sex toilet space with individual stalls and public handwashing facilities. So you end up catering far far fewer people. And I don’t… Read more »
That’s the consequence of removing gender from the legal definition of man and woman. Sex and race are now equivalent protected characteristics.
Hal, sex has never meant the same as ‘gender’ in law. Nothing has been ‘removed’ in the Supreme Court ruling. You seem as angry about women as you are about race. The kindest I can be is to say that it’s ok not to understand something, but it’s not okay to spread misinformation.
You’ve justified segregation by sex on the basis that “wiping all the sprayed male urine off the seats” is unpleasant. Imagine justifying segregating toilets by race on the basis that one race is less clean than another.
I’m angry that a confected manageable risk has led to a situation where women and girls could lose protections and rights.
But let’s pause this until the supreme court deals with a case where a woman hating biological male is arguing their behaviour was targeting gender not sex and the charges should be thrown out.