17/04/2025
TransActual statement on the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act:
Trans communities are devastated by today’s ruling. The Supreme Court chose not to hear from any trans people, preferring instead to listen to exclusionary groups.
Instead of bringing clarity, the Supreme Court has made a ruling which appears to contain a number of contradictions. Irrespective of the small print, the intent seems clear: to exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society.
The Supreme Court answered one question with many more. It has drawn a distinction between “biological” s*x and “certified” s*x. The Court takes the anti-scientific, Trumpian line that s*x is clearly binary and this requires no explanation. In doing so it defies all evidence and expert consensus.
It says that trans people are still protected under the Equality Act. Yet, by saying that trans women are men and trans men are women, with or without legal gender recognition, it also appears to have undermined the Gender Recognition Act.
The ruling talks of women’s spaces, but it is unclear whether these mean ‘any space where you tend to find a lot of women’ – or spaces specifically defined in exemptions to the EA. It repeats anti-trans talking points that do not reflect the views and practices of most LGBTQ+ people.
This ruling has no real purpose beyond ideological objection to the existence of trans people. There is no evidence of harms arising from the system of rights and protections which have been in place since 2010, only increasing hostility and hypothetical fears being leveraged to enable anti-trans discrimination.
The Court’s insistence that this should not be taken as siding with any one group is an insult while they aid an anti-civil rights agenda.
Today’s ruling may have broken the Equality Act beyond repair. We await clarification from our lawyers on that.
It is inevitable that the national press will jump on the bandwagon, and declare trans people no longer permitted to access certain spaces, whether the letter of the law means this or not. Many of those in charge of such spaces will go along with that.
We call on the Scottish government to appeal this clearly biased ruling. We call on all allies to resist those who would treat this as license to discriminate, and to respond by making it explicit that trans and non-binary people are welcome everywhere in the UK.
We call on LGBTQ+ people to continue to stand together, strong and defiant, as we enter a new era of our long struggle for equality and civil rights.
Remember, we have come through worse before and are not going away. Whatever the world throws at us, we will be back, each time, stronger than before.
Read our full statement at: https://transactual.org.uk/blog/2025/04/16/response-by-transactual-to-supreme-court-ruling-on-equality-act/
We know that a lot of people in our community were already struggling. Please reach out for support if you need it. You'll find details of support services in our wellbeing hub: https://transactual.org.uk/wellbeing/