UK Supreme Court Calls Time on Trans Rights, Returns to Sex Binary in Law.
Editors note: Below guest writer Peter Jenkins explores the UK Supreme Court’s landmark legal judgment. This confirms that rights and protections under equality law are firmly and correctly based on biological sex, and do not correspond to a legally certified change of gender. The UK Supreme Court judgement is broadly parallel in intention and effect with the recent Presidential Executive Order. This Order stated that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality” (EO, 2025).
The UK Supreme Court judgment is just as groundbreaking as the Presidential Executive Order in terms of its potential impact within UK government policy. It decisively overturns two decades of widespread inaccurate interpretation and application of equality law in the UK, which favoured the assumed rights of trans people. The UK Supreme Court judgment sets out a clearly argued substantive legal rationale for its decision, and the specific injustices it is designed to address. This judgement now presents a real challenge to UK therapy and healthcare professional associations, which have heavily invested in the politics of gender identification.
Background to the Supreme Court Appeal
At first reading, the Supreme Court judgment seems extremely thorough. This is pretty much as one would expect from, hopefully, the brightest and most experienced legal minds on offer. The 88-page judgment sets out the background and context to the case. This arose out of the attempt by the Scottish Government to use the law to enable biological men with a Gender Recognition Certificate to count as women, for the purposes of representation on Scottish public authority boards. This policy was based on applying the Gender Recognition Act 2004. An earlier court had stated that a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) had the legal effect of changing the holder’s gender ‘for all purposes’. This stance was challenged in court by a group of feminists, Women for Scotland, and then taken to Appeal at the UK Supreme Court.
The case hinged on the everyday and common-sense meaning of words – an interesting turnaround for any post modernists still totally wedded to the notion of perpetual deconstruction. The five judges came to a unanimous decision. This ruling leaves little room for nit-picking by future dissenters. It underlines the critical importance of deciding this issue in terms of equality law. “The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004” (UKSC [2025] para 2).
Rationale for the judgment
The judgement carefully combs through past law, ranging from the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) 1975, through the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004, to the Equality Act (EA) 2010. It notes that, in each case, the term sex implicitly refers to ‘man’ or ‘woman’, i.e. using a binary biological framework. This use of a binary biological framework for legal purposes is actually nothing new, and can be traced back to the watershed case of Corbett v Corbett, which annulled the marriage of April Ashley, a transgender person, in 1971. The Scottish Government’s case, advised by the statutory Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), was that the advent of GRCs produced anomalies and disadvantageous consequences for trans people in a number of specific areas, such as the law on discrimination. Ultimately, the EHRC suggested, these difficulties might require fresh legislation to resolve.
The Supreme Court worked through each of these problematic areas in turn. These included discrimination on grounds of pregnancy and maternity, protection against sexual orientation discrimination, single sex services and communal accommodation. There is almost a sense here that the Supreme Court was rather testily marking the cobbled-together homework of the EHRC, and finding it not quite up to scratch. It could be that the proposals were the product of an earlier, highly activist version of the EHRC. The latter was then closely aligned in its trans ally role in relation to the Scottish Government, rather than in its perhaps more pragmatic and much less ideological present incarnation.
Potential impact of ‘certified gender’ on other protected groups
The judgment then goes on to work through a wide range of potential impacts of the adoption of GRCs as denoting a holder’s acquired gender ‘for all purposes’. This ranges from discrimination in employment, provision of single sex services, single sex higher education, to sport. In each case, it concluded that relying upon GRC-certified gender rather than biological sex can have adverse consequences for fair treatment under equality law. For example, permitting GRC holders to access single sex higher education, or sex-based accommodation, undermined the original intended purpose of these facilities, which was to reserve them for one biological sex. It also sets up unworkable distinctions between trans people with GRCs and those without, with no clear means for service providers to distinguish between these two groups.
This focus on the discursive method used by the Supreme Court might seem a tad pedantic, but it is critically important. Anything less than a ruthlessly systematic approach to analysing parliamentary intention, its use of language, prior case law and legislation, and review of the effects of GRC policy across a wide range of social contexts, would simply open the door to further appeal against this judgment. Summing up, the judgement states: “… the words “sex”, “woman” and “man” …mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man. These and the other provisions to which we have referred cannot properly be interpreted as also extending to include certificated sex without rendering them incoherent and unworkable” (UKSC [2025] para 264).
Responses to the judgment
The most striking image capturing the Supreme Court decision has been the dramatic photos of the women claimants euphorically celebrating on the steps of the court. There is no mistake that this is a very significant legal victory, which has been won (almost exclusively) by the efforts of women and by their own advocacy organisations defending women’s rights. According to leading campaigner, Maya Forstater: “…the judgement was about ‘recognising rules and reality’. If you’re a man, you can call yourself what you like, you can dress how you like, but you cannot work in a rape crisis centre, you cannot go into a woman’s changing room…” (Carrell, 2025).
Sometimes landmark events such as this are mainly registered at a visceral, rather than an intellectual, level. Hence, “We are devastated, and in tears,” says Jane Fae, director of the advocacy group TransActual UK, the judgement was like a “physical punch” (BBC News, 2025a). Stonewall similarly said it was deeply concerned for the “widespread implications” of the Supreme Court ruling. Chief Executive, Simon Blake, said: “It will be incredibly worrying for the trans community and all of us who support them” (BBC News, 2025b). This repeated focus on the seemingly overwhelming emotional impact of the judgment for many trans people has been a key theme in public responses to the judgement, with important implications in turn for therapy organisations.
The end of transgender rights?
Other responses were even more final and catastrophic in their tone. According to India Willoughby, a trans media pundit, “today was the day that transgender rights in the UK died” (2025). While India was not previously noted as a legal commentator, there may well be significant element of truth in this reaction, that is, if transgender rights are properly understood as a rousing, open-ended set of claims for entitlement, rather than a specific set of carefully circumscribed legal rights.
The immediate focus of outrage against the judgment has been directed against the conclusion that the Equality Act 2010 does not permit trans women (i.e. men) with a GRC to claim the rights of biological women. Nevertheless, the judgment was at pains to explore and confirm “…the important protections available under the EA 2010 for trans people with a GRC as we have explained. …this potentially vulnerable group remains protected in the ways we have described” (UKSC [2025] para 264). However, this perspective clearly does not fit the persecution narrative, which is so absolutely central to trans ideology (Jenkins, 2024).
The current crisis in psychotherapy and healthcare
The Supreme Court judgment also feeds into and deepens the current crisis enveloping therapy and healthcare in the UK. Psychotherapy and healthcare in the UK have been profoundly caught up by the post-modernist turn in academia, and by the growing influence of gender identity ideology on membership, research, publication, training and practice. Therapy and healthcare have adopted a series of political policies, such as seeking a legal ban on alleged conversion therapy, which have been used to stifle formerly open debate amongst members. Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) have assumed ever-greater significance within the healthcare and therapy professions’ policy development. A notable shift towards encouraging political activism by members is also evident. However, the Supreme Court judgment presents a profound, existential challenge to the major therapy and healthcare professions. Their policies are out of synch with the law and have been for some time. If anything positive emerges from this debacle, it is that words matter. Reality matters. Sex matters.
And to give the very final word to Kathleen Stock (2025), evicted from her job at the University of Sussex for her gender critical views:
“We told you so.”
References
BBC News (2025a) “Campaigner: ‘Devastated and in tears’, this feels like a ‘physical punch’”.
BBC News (2025b) “Incredibly worrying for trans people – Stonewall.”
Stock, K. (2025) “Letters to the editor”, Times, 18th April.
Legal references (UK)
Corbett v Corbett (otherwise Ashley) [1971] P 83
For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent) [2025] UKSC 16
Legal references (US):
Executive Order (2025) Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. 20th January.
Editor’s note: This is an edited version of an article published by Critical Therapy Antidote, republished here with permission. The original version is here.
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017).
 | A guest post by
|
> There is no mistake that this is a very significant legal victory, which has been won (almost exclusively) by the efforts of women and by their own advocacy organisations defending women’s rights.
Of course: only members of a *protected class* may challenge another protected class.