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How do you define gender? It's something that individuals, schools and governments have struggled with. And today, Britain's Supreme Court weighed in with a ruling that has ramifications for transgender people there. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from London.
(CHEERING)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Cheers outside the court in London from some of the women who brought this case just after hearing Supreme Court Justice Patrick Hodge read aloud a unanimous ruling.
PATRICK HODGE: The terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
FRAYER: The court issued an 88-page judgment that says in part, quote, "the concept of sex is binary. A person is either a woman or a man." Those cheers were from supporters of a gender-critical group called For Women Scotland, which sued the Scottish government back in 2018.
SUSAN SMITH: This has been a really, really long road.
FRAYER: Susan Smith is the group's cofounder. She challenged a 2018 law that requires women to occupy half of the seats on public sector boards in Scotland, and that includes transgender women if they have government-issued gender recognition certificates. But gender-critical feminists challenged that. They want quotas to be only for people born female. They lost in lower courts but won today, and Smith spoke outside the courthouse.
SMITH: The judges have said what we always believed to be the case, that women are protected by their biological sex.
FRAYER: This campaign was bankrolled in part by this country's most famous gender-critical feminist, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who's been accused of transphobia and targeted with boycotts and lawsuits over her views on trans women. This ruling is seen as a blow to transgender rights at a time when similar legal challenges are underway in the United States.
JANE FAE: This is a bit Trumpian, frankly. What this ruling suggests is we're not welcome, we're not wanted and we can now be excluded.
FRAYER: Jane Fae is director of TransActual, a group that supports and defends trans people in the U.K. She says people are trying to figure out the implications of this. Are their gender recognition certificates still valid? Will this lead to labor discrimination or worse?
FAE: There's no clarity, but what we are sure of is that there will be masses of misinformation on social media. And we will see people challenging people who are trans or who they believe to be trans, sometimes violently.
FRAYER: In his comments to the court, Judge Hodge counseled against seeing this as a triumph for one side or another. He said U.K. law does still protect transgender people from discrimination. The British government welcomed today's ruling, saying it'll bring clarity for women and protect single-sex spaces. But another charity working with people in Scotland, where this case originated, put out a message to its members. Please, look out for yourself and each other, it said.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF DESTINY'S CHILD SONG, "GIRL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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