The Supreme Court ruled on 16 April that the legal definition of a woman is based on ‘biological sex’. Protests have erupted across the country, with trans people and their allies taking to the streets in huge numbers.
The case was taken to the Supreme Court by Women Scotland, a transphobic group with links to multi-millionaire children’s author JK Rowling, and no transgender groups or individuals were permitted to give evidence and argue against this dangerous attack on their rights.
The implication of the court’s decision to interpret the Equality Act 2010 as referring to biological sex and not gender is wide-reaching. It removes Equality Act rights from women who hold a Gender Recognition Certificate and leaves them only with the far more limited protections the Act offers to those who have undergone ‘gender reassignment’.
The decision threatens to unleash a wave of attacks on trans people against which the Equality Act has, until now, served as a shield. Already, British Transport police have announced that trans women will be strip searched by male rather than female officers. This will of course affect cis as well as trans women because it will be up to the police to judge whether an individual looks stereotypically male or female.
Reports are already surfacing of transphobes emboldened in humiliating and endangering trans women. Shortly after the court ruling, a 22 year old cis woman was barred from using a women’s toilet at Marks and Spencer because a member of staff determined she looked like ‘a boy’.
We should now expect to struggle employer by employer, service by service, for the right of trans people to use the facilities appropriate to their gender, against those seeking to judge our degree of femininity and police our genitals.
Many, if not all, Labour-affiliated trade unions have clear policies in support of trans rights. They must demand that the government now pass legislation that establishes our right to self-declare our gender and be afforded the rights and protections of that gender.
Resisting this attack on trans rights is a matter of urgency for the entire labour movement, to defend our trans siblings and to resist the wave of right wing populism that is attempting to divide the working class along ‘culture war’ lines and turn back the clock on the rights of the oppressed.
For the court to so easily pull the rug out from under the limited and fragile rights accumulated by trans people should be of huge concern to all women and our LGBT+ siblings. We can see from the United States that a woman’s right to choose, a black person’s protections against workplace discrimination, a migrant’s right to retain their UK citizenship or a gay person’s right to marry could be next.
The rise of right-wing populism across the world is a reaction to falling living standards and increased economic and military tensions. Sections of our ruling classes are increasingly relying on ideologies like nationalism, racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia to mobilise people against scapegoats rather than against the system responsible for poverty and war.
We cannot cede one inch of ground to these reactionary ideas. The struggle against capitalism is not just an economic one, it is a political struggle that must necessarily encompass the democratic rights of those capitalism oppresses.
