by WorldTribune Staff, April 16, 2025 Real World News

What is a woman?

The UK Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled a woman is an adult human female.

The unanimous decision said the 2010 Equality Act used the terms “woman” and “sex” to be about biology and not gender identity.

Women celebrate outside the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The decision stemmed from a lawsuit by For Women Scotland against the Scottish government, which had changed the law to allow for the recognition of men who say they are women as women.

The question before the court was “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.”

The court’s ruling reads: “The definition of sex in the EA 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man. Persons who share that protected characteristic for the purposes of the group-based rights and protections are persons of the same sex and provisions that refer to protection for women necessarily exclude men. Although the word ‘biological’ does not appear in this definition, the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman. These are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation. Men and women are on the face of the definition only differentiated as a grouping by the biology they share with their group.”

Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch said after the ruling: “Women are women. We didn’t need a court to tell us that. But here we are. It took a Supreme Court decision to confirm what we all know: that a piece of paper cannot make a man a woman. For too long the price has been paid by individual women taking action to uphold the law, at great personal cost.”

The women’s rights campaigners advocated against the inclusion of men in women’s sports, the allowance of men in women’s sex-segregated facilities, opposed gender self-ID having a bearing in law, and fought to stop the sex changes of minors.

Author JK Rowling, who has been outspoken in her support for women, said “It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls across the UK. For Women Scotland, I’m so proud to know you.”

Helen Joyce of Sex Matters spoke outside the court, saying: “It really did seem hopeless on occasion. We were right. These women, these ordinary women, saying that sex is material in the Equality Act. They were right and the regulator was wrong, the Government was wrong, Keir Starmer was wrong. Now, when we go to police and say searching shouldn’t be on the basis of what certificates people hold, when we say to companies ‘your gender self ID access to toilets is unlawful,’ they should listen to us. Because we’ve just been agreed with comprehensively by the highest court in the land.”

The Scottish government, which has fought against the recognition of women as women, said: “The Scottish Government accepts today’s Supreme Court judgement. The ruling gives clarity between two relevant pieces of legislation passed at Westminster. We will not engage on the implications of the ruling. Protecting the rights of all will underpin our actions.”

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  Stop the presses: UK court rules on the question: ‘What is a woman?’, WorldTribune.com