A landmark ruling from the Supreme Court has confirmed that, under UK law, sex is a biological fact and men cannot become women just by having the right paperwork. Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to explain why this ruling changes everything. After years of abuse and demonisation, the so-called TERFs have finally been vindicated. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.
Fraser Myers: Can you unpack the Supreme Court decision for us?
Helen Joyce: Specifically, it was a judgment about the Equality Act, which is a portmanteau act that rolls all of the country’s anti-discrimination laws into one massive bundle. The trouble was that by the time the act was passed in 2010, we had another law, the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed people to get a piece of paper that changed their sex for legal purposes. The question the Supreme Court had to decide was, is the Equality Act one of those purposes?
On the face of it, the answer seemed to be yes, because there’s a line in the Gender Recognition Act that says ‘for all purposes’. But if that’s the case, you turn sex-discrimination provisions into something that applies to two mixed-sex categories, because there are men in the women bucket and women in the men bucket.
Women have been fighting for years to get this fixed. We wanted sex-discrimination provisions to work for women under the Equality Act the same way they had done before the Gender Recognition Act.
Hellbound and Down 