Mick Hartley

This is good.

There’s an astonishing quantity of nonsense being talked about the Supreme Court’s FWS judgment, still, including by otherwise reputable lawyers who should know better.

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) May 8, 2025

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So let's get a few things straight.

Generally, in law, sex doesn’t matter. But it goes further than that: in many contexts — work, education, services etc — thanks to the Equality Act 2010, it’s positively not allowed to matter. Sex discrimination is prohibited.

Those prohibitions are subject to exceptions. In various everyday situations where sex does matter, you’re allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex.

So, for example, if you’re recruiting for a bra fitting job, you’re allowed to say you only want to employ a woman in the role.

You don't need any very special reasons to use these exceptions: they're provided for routine, everyday needs like single-sex toilets and changing rooms, single-sex swimming sessions, same-sex healthcare provision, and so on.

So what was For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers all about?

The question the court had to answer (although it arose in a slightly complicated way) was one of perfect simplicity: what do the words, “woman,” “man” and “sex” mean in the EqA?

The answer was simple, too. Those words have their ordinary biological meanings. For the purposes of the EqA, a gender recognition certificate does not change the holder’s sex.

In other words, so far as the Equality Act is concerned (the single piece of legislation most concerned with the circumstances in which sex either does does not matter), trans women are men.

That bears repetition. The Supreme Court has decided that for the purposes of the Equality Act, trans women are men.

That means that all the exceptions in the EqA that permit single-sex services, schools, associations etc have to be operated on the basis of biological sex.

It means that if a service (etc) lawfully provided for women only, it will be lawful to exclude all men from it. All men, however they dress, however they identify, and whatever paperwork they may hold.

It doesn't just mean that it will be lawful to exclude all men: it means it will be compulsory to exclude all men.

That's because if a space or service purports to be single-sex, but admits men if they say they are women, it won't be single sex any more, but mixed. So it won't be a proper operation of a single-sex exception at all, and its exclusion of all the other men will be unlawful.

There's no way around this. A service is either single sex, or mixed sex. If it's mixed sex, it can't lawfully exclude some men because they are men, while admitting others who say they are women. If it's single sex, by definition it excludes all men.

The idea that a genuinely single-sex service might still face challenge as indirect discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment is, to coin a phrase, an obvious absurdity.

The slam-dunk justification would be: "We can't let you in, or we'd be a mixed-sex service. We'd lose the protection of whatever exception we're using, and we'd have to let all the other men in as well."

Let's get one other thing straight, while we're at it.

Women have been gaslit, bullied, threatened, dismissed, smeared, and sometimes physically attacked for standing up for these rights to ordinary, everyday privacy and dignity.

We have been told that even asking politely for these rights is "transphobic" and "not worthy of respect in a democratic society". Even the right to talk about such things at work has had to be bitterly fought for, in case after case in the employment tribunals.

Now the Supreme Court has authoritatively ruled that sex is real, and sometimes matters. In other words, what trans activists have tried to paint as a niche belief is now beyond doubt the law of the land.

That vindication leaves a great deal of anger in its wake. Anyone who instructs their lawyers to try to find a way of wiggling round the clear, unequivocal ruling of the Supreme Court can expect to have a fight on their hands.

For too long, a vocal, bullying minority has terrorised employers and service-providers into operating everything that should be single-sex on a "trans inclusive" basis, for fear of lawsuits.

Well, women fighting for their single-sex spaces now unequivocally have the law on their side.

So employers and service-providers will probably face lawsuits for a while whatever they do. If tempted to continue to permit men to violate the privacy of their female colleagues or fellow-customers, they should ask themselves a simple question.

"Do we feel lucky?"