UK Supreme Court Transgender Judgment Has Broad Implications

Men who identify as female will not be allowed to use female bathrooms or compete in women’s sports following ruling that sex is binary, equalities boss said.

Screen grab of judges at the Supreme Court in London, handing down their judgment on the legal definition of a woman on April 16, 2025. PA Video/PA

News Analysis

Men who identify as transgender will not be legally allowed to use single-sex female toilets, changing rooms or compete in women’s sports following a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the head of Britain’s equalities watchdog said on April 17.

Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Chairwoman Baroness Kishwer Falkner said the ruling, which came the day before on April 16, was “enormously consequential” and brought clarity to previously legally ambiguous areas, as she vowed to pursue organisations which do not update their policies.

The highest court in the land found that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex,” meaning that men with a gender recognition certificate (GRC), which legally recognises their gender as female, can be excluded from single-sex spaces if “proportionate.”

Women’s groups, gay rights organisations and their supporters have been celebrating the ruling, handed down unanimously by all five judges who heard the appeal brought by For Women Scotland (FWS) against the Scottish government, while businesses and government departments grapple over what it will mean in practical terms.

Alba Party MSP Ash Regan, who quit as an SNP Scottish Government minister in 2022 over the gender reforms, has lodged a motion in Holyrood calling on the Scottish Government to take “urgent action” to make sure public bodies are “following the law” and putting the ruling into practice.

There are a number of ongoing legal actions across the UK, including industrial tribunals such as the case of the Darlington nurses and nurse Sandie Peggie from Fife, who were forced to share changing rooms with a trans-identifying male colleague, which will be impacted by the Supreme Court judgment.

NHS nurse Jennifer Melle is taking legal action against the Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust after she was disciplined for refusing to address a transgender paedophile as “Mr.”

The EHRC is a non-departmental public body, responsible for enforcing the Equality Act in England, Wales and Scotland.

Northern Ireland has similar bodies responsible for the law around discrimination.

Claims Judgment ‘Brings Clarity’

Falkner, a cross-bench peer, said organisations should be “taking care” to look at the “very readable“ 88-page judgment to ”understand that it does bring clarity, helps them decide what they should do.”

Asked if it was now the case that trans-identifying men cannot take part in women’s sport, she told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, “Yes, it is.”

On the matter of changing rooms and toilets, Falkner said: “Single-sex services like changing rooms must be based on biological sex.

“If a male person is allowed to use a women-only service or facility, it isn’t any longer single-sex, then it becomes a mixed-sex space.

“But I have to say, there’s no law that forces organisations, service providers, to provide a single-sex space, and there is no law against them providing a third space, an additional space, such as unisex toilets for example, or changing rooms.”

She suggested trans rights organisations “should be using their powers of advocacy to ask for those third spaces” rather than fighting for members to be allowed into the facilities meant for the opposite sex.

Her comments prompted concerns from some that non-gendered spaces could become the norm in future, rather than existing alongside separate single-sex spaces.

It is also unclear how keeping trans-identifying males out of women’s private spaces could be policed, with businesses such as gyms and shops yet to make any announcements of policy changes.

The commission has said it is working “at pace to incorporate the implications of this judgment” into the code for public bodies setting out their duties under the Equality Act, and is expecting to lay an updated statutory code of practice before Parliament by the summer.

Falkner said the commission evaluates when the law is not followed by organisations and can speak to those bodies, or “use enforcement, compliance tools or whatever, we will be continuing to do that.”

NHS Policy and Legal Battles

She said the NHS will “have to change” its 2019 policy around single-sex wards, which states that trans-identifying people “should be accommodated according to their presentation.”

Falkner said the court ruling means there is now “no confusion” and the NHS “can start to implement the new legal reasoning and produce their exceptions forthwith.”

NHS officials said they were already in the process of updating the guidance but the judgment will be considered as they move forward.

Care minister Karin Smyth told “BBC Breakfast” that she hopes the ruling will draw a line under arguments over gender recognition, but accepted more “homework” will have to be done on what it will mean in practice.

She said that “the NHS will obviously be complying” with the judgment along with ”every other public body.”

Criminal Justice and Sports

British Transport Police (BTP) said on Thursday that it had adopted a new “interim position” which will see trans people held in custody strip searched by an officer in line with their birth sex.

While Scotland has its own criminal justice system separate to the rest of the UK, equalities law is not a devolved matter, which meant the UK-wide Supreme Court held jurisdiction over the case between FWS and the Scottish government. The judgment is likely to call time on the highly controversial practice north of the border of locking up trans-identifying male prisoners alongside vulnerable women inmates in the female prison estate.

The Supreme Court judgment described how misinterpretations of the 2010 Equality Act have led to “incoherence and impracticability” in the “operations of provisions relating to women’s fair participation in sport.”

A number of stories which have hit the headlines include a recent all-men’s ladies’ pool final, a biological male in a female Cambridge crew competing at the 2015 Boat Race, and instances of women losing medals to trans-identifying men, notably in cycling.

The Supreme Court judgment means that sporting bodies and educational establishments will be in breach of the law if they continue to treat transgender-identified athletes as though they are the opposite sex.

The five Supreme Court justices decided that it would be “incoherent” for transgender-identified men to be considered as women under the law, and that the Scottish government had been misapplying the Equality Act in doing so.

Lord Hodge told the court: “In our view, the absence of coherence within the statute, and the practical problems which arise demonstrate that that interpretation is not correct.”

The judges noted that protections for pregnant women set out in the Equality Act would collapse unless “man” and “woman” had a biological meaning.

Certificates Versus Reality

The judgment found that there were clear dangers in recognising certificated sex having the same legal status as biological sex, such as for gay people and particularly for lesbians, who could be required to accept transgender-identifying males into their groups if a GRC was accepted as making a man legally a woman.

Same-sex attracted people are given protection as a minority group under the equalities act, in the same way as women are as the historically oppressed and more physically vulnerable sex, with the LGB Alliance charity having intervened in the case on behalf of its lesbian members to support FWS in its historic win.

The Supreme Court justices made clear that trans-identifying people remain legally protected from discrimination under the Equality Act on the basis of their “gender identity” whether they possess a GRC or not.

However, some are now questioning whether there is any point in people obtaining the £5 certificate, when it has effectively been branded legally meaningless.

GRCs will still serve the administrative purposes they were originally intended for, including allowing transgender-identifying individuals to change their sex on birth certificates.

More than 8,000 gender recognition certificates have been granted in the UK since their introduction under the Gender Recognition Act of 2005.

A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required to obtain the piece of paper, and the applicant should have been living in their acquired gender for at least two years.

Numbers obtaining the certificates have risen sharply in recent years.

Some 1,088 were granted in 2023-2o24, up sharply from 871 in 2022-23 and 495 in 2021-2022.

Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of certificates granted in 2023-2024 were to people who had been born from 1990 onwards, with almost one in five (18 percent) having been been born in 2000 or later.

The ruling has put to bed demands by the Scottish Government, and trans-rights lobbyists such as Stonewall, that these certificates should allow transgender-identifying men to be treated as if they were biological women under the law.