The UK’s Anti-Trans Ruling Is a Defeat for All Women
Even the self-described feminists celebrating the Supreme Court’s attempt to banish trans people from womanhood will pay a heavy price.
Trans rights supporters march in London after the UK Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling.
(Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing via Getty Images)
The UK Supreme Court’s transphobic ruling on the definition of “woman” last week is a defeat for all women—even, ultimately, the self-described feminists celebrating it, and the women who will gain in the short term from their alliance with the carceral state.
Following the ruling, J.K. Rowling, the world’s richest author and perhaps its most prominent transphobe, tweeted a photo of herself enjoying a cigar and a bourbon on her $15 million superyacht, toasting what she called “TERF VE Day,” in reference to the acronym “trans-exclusionary radical feminism” and the surrender of German military operations that heralded “Victory in Europe” 80 years ago. “I love it when a plan comes together,” Rowling added.
Rowling had a very particular reason to celebrate; she personally bankrolled the legal campaign by the anti-trans group For Women Scotland that led to the Supreme Court decision. But she was not alone; all over the world, Rowling’s fellow cisfeminist activists popped champagne and congratulated themselves on “reality winning,” imagining themselves, too, perhaps, to be victorious powers in World War II, triumphant over fascism.
Try as they might to wrap themselves in the antifascist flag, though, these activists are hailing a decision that represents a ghoulish culmination of fascistic “family values” agitation in women’s name—something it achieves by stomping on a tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority.
This is nothing new, either; for over two decades, at the highest levels of Britain’s state and cultural establishment, the articulation of cissexist policy has flowed not only from antifeminist politicians’ lips but also from trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who have used every conceivable queerphobic and fascist trope against trans women—pervert, groomer, pedophile, fetishist, rapist, barbarian, deceiver, interloper, parasite—to achieve their end.
The Supreme Court’s 88-page judgment declares that trans women whose affirmed gender had been legally recognized by the UK government will no longer be considered women under existing equality laws. Suddenly, in other words, the document that someone living in that country has used for the past 21 years to secure the state’s recognition of their (changed) sex—“for all purposes”—no longer applies in many segregated contexts such as sports, hospital wards, and university accommodation.
It no longer protects trans dignity on public boards, either, which is what the For Women Scotland appeal was originally about: The court, in its own words, was considering “whether the appointment of a trans woman with a GRC [Gender Recognition Certificate] counts as the appointment of a woman.” Last Wednesday, Lord Patrick Hodge, deputy president of the Supreme Court, announced that no, trans women don’t count. Trans people make up roughly half a percent of Britain’s population, and only a tiny fraction of them—about 9,000—have acquired the aforementioned certificate since it was made available in 2004 following the passage of the country’s Gender Recognition Act. But the ruling now elevates them to the status of an existential threat.
Current Issue
Astonishingly, the ruling specifies that what it calls “women living in the male gender”—i.e., trans men, and cis women whose appearance is deemed masculine—“could also be excluded” alongside cis men, from women’s spaces. “Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies,” clarified the leading anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater; “That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to ladies.” Forstater’s comments underscore the ultimate goal of TERFs and other transphobes: to expunge trans people from public life.
Predictably, the all-white, majority-male panel of judges, who heard from no trans people or groups at all in connection with the case, insist that their destruction of trans women’s legal standing qua women vis-à-vis the UK Equality Act is not a defeat for the trans community at all. Trans people in Britain are still protected as trans people by the separate Gender Recognition Act, so the apologists argue; thus, no one loses. But given that institutions are already scrambling to impose penalties on all and any persons suspected of trespassing on the “wrong” side of sex-segregated facilities—if for whatever reason they cannot, or will not, provide proof of assigned sex at birth—it’s unclear to me if anyone really believes this.
The fact, already now, is this: If I am perceived not to be what I say I am, and I don’t have the relevant documents, I can be strip-searched by male transport police, and legally barred from single-sex spaces. Trans people will, of course, continue to live lives of authenticity, but make no mistake: Everyone’s bodily autonomy is curtailed (especially those of us who, cis or trans, are poor, undocumented, racialized, intersex, gender non-conforming) by the cisfeminist diktat against non-cis humanity’s existence in public.
The decades-long coordinated attack on trans rights paves the way for the unraveling of the Equality Act as a whole, and the dismantling of every (limited but important) legislative gain for social justice achieved since 1998’s explosive “Lawrence Inquiry” into institutional and police racism in the UK. The playbook is now all set to merge with the American one “defending women against gender ideology extremism” (per the White House’s executive order of January, which seeks to make human sexuation, as it were, great again).
Hitherto, to suggest as much has typically incurred incandescent indignation on the part of feminism’s Brexiteers—the self-styled anti-woke left-liberal single-issue cissexists whose reactionary brand has long been hegemonic in the UK. This camp has long promoted itself as profoundly un-American. But, increasingly, its hatred of the Black, abolitionist, gender-abundant, utopian international left supersedes its patriotism, leading it to align itself with MAGA (unlikely inheritor of the “true” feminism the left abandoned) without shame.
The rationale offered for the retraction of trans people’s right to be men and women in society (rather than un-men and un-women) boils down to the word “biology.” Yet the word does not appear in the Equality Act, and the judge explicitly declines to define it, declaring that the “biological characteristics” corresponding to the “plain and unambiguous words [‘man’ and ‘woman’] are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation.” As the archivist Morgan Page summarized it acidly, “apparently the UK Supreme Court will know women when they see them,” this being the litmus test for pornography put forward by the US Supreme Court in the 1960s.
The comparison to obscenity law is no idle one. “Deep in the judgment,” noted the barrister Dave Renton, “is an idea of trans people as moral contaminants.” For half a century, the drive to purify womanhood of perversity has indeed undergirded the minority branch of Anglo American women’s liberationism that, in 2008, was dubbed “TERF.” (A better label than “TERFism,” in my view, would have been “cisfeminism” or “cultural feminism,” since there really is nothing radical about the ideology, even though it is feminist.)
One lurid antecedent of the feminist misogyny—yes!—at the heart of TERFism is the ecofeminist theologian Mary Daly’s luridly femmephobic 1978 screed Gyn/Ecology: the Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism, which pours infinitely more contempt on femininity and “artificiality” than it does on patriarchy. Expounded via lynch mob–esque interventions in lesbian spaces by figures like Sheila Jeffreys in England and Robin Morgan in the United States, this fringe feminism was considered reactionary by most radical feminists already in 1973.
Preferring the term “gender-critical,” 21st-century TERFs have protested for years that TERF is a misogynistic slur; still, the more of British society they’ve captured, the more they’ve grown content with the moniker. “Welcome to Team TERF,” gloats UnHerd every time an A-lister turns transphobe. “2023 is the year of the TERF,” declares the far-right rally Let Women Speak. “We will fight,” jokes Rowling in another revealing effort to claim Churchillian glory for her cause, “on the beaches of TERF Island.” The copious “strong borders” imagery readily reveals TERFism to be a female cultural nationalism or sexual nationalism, premised—Brexit-style—on the securitization of the tacitly white and innocent body politic against dysgenic gender “refugees.”
The pogrom-inciting tenor of what has been called “the trans debate” was normalized from the get-go by feminism’s moral alibi and the nepotism of Britain’s commentariat class. The hyper-respectability of many of its ringleaders surely didn’t hurt, either. Helen Joyce, one of the most influential trans-annihilationists currently heralding the Supreme Court decision as a personal win, is a former editor at The Economist. Her buddy the celebrity anti-trans philosopher Kathleen Stock is a royally honored academic. Rowling, of course, is a national treasure. Meanwhile, the publishing industry has glutted itself on trans-“skeptic” books just asking questions—not just by Joyce and Stock—and these all receive rave reviews in the UK Guardian. (Back in 2018, the US office of that newspaper was even moved to denounce its British counterpart over its participation in the self-styled “feminist” moral panic.)
The riddle of “TERF Island” continues to intrigue those international onlookers who intuit feminism and transphobia to be opposites. Unlike the supposedly very different—crassly “polarized” and “partisan”—makeup of the American fight for trans rights, in Britain it’s a point of pride that genteelly genocidal anti-gender-ism cuts across Conservative, Labour, and feminist milieus. (Right on cue, the Labour government hailed the Supreme Court decision, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying he was “really pleased” with the “clarity” it provided, and his spokesperson saying that Starmer no longer believes that trans women are women.)
Hearteningly, on Saturday, the UK also saw widespread gigantic anti-TERF protests of the Supreme Court decision, suggesting some degree of popular rejection of the cissexist “common sense” that was explicitly deployed in the court. This epistemic pseudo-realism that we nowadays so often see violently invoked by figures as superficially disparate as J.K. Rowling and D.J. Trump—on matters ranging from woman-definition to immigration—is, to borrow from the historian Ann Stoler, a colonial common sense. This is also paradoxically why TERFism, like all fascist discourses and all imperial and settler-colonial horizons, imagines itself upside-down, as somehow preyed-upon, bullied, colonized, and at risk of genocidal erasure at the hands of the subjugated group it dehumanizes.
More pressing matters than metaphysical and/or state recognition of one’s sex often preoccupy individuals in the trans community. The core scourges of trans life in the UK include: poverty, medical under-service, labor market exclusions, sexual violence, housing discrimination, and a media climate of brutal mockery, scapegoating, and stigma.
Conversely, in the baseless narrative propagated via the British establishment’s long-standing hate fest around trans-ness, trans women constitute a powerful, sinister sexual threat to ladies, lesbians, and little boys and girls, all of whom are at the mercy of this phantasmic social plague of predatory and fetishistic “men” brandishing pieces of paper that falsely declare them female so as to access “single-sex spaces” where they don’t belong and carry out all manner of evil. (Trans men were usually, until now, an afterthought in TERF politics: harmless at best, traitors to womankind at worst. Thanks to For Women Scotland, though, they might not be able to legally pee in public at all.)
In the multifaceted fight against fascism ahead of us, many voices will be raised to re-explain at length, again and again, why trans women are women and trans men are men. Debunking the bad sexological science that well-spoken eugenicists like Helen Joyce propound is certainly a worthwhile task, since it often dazzles the uninitiated and gives pause to the uncertain. But the more important priority, for my money, remains the refusal of TERFs’ very terrain of argument.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
Feminism does not, and has never, in fact, required a definition of “woman.” To the contrary, while “enemy feminisms” (as I call them) have repeatedly attempted to ontologize and naturalize sex, other feminisms, over the centuries, have pursued the struggle against sexual hierarchy as an all-encompassing utopian endeavor whose present and future constituencies are necessarily moot: Much of revolutionary feminism, for example, remains agnostic about whether “women” will definitely exist after patriarchy, especially given how many female subjects—Indigenous, enslaved, disabled, queer, sex-working—have been excluded from womanhood in the past.
Cisness brutalizes us all. The border guards of sex are the enemies of human liberation, and we fight them best by refusing to debate the fairness, let alone the accuracy, of their borders in the first place. “Womanhood is not assigned. It is lived, sacred, and sovereign,” as the joint statement by the Muslim-led feminist Transfuturist and Ad’iyah collectives following the Supreme Court ruling reminds us. “We do not and will never recognize the authority of any government court or institution to determine our legitimacy. They do not know us—and they can never name us.”
Update: This piece originally said that the Supreme Court panel that issued the ruling was all-male. In fact, it was majority-male.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.
In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.
We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.
This is the journalism that matters in 2025. But we can’t do this without you. As a reader-supported publication, we rely on the support of generous donors. Please, help make our essential independent journalism possible with a donation today.
In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
More from The Nation
His papacy set many new precedents for the church, and his successor will be chosen from a group that he himself quietly transformed.
A conversation with legal historian Mary Ziegler on her new book about the anti-abortion movement’s fight to establish constitutional rights for embryos and fetuses.
The US medical profession’s long history of complicity with state violence has prepared it for compliance with Trump’s authoritarian orders.
Pope Francis, who has died at 88, fought for economic justice with a consistency that distinguished him from the elites of his time.
The coach of the Golden State Warriors stands up to bullies like Donald Trump. Let’s hope that others in the NBA will follow suit.
Very real pain is about to be inflicted on students, staff, researchers, and faculty. At least for now, most of the people here are willing to bear that price.