'We won't stop' - Scottish women's group defiant ahead of landmark Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court is set to decide what a woman is – at least in legal terms – in the culmination of a battle by a group of Scottish activists who opposed the Scottish National Party’s gender recognition reforms.

For Women Scotland (FWS) took the Scottish government to court over its plans to change the Gender Recognition Act – which would have made it easier for any man to declare himself legally a woman.

The group is seeking to overturn a 2023 ruling by Scottish courts that treating someone with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) as a woman under the Equality Act is lawful. The UK’s most senior judges will pass their verdict on Wednesday morning.

The case is likely to have huge ramifications for women’s rights and the extent to which they are impacted by gender recognition legislation throughout the UK. Most crucially – whether having a gender recognition certificate, a legal sex change, entitles a male to be treated as a female with regard to the provision of single sex spaces.

There is no requirement for men to have any physical procedures before being given a GRC. Applicants need to be at least 18 years old and submit two medical reports. They also must prove they have ‘lived full-time’ in their acquired gender for at least two years – but critics have questioned what that means in reality.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will announce its decision on whether men and women who have obtained a GRC will be treated, for all purposes, as their new legal gender under the Equality Act in Great Britain.

While the Equality Act does not apply in Northern Ireland, the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) does, and the implications of the Supreme Court ruling in the province won’t be immediately clear. Stormont’s Department of Health says the GRA “gives transsexual people the legal right to live in their acquired gender”.

Marion Calder – co-director of FWS – wants the definition of sex under the equality act to be based solely on biological sex. She argues that any other ruling by the court will result in huge damage to women’s rights to single sex spaces – and consequences for protections for sexual orientation.

Ms Calder, co-director of FWS told the News Letter: “Even if we lose [on Wednesday], we won’t stop until we get our rights back. This is not about further rights, its about getting back to where we were 10 years ago. We need to do that before we can even get to properly addressing issues like violence against women and girls”.

“Parliamentarians that should have known better saw this new shiny thing, this new progressive aspect, when passing the gender recognition act. They really didn’t consider or imagine what would happen in 10 or 15 years.

“This was done for men. They never even imagined that females were going to change their sex. They didn’t imagine that quite a large proportion [of men] would now be identifying as non-binary and saying ‘I am who I say I am and that means going into female spaces’”, she said.

Marion Calder says there is no need for the UK’s current gender recognition laws at all. “Lots of things have changed. So the question is, why does it need to actually exist?” she said.

Asked why it was Scottish women who had challenged the impact of transgender laws on women’s legal protections, she blamed the Scottish National Party’s attitudes to the issue.

“We had the mad SNP that jumped on this. They got ahead of the law. We have a massive problem within Scotland because of the way our third sector and charitable sector work. Some are 90 to 100 per cent funded by the Scottish government – and it ends up with this circle about who came up with the ideas. Was it the NGOs, the civil service or the Scottish government?”.

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