By Ben Cooke.
The UK Supreme Court’s decision today is legally incomprehensible and morally deeply questionable. More than that, it’s just very stupid: like all anti-trans ideology, barely any thought seems to have gone into it.
By insisting that sex-based rights are assigned solely to biological sex, we’re left with a fairly obvious next question. What’s biological sex, then?
I mean, this decision pretty much demands a legal definition, right? Great! Where do intersex individuals sit? Let’s not go pretending they don’t exist, there are millions of them. What do we do when a cis-passing trans woman is legitimately discriminated against for being a woman? Let the misogynist off with a pat on the head because she doesn’t have the legal protection of the Equal Rights Act? How do we square the fact that more trans men can pass than trans women, living largely invisibly as men and ostensibly benefitting from male privilege in a patriarchal society while now legally considered to be women? Do any of these anti-trans campaigners even have an opinion about trans men? Because it seems as though their bigotry is solely focused on trans women.
What this decision does do, is demonstrate how incompetent the Equal Rights Act is to protect human rights in the 21st century, a statement all the more damning considering it’s only fifteen years old. As it stands, the ramifications will be felt by the trans community – real people, with real lives – for decades.
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