London, Apr 16 (PTI) The UK Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled on the legal definition of a woman to settle a long-drawn dispute in Scotland over the devolved government’s stand on sex-based protections for transgender women.

Lord Patrick Hodge, the Deputy President of the country’s highest court, read out the five-judge bench’s unanimous ruling that the definition of the terms woman and sex in the UK’s Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

The Supreme Court appeal by the For Women Scotland campaign group had challenged the Scottish government’s view that transgender people with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) are entitled to sex-based protections under the act.

“The Supreme Court unanimously allows the appeal. It holds that the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex,” the judgment notes.

Lord Hodge added: “We counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not.” The court reiterated that transgender people still have legal protection from discrimination.

A GRC is a document that allows trans people to change their gender legally. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 established that an adult can receive a GRC if they provide evidence that they have or have had gender dysphoria, have lived as their acquired gender for two years and intend to continue to do so until death.

In 2022, the campaign group challenged the lawfulness of the new statutory guidance, saying the definition of a “woman” refers to biological sex, meaning that a trans woman with a GRC (a biological male with a GRC in the female gender) is not considered a woman under the Equality Act 2010.

The government, as respondent in the legal case, argued that the definition of a “woman” refers to “certificated sex”, meaning that it includes trans women with a GRC.

“The Scottish Government accepts today’s Supreme Court judgement. The ruling gives clarity between two relevant pieces of legislation passed at Westminster,” said Scottish First Minister John Swinney.

“We will now engage on the implications of the ruling. Protecting the rights of all will underpin our actions,” he said.

Women’s group campaigners had been fighting against the loss of protected spaces from those seeking to abuse transgender rights. The Supreme Court ruling is a watershed moment in settling the years-long Scottish legal battle, with UK-wide implications.

The judgment reads: “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man. Persons who share that protected characteristic for the purposes of the group-based rights and protections are persons of the same sex, and provisions that refer to protection for women necessarily exclude men.

“Although the word ‘biological’ does not appear in this definition, the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman. These are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation. Men and women are on the face of the definition only differentiated as a grouping by the biology they share with their group.” PTI AK PY PY