Supreme Court Ruling on Sex in the Equality Act

On April 16th 2025, the UK Supreme Court published their judgment in the case of For Women Scotland vs. Scottish Ministers. You can read the judgement in full here.

It dealt with the meaning of the words “sex”, “man” and “woman” for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. The Supreme Court decided that in the Equality Act, all of those words have a “biological” meaning (although they did not really define what that means – other than “sex at birth”).

The ruling has had an enormous impact on the equality and human rights of trans people. In particular, it:

• removed legal gender recognition from trans women and trans men who have gender recognition certificates (GRCs), for the purposes of equality law. Previously, governments across the UK, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said that getting a GRC meant you were recognised under the Equality Act 2010 as the sex you’d transitioned to. Indeed it seems very clear that the intention of Parliament was that this would be one of the effects of getting a GRC.
• changed the interpretation of how trans people can (or can’t) use services provided separately to men and women. This has meant a huge number of organisations, services and public bodies have changed their policies to exclude trans people from all services that align with our gender identities. While there is still some disagreement on whether the ruling requires trans people to always be excluded from services and spaces provided separately to men and women in line with our gender identities, the EHRC has produced statutory guidance on the Equality Act saying this is the approach that should be taken.

We know that these changes are likely to have an enormous impact on trans people. To help us understand what is happening, and make sure we can make the case for changes to the law and policies to allow trans people to be treated as who we truly are, please let us know about any problems you are having by reporting them to TransActual’s gendered spaces tracker. You can let them know you’re happy for them to share your experiences with us.

See the pages below for more analysis and updates on the ruling itself, the EHRC’s Code of Practice for services, and some of the wider impacts of the decision.

Other impacts of the judgment

Other impacts and resources

While the Supreme Court judgment was about the Equality Act 2010, its impact has been much wider. Here is some of our work and statements responding to these:

• April 2025: The Convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Equality, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee wrote to us to ask about our response to the UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010, and our initial reflections on the implications of the judgment. You can read our letter outlining our initial thoughts and concerns here, as well a short follow-up after the EHRC’s “interim update” here.
• May 2025: We wrote a letter to the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body following their decision to ban trans women from women’s toilets and trans men from trans men’s toilets, detailing the impacts this will have on Scottish Democracy.
• July 2025: We published a human rights analysis on the impact of the Supreme Court judgment.
• September 2025: The Scottish Government updated their guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools to say that there must be separate toilets provided for boys and girls on the basis of “biological sex”. Read our statement on this here.
• March 2026: The Scottish Parliament voted to add “sex” as a characteristic to its existing hate crime legislation, borrowing the Supreme Court’s definition of “sex” meaning “biological sex at birth”. Read our statement on this here.
• June 2026: The Outer House of the Court of Session ruled that the Scottish Prison Service’s policy on managing trans prisoners (performing individual risk assessment to see whether they should be held on the men’s or women’s estate) was unlawful. Read our statement on this here.