Transgender women are not 'women' under equalities law, Supreme Court judges rule
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00:00The central question on this appeal is the meaning of the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010.
00:10Do those terms refer to biological women or biological sex?
00:16Or is a woman to be interpreted as extending to a trans woman with a gender recognition certificate?
00:24By that I mean a person born male who now possesses a gender recognition certificate amending her gender to female.
00:33And sex to be interpreted as including what I will refer to as certificated sex.
00:41The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
00:54But we counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another.
01:03It is not.
01:04As I shall explain later in this hand-down speech, the Equality Act 2010 gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment,
01:20but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender.
01:31This is the application of the principle of discrimination by association.
01:36Those statutory protections are available to transgender people whether or not they possess a gender recognition certificate.