‘We no longer have to pretend that people can change sex’

A landmark ruling from the Supreme Court has confirmed that, under UK law, sex is a biological fact and men cannot become women just by having the right paperwork. Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to explain why this ruling changes everything. After years of abuse and demonisation, the so-called TERFs have finally been vindicated. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Fraser Myers: Can you unpack the Supreme Court decision for us?

Helen Joyce: Specifically, it was a judgment about the Equality Act, which is a portmanteau act that rolls all of the country’s anti-discrimination laws into one massive bundle. The trouble was that by the time the act was passed in 2010, we had another law, the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed people to get a piece of paper that changed their sex for legal purposes. The question the Supreme Court had to decide was, is the Equality Act one of those purposes?

On the face of it, the answer seemed to be yes, because there’s a line in the Gender Recognition Act that says ‘for all purposes’. But if that’s the case, you turn sex-discrimination provisions into something that applies to two mixed-sex categories, because there are men in the women bucket and women in the men bucket.

Women have been fighting for years to get this fixed. We wanted sex-discrimination provisions to work for women under the Equality Act the same way they had done before the Gender Recognition Act.

Myers: Is it fair to call this a win for biological reality?

Joyce: It’s a vindication of two things: biological reality, and the women who have been fighting every figure in the establishment who said we were wrong.
It’s important to understand that the Supreme Court judges didn’t say ‘biological reality matters’. That’s not their job. What they did was a very close reading of the two laws, how words have to be interpreted, and how to deal with knots in the Equality Act that were introduced when the Gender Recognition Act became law.

Why did the highest court in the land reach this conclusion? Because reality matters, and you can’t do the job of protecting human rights unless you do so on the basis of reality.

Myers: What would it have meant if the other side won?

Joyce: Well, everyone thought we would lose, and I have to say that I thought we would. I was expecting it to be a loss, with the Supreme Court saying the law really did destroy the rights of women, and in particular lesbians, and parliament now needed to sort the mess out. But what we got was a 10-out-of-10 win.

Myers: What does this mean for gay rights?

Joyce: There were three things on our side. There was For Women Scotland, who pleaded with the court to understand that women’s rights are very recent, very hard won, and they were being destroyed. Sex Matters provided the statutory interpretation – namely, how the court could find a path through the conflicting legislation.

But the ‘lesbian interveners’ in the case did something really important, too. There had always been an exception that allowed women to operate single-sex spaces, but it was incredibly complex. There was no exception for associations. So, if 25 people or more belonged to a lesbian association, that association had no right at all to exclude heterosexual men with certificates saying they were women. In effect, it destroyed lesbian spaces, and the court took that very seriously.

The judgment included a beautiful line, which said that ‘people are not sexually orientated towards those in possession of a certificate’. As I said, biological reality underpins our human rights, and that’s why the court ended up where it did.

Myers: Have we finally reached peak trans?

Joyce: I really think we have. Now people know for certain that they do not have let men into women-only spaces, even the men with certificates. We’ve returned to the status quo ante.

You go back to where we were before the Gender Recognition Act, before you started pretending that we could change sex. You run a space now on the basis of what you can see with your own eyes, and have always been able to see. There are two types of human beings, men and women.

The ruling also has a simple message for anyone who has a policy based on sex. It doesn’t matter if the policy has to do with women’s toilets and changing rooms at work, an NHS hospital with single-sex wards, or sporting competitions that separate women from men. Unless the policies are basing these distinctions on biological sex, there is no legal basis for them.

Myers: Do you feel proud to live on TERF Island?

Joyce: I absolutely do. I feel vindicated. I still haven’t come off cloud nine, frankly.

Also, it’s been really fun seeing people who did not agree with us, who called us bigots, who said we were fighting a culture war, now say that this is what they always believed. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said on X after the judgment that he had always thought single-sex spaces should be run on the basis of biology. His post received a community note because it wasn’t true – he had whipped Labour MPs into voting for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have introduced gender self-identification.

I feel great about that. Everybody has had to sheepishly head over to the right side. It’s like Sun Tzu’s famous golden bridge. They got to go over the bridge and pretend they were never on the wrong side.

Fraser Myers was talking to Helen Joyce. Watch the full conversation here: