What the UK’s decision on trans women got wrong. “biological sex” is not a term used in the Equality Act 2010, which only uses the term “sex”.  The Court nevertheless used this phrase 66 times in its judgment, and took it upon itself to provide a simplistic definition of the term, that is contrary to scientific and medical evidence. Indeed,  doctors at the British Medical Association have described the court’s decision as ‘scientifically illiterate’. Babies are assumed to be a particular sex when they are born based only on the appearance of their genitalia. That sex is then assigned to them and recorded on their birth certificate. However, it is widely accepted that sex is not a simple binary classificationbased solely on genitalia at birth. Sex encompasses a multitude of characteristics, including chromosomes, hormones and secondary sexual characteristics. Around the world, approximately one in 2,000 babies are born intersex, that is, they have innate sex characteristics that do not fit medical norms for female or male bodies. For these reasons, some countries, such as New Zealand, allow parents to record a child’s sex on their birth certificates as “indeterminate”, while others (e.g. Germany) allow parents to leave the sex category blank. The scientific community recognises that sex is a spectrum, and while biologists have been building a more nuanced view of sex, the UK decision demonstrates that judges there are yet to catch up. The Court stressed that its role was one of statutory interpretation i.e. to interpret the words in the Equality Act, but then went off on a tangent, using and defining words not in the Act, which undermines the entire decision. The decision is also flawed in its findings in relation to the provisions of the Equality Act that prohibit discrimination on the basis of breastfeeding. The judges found that the prohibition on discriminating against women who are breastfeeding supported their finding that women means only those born female, saying that breastfeeding “obviously applies to biological women only”. However, this is again flawed thinking and contrary to multiple studies that have found that trans women can successfully breastfeed. It will take some time for the practical implications of the ruling to be fully realised, but for now, it is being interpreted as meaning that trans people can be excluded from single-sex spaces such as toilets, change rooms and women’s refuges, without violating the Equality Act, which is actually going beyond the limited scope of the judgment.  This highlights the urgent need for Parliament to modernise the UK Equality Act to reflect contemporary knowledge and understandings of sex and gender. share.google/YqyUPPEeHIB9sgV…