According to The Guardian, “Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the ruling on Wednesday by the UK supreme court that under the Equality Act ’woman’ only referred to biological women was ’enormously consequential’. Lady Falkner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday morning the commission was working on a fresh code of practice on women’s spaces, which would have legal force, to confirm what the new rules would be. ’We are going to have a new statutory code of practice, ‘statutory’ meaning it will be the law of the land, it will be interpreted by courts as the law of the land. We’re hoping we’re going to have that by the summer,” she said. She said the court’s judgment meant only biological women could use single-sex changing rooms and women’s toilets, or participate in women-only sporting events and teams, or be placed in women’s wards in hospitals.”

To one side of the feminist spectrum, the ruling is a betrayal of trans rights and a capitulation to an essentialist, medicalised understanding of womanhood. For others, it is a necessary reassertion of the reality of sex-based oppression and the legal protections that flow from it.

As Anticapitalist Resistance (ACR) member Paris Wilder and RS21 columnist June argue, the stakes go far beyond quotas. The judgment codifies a fixed, binary notion of sex and excludes even trans people with a Gender Recognition Certificate from legal recognition as women in contexts governed by the Equality Act.

Wilder warns that we are witnessing “a fundamental attack on the human rights of trans people,” at a time of rising transphobic violence, declining healthcare access, and moral panic about gender non-conformity. June adds: “This ruling is not about toilets. It is not about safety. It is not about rights. It is about eliminating any public presence of trans women at all.”

Wilder draws on feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who insists that feminism depends on the question “what is a woman?” remaining open. “The court’s answer to the question is both medicalised and reductive,” Wilder writes. “Being a woman entails having an XX chromosome, large gametes and the ability to produce children. It is a literal definition of the female body’s function under capitalism.”

This has implications not just for trans women, but for feminism itself. Wilder continues: “The term ‘woman’ is the site of a political struggle. That struggle is made real and lived in different ways by different women. Feminism must remain a space in which we contest the meaning of what it is to be a woman.”

June similarly situates the ruling within what she calls “a global reactionary movement,” tying trans exclusion to broader anti-feminist, anti-queer, and authoritarian politics. “Trans people are cut off from healthcare, subjected to violence, and depicted by the press as perverts or threats,” she writes. “And now the law affirms that view.”

Yet other feminists defend the judgment—and the struggle that led to it—as rooted in a longstanding materialist analysis of women’s oppression.

Ruth Serwotka, former convenor of the Socialist Feminist Network and co-founder of Womens’ Space UK, maintains that the case was about defending existing legal protections, not bigotry. “It’s actually very clear,” she says. “Sex, gender reassignment, and sexual orientation are all protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, and the guidance by the Scottish government undermined that.”

Serwotka argues that the left has too often failed to engage with the material realities of female oppression. “The only radical political argument to be made in relation to women’s oppression is that it is material and that it stems from women’s biology and the efforts to control women’s biology.”

She acknowledges that trans people suffer discrimination, but maintains that conflating sex and gender identity risks rendering sex-based protections incoherent. “What I found in Scotland was that a lot of feminists had been gaslit for a very long time. They knew that their own lives and their experiences of sexism and oppression were based on being female. But they were being told constantly that sex doesn’t matter.”

Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War and former Socialist Workers Party leader, supports the court ruling and defends gender-critical feminism against claims of right-wing collusion. “I do not accept the idea that this is about bigotry,” she says. “It’s about the law and how it operates. Women, who are biologically female, have the right to protection. That doesn’t mean you’re saying anything bad about anyone else.”

German says the left has ceded too much ground to identity politics, losing focus on class and material inequality. “The reality is that women still face huge discrimination—in the workplace, in terms of violence, in politics, in every aspect of life. If we can’t even define who we’re talking about, how can we fight that?”

June forcefully rejects this framing. “There’s a belief, increasingly common, that people who are trans women, or don’t pass as cis women, are ‘male invaders,’” she writes. “This is a slur, not a position. It opens the door to violence.” She views the legal definition of womanhood based on chromosomes and reproduction as both cruel and arbitrary. “It creates a nightmare. A legal person who can never fully exist in law.”

Yet those left feminists who support the judgment resist this framing. They argue that the 2004 Gender Recognition Act has been used to subvert the intention and letter of the Equality Act by trying to elevate one protected characteristic (trans) above others (both sex and sexual orientation).
Serwotka, insists that "There is nothing in this [April 2025 Supreme Court Ruling] judgment that undermines the human rights of trans people.” She argues that the ruling maintains legal protections for trans individuals under the category of “gender reassignment,” as well as “sex,” and that “no one has the right to promote their own rights above the rights of others.” For Serwotka, the legal clarification offers a necessary balance: between trans rights and women’s sex-based rights.
Lindsey German concurs, arguing that the judgment has simply reaffirmed a distinction that was always intended in the law: “The Equality Act gives protection to sex, sexual orientation and gender reassignment. That still remains and it applies to every stage of transition and prohibits discrimination against trans men and women.” She warns against the framing of this judgment as “bigotry,” calling it “an insult to women.”

While Serwotka insists that women-only and lesbian-only spaces are essential gains of the feminist movement, RS21 writer and trans activist June considers the protection of lesbian-only spaces “bizzare.”

On of the few areas where both strands of left feminism agree is the exploitation of some women’s concerns by reactionary women linked to conservative and far right agendas. Serwotka strongly cautions against allowing “being gender critical” to override other foundational feminist principles. She writes: “Unfortunately, I do not feel this is a view of others who claim to share the feminist cause… Some women claiming to be ‘gender critical’ embrace social movements that are antithetical to the interests of women.” She calls out the alliances between groups like Standing for Women and the American religious right, which she says “manifested themselves in opposition to BLM, in support of alliances with anti-abortion groups, in the advocacy for patriarchal family systems.” These alliances, she concludes, are “not just unfortunate… [but] a sophisticated and deliberate attempt to appropriate elements of feminism and deliver it as a populist cause to our enemies.”

Adam Novak