This is the opening to my essay on the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act, published in the Observer on 27 April 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.

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The debate over the Supreme Court judgment on sex and gender and the meaning of “woman” within the Equality Act 2010 has been almost as illuminating as the judgment itself. The court affirmed that the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act refers to “biological and not certificated sex”; that is, to those born female, not to those who may have changed their gender identity, including through a gender recognition certificate (GRC). This will have major implications, acknowledging as legal the implementation of single-sex spaces and categories, whether in refuges, hospitals or sport.

What the Supreme Court settled was a legal question, not the wider moral and political issues at the heart of the sex/gender debate. Yet, in much of the discussion over the past week, it was as if politicians, not least Labour ministers, had needed the judges to help sort out their own answers to those more profound questions, too.

“Do you believe that a trans woman is a woman?” Keir Starmer was asked in a TV interview. “I think the Supreme Court has answered that,” he replied. “A woman is an adult female – the court has made that clear.” Clarity about the law is welcome; but one’s moral or political stance should not derive from the law as it stands. It should, rather, be the foundation of lawmaking. The failure of too many politicians to understand this exposes a void in our political process.

From a moral and political perspective, the distinction between sex and gender is important for both trans people and for women. That distinction is at the heart of “gender dysphoria”, the distress that some people experience because of a perceived mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. It is vital, too, for securing equality for those who identify themselves by their gender, not their sex. For women, the discrimination they are forced to confront and the violence they face derive from social perceptions of sexual differences. “Women’s rights” are, in essence, sex-based rights.

To take equality seriously, we must accept that rights matter in relation to both sex and gender, though not necessarily in the same contexts.

Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.