Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has praised today’s Supreme Court’s ruling, saying the law has finally caught up with science.
“Supreme Court rules that a woman is legally defined as … a woman,” he said.
“Congratulations. And ‘The concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man’. Yes, the science was settled in the Precambrian [era]. Nice that the law has finally caught up.”
How did it all happen?
In the Autumn of 2024 , the Scottish Feminist Network and For Women in Scotland (FWC) group were granted the right to a judicial review of the Scottish Nationalist/ Scottish Greens sponsored Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) by the UK Supreme Court.
FWC’s request challenged Holyrood’s policy that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate in their chosen gender has the Protected Characteristic of sex. Their point was that the inclusion of a man’s chosen woman gender identity alongside the female biological sex in the Equality Act was unworkable.
FWC were seeking clarity that sex was always meant to be interpreted as biological sex when the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act were first drafted.
Scottish Ministers – which include trans activist Greens MSPs – did finally accept that, as a point of law, there was a need for certainty as to the definition of the term ‘woman’. They agreed the case could be brought before the UK Supreme Court.
But how and why the UK team of experts and lawyers originally involved in the drafting of the pioneer Gender Recognition Act (GRA) got into such a muddle about the definition of sex in the first place ?
An explanation came to light from Robert Wintermute, professor of human rights law at King’s College London as he took part in the drafting of the United Nations guide entitled the “Yogyarkarta Principles”. This document was adopted in November 2006 at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia.
Signed off by a group of human rights experts, lawyers, and transsexual activists ( a terminology used at the time for transgender people ), Professor Wintermute came forward to recognise that the guide had failed to consider that transwomen would seek to confuse sex with gender and thus give them access to female-only spaces.
Wintermute has since confessed what he did not then consider the implications of Principle 3 of the ‘Yogyarkarta Principles’ in particular being in conflict with women’s sex-based rights and that those rights would ever be eradicated by trans rights.
Although the UN panel was co-chaired by Sonia Correa, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls and Brazillian sexual rights activist, she was reported to have refused to refer to the word ‘woman’ and ‘women’s rights’ because she believed that sex was a 19th century and a Western social construct.
Straight out of her post-modernist academic training, Correa considered that expressing the views that biological differences between the sexes were backward and “fundamentalist”.
As a result of such ideologically muddled identity politics thinking by the rapporteur representing women and girls, members of the UN panel simply did not seek to consult, nor listen to women’s organisations, has now admitted Professor Wintermute.
Unlike Wintermute, Vitit Muntarbhorn, also a member of the UN panel from the University of Bangkok still insists to this day that the concept of gender identity as defined in the Yogyarkarta guide poses no threat to women’s sex based rights.
The outcome of the judicial review by the UK High Court granted to For Women in Scotland on this 16th April 2025 is that ‘sex’ under the GRA and the EA was always meant to be understood as biological sex.
It also means that trans people with a gender re-assignment will continue to be protected against dicrimination, harrassment and bullying because of their gender as all minorities with Protected Characteristics.
Such a landmark ruling finally signals the end of the Green Party of England and Wales – and of the Scottish Nationalist/ Scottish Greens – discriminatory definition of transphobia which deliberatly confused sex with gender. The persecution of members who simply hold the view that biological sex is a fact must stop. However this does not mean that any form of discriminatory behaviour, bullying or the harassment of trans people because of their gender should ever be tolerated.
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