Supreme Court told to uphold ‘ordinary’ definition of woman

The Supreme Court should defend “the facts of biological reality rather than the fantasies of legal fiction”, a leading human rights lawyer has said.

Representing campaign group For Women Scotland, Aidan O’Neill KC urged the UK’s highest court to rule in favour of its appeal against Scottish Government guidance which allows men who identify as women to take women-only positions on company boards.

Last year, Scotland’s Inner House of the Court of Session backed the Scottish Government’s position, which asserts that the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 can class men who have Gender Recognition Certificates (GRC) as women, without contradicting other legislation.

‘Biological denialism’

Mr O’Neill emphasised: “Our position is your sex, whether you are a man or a woman or a girl or a boy, is determined from conception in utero, even before one’s birth, by one’s body.”

He warned that women are now facing “biological denialism”, where “being a woman has nothing to do with biology” and so they are not allowed to campaign against men accessing female-only spaces.

But the KC urged the court to denounce the Scottish Government’s “new legal category of ‘certified sex'” in relation to GRCs, and instead defend the “ordinary” definition of sex.

He concluded: “It’s simple and straightforward if you stick with women being women, men being men.”

‘Laughing stock’

Earlier this month, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) came under fire for recording gender identity rather than birth sex in the official death registry.

Those with GRCs are automatically recorded as the opposite sex, but the NRS revealed that it may also change a deceased person’s gender identity on appeal from friends or relatives.

For Women Scotland’s Director Susan Smith explained that this would skew official statistics on diseases and affect subsequent allocation of funding.

She said: “Conflating sex with gender doesn’t just risk making Scotland a laughing stock, it may also risk lives and cost the public purse.”