On 16 April 2025, the Herald was delighted to report:
The First Minister is facing increasing pressure from opposition parties and women’s groups to update guidance for public bodies following a landmark ruling on the legal definition of a woman.
The calls come after a long-running legal battle between For Women Scotland (FWS) [above] and the Scottish Government reached its conclusion on Wednesday morning, with the Supreme Court ruling in favour of the women’s group .
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25096078.women-scotland-calls-new-guidance-historic-ruling/
Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, who had of course voted with the SNP on the gender recognition act, quickly shifted to welcome the Supreme Court decision as providing clarity, and claiming “I’ve always said that we should protect single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex. There’s a clear ruling now from the Supreme Court.”
From that point until quite recently, FWS criticism has been overwhelmingly directed at the SNP Scottish Government with very few reports of the UK Labour Government being attacked, but yesterday in the Times:
We won the Supreme Court sex ruling. The PM is subverting it – For Women Scotland, whose case led to the judgment on biological sex, accuse the UK and Scottish governments of endangering women through blocking tactics
The Times is careful to include the Scottish Government and John Swinney does get one mention over delaying to meet with them but it’s the Labour Government minister Bridget Phillipson and PM Starmer who are clearly the focus now.
Bridget Phillipson [the secretary for women and equalities] in particular is trying to fudge the law by sitting on the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC] guidance, and it is having a serious impact on women. More than three months later, however, Phillipson is still refusing to sign it, saying she is concerned the guidance is “trans exclusive” — and if she means that it excludes males from women’s-only spaces, she is correct, because that is what flows from the court’s ruling.
“If Bridget Phillipson and Keir Starmer don’t like what the Supreme Court did, they have the power to change it. But they’re not going to do that, because they know it would be incredibly unpopular and stupid and they’d lose support. So instead they’re playing silly buggers and trying to change the law by stealth,” says Smith.
Why will FWS increasingly turn on Starmer and Labour? Because having made sure the Supreme Court could display its power over Scottish Law and portray the SNP as defeated, Labour has now gone on to bow to other stronger pressures than those from a wee Scottish protest group, such as the EHRC, and has shoved them under a bus.
Will any Scottish media platform ask Anas Sarwar what he now thinks or will there be no time to do so because an SNP chief exec’s camper van purchase soon fill all the bandwidth?
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
The relevant legislation namely the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equalities Act 2010 were both Labour pieces of Legislation. The GRC 2004 when Blair was PM and the EQ 2010 when Brown was PM. Furthermore the GRC 2004 was adopted into Scots Law via a Sewel Convention by the Labour/LibDem Scottish Executive in Holyrood.
It was a House of Commons Committee ca 2015/16 that recommended, after an inquiry, that the process by which a Gender Recognition Certificate should be reformed In the 2016 Holyrood election all the main parties included reform of the GRA 2004 in their manifestos.
The UK Gov was to do it for England and Wales while the SG was to do it for Scotland. Theresa May started the process of revision in E and W then Johnson shelved it. Only Scotland completed the process of revision.
LikeLike
‘The relevant legislation namely the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equalities Act 2010 were both Labour pieces of Legislation’ – indeed!
A btl contribution to TuS that I made on August 18, 2025: seems relevant here: from a review of documents from Westminster – Hansard records of parliamentary debates on the Gender Recognition Bill (c. 2003-4) and the Human Rights Bill (c. 2009-10) plus the transcript of oral evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights (in 2009) plus the text of relevant acts, it seems to me that the origin story and its subsequent fall-out resides in Westminster under Labour governments and not in Holyrood under the SNP.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004, an Act of a Labour Westminster government, and its Clause 9 received close attention in the 2025 UK Supreme Court judgement in For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent). This clause in the Act seems – to this non-lawyer – to have been drafted in a way to avoid any doubt in terms of government/parliamentary intent:
‘Consequences of issue of gender recognition certificate etc.
9 General ‘(1) Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).’
Whatever one’s view of the substantive issue here, this clause in the Labour government’s legislation – as drafted and passed into law – could hardly be clearer! Aware of the significance of this, in a House of Lords debate on the Gender Recognition Bill (see Hansard for January 19, 2004), the Tory Lord Tebbit asked Her Majesty’s Government: ‘Whether they attribute the same meaning to the word “sex” as to the word “gender”.
Lord Filkin, the relevant minister in the Blair government responded: ‘No. It is, however, a fundamental proposition of the Gender Recognition Bill that, following legal recognition in their acquired gender, a transsexual person will be regarded in UK law as being of the acquired gender for all purposes and that in law that acquired gender will be the same as any legal definition of their sex.’
Filkin added: ’This means that, following legal recognition, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex in law becomes that of a man and if the person’s acquired gender is the female gender, the person’s sex in law becomes that of a woman.
‘Where under any legislation it is necessary to decide the sex of a person who has an acquired gender, or to say whether that person is a man or a woman, or male or female, the question must be answered in accordance with the person’s acquired gender.’ (my emphasis)
Again, whatever one’s position on the substantive issue, the ‘fundamental proposition’ within the Blair government’s Gender Recognition Act 2004 – its intent – could hardly have been stated more clearly.
Of course, there was no SNP or Scottish Government involvement in drafting or securing the passage of this Bill. And when subsequent Westminster governments failed to sort out what the Supreme Court has only in 2025 judged to be incompatible with more recent equalities legislation – namely the Labour government’s Equalities Act 2010 – again no SNP Scottish Government minister was involved!
Referring to Westminster’s Equality Act, 2010, the Supreme Court in 2025 concluded that ‘There is no provision in the EA 2010 that expressly addresses the effect of section 9(1) of the GRA 2004’ Why not? This is surely a damning indictment of the then Labour Westminster government and more broadly of Westminster’s legislative process responsible for the Equality Act 2010, given the explicit terms of Clause 9 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004!
It is worth noting that a quick read of the Hansard records for ALL the debates on the Equality Bill in 2009-2010 reveals that little attention was given to the now fraught sex vs. gender issue and little attention given to the significance of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. When the term ‘gender’ is used in these debates, it is predominantly in the context of the ‘gender pay gap’.
However, and finally, it is instructive to note oral evidence to Westminster’s Human Rights Joint Committee: ‘Legislative Scrutiny: Equality Bill – Oral evidence taken before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, 24 June 2009‘. The key witness was Vera Baird QC MP, Solicitor General in the Labour government and a lead minister in taking the Bill through parliament (Source: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200809/jtselect/jtrights/169/9062401.htm )
What follows requires careful reading – worth reading the full transcript in Hansard – but it seems notable for pointing up the Labour government’s INTENT. It involves an exchange between Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris and Vera Baird over the nature of exemptions proposed in the Equality bill going through Westminster.
Q73 Dr Evan Harris MP (Lib Dem): ‘… Under the Gender Recognition Act, of course, that requires that people be recognised in their new gender for all purposes. Therefore, one of the questions I have is whether to protect their human rights and be compliant with that law, (i.e. with the Gender Recognition Act), even if the Equality Bill could write out that one did not have to be compliant, if there was not to be regression how can you allow exceptions on grounds of gender reassignment even where people have a Gender Recognition Certificate? I do not think we raised this in Committee so it is a new human rights based point.’
Vera Baird: ‘What are the specific exceptions that you are worried about?’
Q74 Dr Harris: ‘For example, in Schedule 9 there is the ability of a religious organisation to discriminate, so they could say, “We will allow a woman priest”, that is if they had women priests—
Vera Baird: ‘There are not many of them.’
Q75 Dr Harris: ‘Yes, indeed, but let us say they did, “But we are not going to allow a woman priest who is in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate, who is a woman”. They would argue that is a permitted exception under gender reassignment. Is that a clash with the sex discrimination provisions?’
Vera Baird: ‘Is that right? She is a woman now for all purposes, not a transgender person, a woman.’
Q76 Dr Harris: ‘Right.’
Vera Baird: ‘That is the point of the certificate, is it not, to make it clear beyond doubt and that is where all her rights come from.’
Q77 Dr Harris: ‘So what you are saying is someone with a certificate does not fall within the protected ground and, therefore, exceptions on that protected ground—‘
Vera Baird: ‘Will fall within the protected ground of sex.’
Chairman: ‘I think you have answered the question.’
So once again the intent of the Labour government – and by extension, of the Parliament passing the Equality bill into law – seems clear from the foregoing: the Supreme Court no doubt only sought to determine intent based on its own interpretation of the final legal text of Westminster’s Act regardless of other expressed indications of parliamentary intent at the time the Equality bill was being passed.
By the way, for the avoidance of doubt, there was no SNP government minister supportive of trans rights sitting on Vera Baird’s shoulder, whispering in her ear as she gave her answer to Dr Harris’ question! The mess there is now is down to Labour governments’ legislation plus the flawed process of drafting and scrutinising new legislation in Westminster!
LikeLike