The UK supreme court has issued a historic and definitive ruling that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex.

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex.

So as the dust settles on the ruling, what can we take away from it?

The United Kingdom’s supreme court ruled Wednesday that males who identify as women do not fall qualify as women under anti-discrimination law, a monumental decision that will have major consequences for British law.

During her fifth and final term in the Maine House of Representatives in 2022, Beth O’Connor felt the state’s political winds change in a perilous direction.

O’Connor had proposed what she believed to be a commonsense bill to ban men in women’s sports.

The Trump administration has ordered the National Institutes of Health to study the physical and mental health effects of undergoing gender transition, according to an internal NIH memo obtained by NPR.

Earlier this year, I testified before the Colorado legislature in opposition to House Bill 25-1109, which would have required death certificates to reflect decedents’ “gender identity,” rather than their sex. The proposal was self-evidently absurd—death certificates are legal documents, not tributes to decedents’ subjective sense of self. Nevertheless, the legislature passed the bill, which awaits Governor Jared Polis’s signature.

On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to no longer consider a person’s gender and to recognize people as either male or female, as defined by the size of their reproductive cells.

President Donald Trump suffered a series of legal losses this week as more federal judges blocked his executive orders.

Why It Matters

The issues this week affect everything from the ban on trans members of the military to the retention of government records and the firing of thousands of federal workers.

A federal judge from New Jersey temporarily blocked the Trump administration from separating two transgender service members from the Air Force. 

The ruling is the second instance when a federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration as it seeks to implement its ban against transgender people from serving in the military. 

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the U.S. military from enforcing President Donald Trump's executive order barring transgender people from military service while a lawsuit by 20 current and would-be service members challenging the measure goes forward.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington found that Trump's January 27 order, one of a several issued by the Republican president impacting legal rights for transgender Americans, likely violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on sex discrimination.