Why Supporting the UK Supreme Court’s Anti-Trans Ruling Is a Betrayal of Women

The colossal betrayal of women championed by the Gender-Critical movement

MX VALENTINA

JUN 25, 2025

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

The UK Supreme Court’s 2023–2024 ruling that restricted the definition of “woman” to exclude transgender and intersex people from certain legal protections was celebrated by gender-critical feminists. But supporting this ruling, especially as a woman, amounts to a betrayal of feminist principles and a dangerous alignment with state-enforced gender essentialism. It harms all women by strengthening patriarchal tools of exclusion, surveillance, and control. It also harms anyone who is “other” in a patriarchal system.

The SWERF and TERF brigade have had their moment.

Feminism has long fought against the state’s attempts to legislate womanhood. From property laws to reproductive rights, patriarchal legal systems have historically excluded women from personhood and full citizenship. We forget how recent our steps towards equality are (right to vote, to have a bank account, to own property, to inherit, to drive, to show our faces in public). This ruling gives the state the authority to define womanhood according to narrow biological criteria — criteria that have always been used to police, punish, and exclude certain women, especially queer, disabled, Black, and gender-nonconforming women.¹

This legal essentialism betrays the feminist ideal that womanhood is not a function of anatomy, but of lived experience under patriarchy.

Feminism gains power through solidarity, not exclusion. Yet this ruling fractures that power by drawing hard lines between “real” and “fake” women.

Transgender women are among the most vulnerable members of the broader female experience:

• In the UK, 56% of trans women of colour have experienced hate crimes.²
• Almost 90% of trans people avoid public spaces for fear of abuse.³
• Globally, trans women — especially sex workers — face disproportionate murder rates.⁴

To deny their womanhood is to deny them protection. That is not just unkind, it is politically malign.

The gender-critical argument that “a man can never be a woman” relies on biological essentialism, the same logic that patriarchal science used to deny women education, property rights, and suffrage. It assumes what it sets out to prove: that a trans woman is a man. That is circular reasoning, not argument. It erases the social, psychological, and legal realities of transition, and the documented mental health consequences of denying recognition.⁵

Even if someone disagrees with trans women being women, denying them access to gender-appropriate services, shelters, and protections increases their risk of assault, homelessness, and death. No feminist should consider that an acceptable price for ideological purity.

Linking “all violence against women is committed by men” to allowing trans women into women’s spaces as risky to women simply doesn’t hold up:

• Most male violence comes from cis men, not trans women. Trans people make up a tiny percentage of the population. A 2021 meta-analysis of U.S. jurisdictions with inclusive policies found no increase in assaults in gendered spaces.⁶
• Trans women are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. They are often victimized by cis men in women’s spaces when denied appropriate housing.⁷
• If violence by men is the problem, the solution is to target violent men, not trans women.

To argue otherwise echoes the same logic used to exclude butch lesbians from women’s spaces in the 1980s, or to surveil Black women as “aggressive” or “mannish.”⁸ That’s not feminism. That’s fear-based exclusionism.

The Supreme Court ruling endorses a hierarchy: that some women are real, and others are counterfeit. But history shows how these hierarchies become tools of control:

• The “respectable wife” vs. the “dangerous whore”: Under the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–1886), police detained women suspected of prostitution for forced medical exams. Working-class and Irish women were disproportionately targeted.⁹
• The fertile mother vs. the barren spinster: NHS fertility access is still limited by age, marital status, and postcode — exclusions that disproportionately affect queer women and those with disabilities.¹⁰
• The cis woman vs. the trans intruder: The ruling reinforces a harmful narrative that trans women are dangerous. There’s no evidence for this, only moral panic.¹¹
• White womanhood vs. racialized femininity: Colonial feminism glorified white women and demonized colonized ones. That pattern persists in how immigration law treats migrant women today.¹² ¹³
• Able-bodied women vs. disabled women: For much of the 20th century, disabled women were sterilized or institutionalized to prevent reproduction. In the UK, this persisted under the Mental Deficiency Act until the 1980s.¹⁴

Each of these binaries has been used to divide, exclude, and control women. True feminism resists these divisions.

The ruling’s defenders often believe they’re protecting women. But in truth, they are:

• Ceding the definition of “woman” to state institutions. When the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was blocked by Westminster, it wasn’t just trans people who lost. It was Scotland’s right to define gender in its own legislation.¹⁵. Imperial Britain crushing its own satellite nations; Scotland is now England’s bitch.
• Abandoning the most vulnerable women. Trans women face disproportionately high rates of abuse, yet are often excluded from women’s shelters and services.¹⁶
• Undermining feminist solidarity. Groups like Women’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance devote more energy to excluding trans women than to challenging male violence or economic inequality. That is not a coincidence. It is a political strategy that fractures feminism.¹⁷
• Reinforcing patriarchal norms that have always punished non-conforming women. The same logic that now excludes trans women has been used to surveil intersex people, pathologize butch lesbians, and strip lesbian mothers of custody.¹⁷

This ruling doesn’t just impact trans women. It endangers every woman who doesn’t conform — and reactivates one of patriarchy’s oldest tactics: controlling women by turning them against each other.

The binaries it reinforces are nothing new. They’ve always been tools of subjugation:

Now, it’s real women vs. ‘fake’ ones.

When you side with the state in defining who is “real,” you are serving patriarchy, not feminism. You are not protecting women — you are policing them. Congratulations to the Gender-Critical feminists and their poster child leader, a modern-day Magda Goebbels, Joann Rowling, for rolling back the hard-won victories of feminists and womanists of the past 50 years.

To the Gender Critical Feminists and their ilk: you’ve become the useful idiots of the state: cosplaying as radicals while reinforcing the very structures that keep all women in chains. No, you aren’t defending womanhood: you’re auditioning for a place at the master’s table, hoping to be spared by throwing your sisters under the bus.

Thanks for reading Diary of a Sex Witch! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This post originally appeared on Substack

Endnotes

1. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), 100–108.
2. Stonewall, “LGBT in Britain — Hate Crime and Discrimination,” 2022. https://www.stonewall.org.uk
3. Galop, “Trans People and Domestic Abuse: Barriers to Accessing Services,” 2021. https://galop.org.uk
4. Human Rights Campaign, “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2022.” https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2022
5. American Psychological Association, “Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts,” 2021. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-gender-identity-change-efforts.pdf
6. Jody L. Herman et al., “Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Laws and Public Safety in Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Changing Rooms,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 17, no. 3 (2020): 494–507.
7. Prison Reform Trust, “Transgender People in Prison,” Briefing Paper, 2020. https://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk
8. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 118–132.
9. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
10. British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), “Fertility treatment access still riddled with discrimination,” 2021. https://www.bpas.org
11. Stonewall, LGBT in Britain: Trans Report, 2018; and Galop, Transphobic Hate Crime Report, 2020.
12. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88–126.
13. Pragna Patel and Southall Black Sisters, “Asylum and the Politics of Gender,” in Women and Migration in the UK, eds. Natasha Carver and Anastasia Chamberlen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 121–139.
14. Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale, Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979 (Routledge, 2012).
15. UK Government, “Section 35 Order: Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill,” January 2023. https://www.gov.uk
16. Amelia Abraham, Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture (Picador, 2019).
17. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke University Press, 2011).