Bad advice is everywhere. Opponents of last week’s Supreme Court judgment — which deemed that “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act refers to biological sex — are outraged and doing their best to undermine it. The responses range from the deranged, such as an “open letter” to MPs from a group of people signing themselves “The Aggrieved”, to misstatements of the law.

Among the latter is a blog post by Dr Helen Webberley, founder of GenderGP, an online clinic based in Singapore which offers “personalised, gender-affirming medications in just 2-3 weeks”. In a briefing on the GenderGP website, Webberley claims that nothing much has changed following the court’s decision. She asserts that it does not override the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA), which “allows trans people to legally change their sex on their birth certificate and be legally recognised in that gender for all legal purposes”.

The judgment says precisely the opposite, confirming that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex. Indeed, the ruling has rendered a gender recognition certificate (GRC) all but useless, calling into question the purpose of a document that doesn’t — and never did — change someone’s sex. Yet that was the claim made by trans activists, who held the threat of court action over organisations that refused to treat “trans women” with a GRC as though they were biological females. Some 8,464 certificates have been issued, but it’s no longer clear what difference they make to the individuals who hold them.

The knock-on effect of the GRA has nevertheless been disastrous. It has created an atmosphere of de facto self-ID, where some trans women who didn’t have a GRC behaved as though they did. They were even allowed — and still are, according to a government website — to “update” passports and driving licences with a new name and “gender” without going to the bother of getting a GRC.

The most scandalous aspect of the GRA, however, is the fact that it allows the holder to apply for a new birth certificate showing a different sex from the one they were born into. A 40-year-old man can thus produce a legal document stating he was born and grew up as a girl, while retaining fully functioning male genitalia. This kind of sex falsification is deeply offensive to many people, undermining trust in official documents, and it’s a powerful argument in favour of repealing the legislation.

The issue divides feminists and irritates lawyers, who point out that the GRA was passed in response to a decision in 2002 by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the absence of domestic legislation recognising the acquired gender of “transsexuals” violated their rights.  At the time, it was assumed that the new law would apply to a tiny minority of people in the UK who were intent on taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing surgery. But it’s since become clear that most “trans women” don’t modify their bodies, relying instead on unprovable claims about “gender identity”.

The legislation has metamorphosed into a threat to women’s rights, used by activists to justify an invasion of single-sex spaces. The Supreme Court has put a stop to that, assuming that guidance due to be published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission this summer sticks closely to the judgment.

Trans activists have, meanwhile, reverted to their old tactic of presenting the law as they would like it to be, rather than as it is. This week, Labour MP Dawn Butler insisted that “Trans women should of course still continue to use women’s bathrooms […]”.  That is no longer what the law allows. The trans lobby is now defending a piece of paper which grants legal entitlements so specious that it may as well be framed and hung in the gender-neutral loo.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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