Nicola Sturgeon says Supreme Court gender ruling 'massively misinterpreted'

NICOLA Sturgeon has said the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman has been “massively misinterpreted”.

The former first minister was speaking at the How the Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye on Saturday, and said she would “always be an ally of the trans community”.

The Sunday Times reports that Sturgeon told the festival the Supreme Court judgment set out “what the law is, there is no gain saying that”.

But she added it was the job of politicians to “decide what the law should be or has to be”.

We told how Lady Hale, the first female president of the Supreme Court, said the ruling had been “misinterpreted”, and that there was “nothing in that judgment that says that you can’t have gender-neutral loos”.

In the weeks following the judgment, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released interim guidance that banned transgender people from using the bathroom of their acquired gender.

The guidance was described as “cruel”, “authoritarian” and “segregation”.

Trans women were subsequently banned from playing women’s football and cricket. 

Sturgeon referenced Hale’s comments, adding: “That judgment, I think, has been massively overinterpreted in terms of some of the immediate reactions to it.

“But if it is the case that the judgment means we have to move to a situation where trans lives are almost impossible to live then I’m sorry but the law has to change because that is not an acceptable way to be.”

The Glasgow MSP previously told journalists in Holyrood that it “doesn’t make a single woman any safer” to make trans people's lives “almost unliveable”. 

In April, the Supreme Court ruled that under the Equality Act 2010 a woman is defined by “biological sex” and does not include a transgender woman with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).

This decision went against how the law had been interpreted across public and private bodies in the UK for the past 20 years.

Sturgeon, who is standing down at the next Holyrood election, said that despite abuse she had received she would “always” be an ally to the trans community “no matter how difficult that might be”.

“Many of those who are on the other side [of the issue] say it is all about protecting women,” she said.

“Isn’t it ironic that I have probably had more misogynistic abuse as a result of this issue than on any other issue in my entire political career. Go figure.”

For Women Scotland, an anti-trans campaign group who took the gender case to the Supreme Court, originally after challenging the inclusion of trans women on gender quotas for public boards in Scottish Government guidance, criticised Sturgeon’s comments.

(Image: PA)

Susan Smith told The Times: “It would be quite ironic, although not unexpected, if the first female first minister was resolutely sticking to the notion that biological sex is some nebulous concept​,” she said.

​”There has indeed been a great deal of misrepresentation of the Supreme Court ruling, but the most egregious has come from trans activists who have spun the most outrageous interpretations.”

Sturgeon was first minister when the Scottish Parliament passed its Gender Recognition Reform Act in 2022, which would allow transgender people to self-identify and simplified the requirements to acquire a GRC, before it was blocked by Westminster from becoming law.