The UK Supreme Court has established that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equility Act (the British law against discrimination) refer exclusively to biological sex. It is a historical sentence. For the first time, the highest British judicial authority states that the protection reserved for women in the 2010 law does not extend to transgender women, not even those in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

The verdict, emitted unanimously by five judges, represents a turning point, above all because it was supported and applauded by the Labor government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a sign of a change of direction compared to years of policies that have placed the genre in the center, at the expense of biology.

Woman only by birth: what changes

In concrete terms, transgender women will no longer be able to access assignments on the public administration boards reserved for women. The sentence also opens the door to restrictions on the use of spaces and services intended for biological women, and could trigger a rewriting of British laws on gender recognition.

Paradoxical that a sentence of the Supreme Court has served to reiterate something that for millennia was obvious: to say what a woman is. But in recent years, giving priority to the perceived genre, one has ended up relegating biological sex to a secondary detail – as if reality could be suspended in the name of sensitivity.

The reality suspended in the name of sensitivity

In a healthy society, those who identify themselves differently should be able to live freely and without discrimination. But getting to affirm that a man who feels like a woman is a woman means overcoming the border between respect and denial of reality. It means ignoring that the female experience is not only a subjective sensation, but something rooted in biology.

This slip in the United Kingdom had opened spaces designed for the safety and privacy of women to those who were not women; He had forced to rewrite laws, languages, statistics; He had transformed the female identity into a floating concept: “person with uterus” or “person who menstruation”. I don’t progress but ideological confusion.

The ideology that erases women

Of course, the US Trumpian right has dropped on this deformation as a vulture. With the excuse of fighting “Woke” ideology, the Trump administration has even eliminated the word “woman” from official communications. A surgical removal that led to the same result: to delete women. And it was pushed even further: on the pretext of dismantling the policies of diversity, equity and inclusion (diversity, equity, inclusion), she targeted women at the top, in particular in the armed forces, labeling them as “appointments of”, therefore “the result of favoritism, errors to be corrected”. Targeted layoffs, strategic relegations, disseminated eras by “meritocratic” reforms. As if to say that if a woman has arrived at the top, it must take us under a preferential lane.

Polarization dragged the debate on paradoxical soil, where the right and left extremisms have reached the same result: erase women. On the one hand, the right sorceress liquidates each female presence at the top as suspect. If you are a woman and you are successful you are there for favoritism, not by capacity. On the other, the radical left has emptied the very concept of “woman”; made it indefinable, subject to perception. Thus, in the name of the inclusion, he opened the door to the idea that anyone who can be a woman, without serving the body, experience, biology. If all is a woman, then none really is.

The alternative of the Labor left

It is important that such a clear sentence came right under a Labor government. It shows that a left capable of defending reality, without bending to an ideological progressiveness and disconnected from the concrete, is possible. And above all that the alternative to identity drift must not necessarily be the reactionary extremism of the right.