Peter Jenkins explores the UK Supreme Court’s landmark legal judgment. This confirms that rights and protections under equality law are firmly and correctly based on biological sex, and do not correspond to a legally certified change of gender. This overturns two decades of widespread inaccurate interpretation and application of equality law in the UK, favouring the assumed rights of trans people. The Supreme Court judgment sets out a clearly argued substantive legal rationale for its decision, and the specific injustices it is designed to address. The judgement now presents a real challenge to UK therapy associations, which have heavily invested in the politics of gender identification.
Background to the Supreme Court Appeal
At first reading, the Supreme Court judgment seems extremely thorough. This is pretty much as one would expect from, hopefully, the brightest and most experienced legal minds on offer. The 88-page judgment sets out the background and context to the case. This arose out of the attempt by the Scottish Government to use the law to enable biological men with a Gender Recognition Certificate to count as women, for the purposes of representation on Scottish public authority boards. This policy was based on applying the Gender Recognition Act 2004. An earlier court had stated that a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) had the legal effect of changing the holder’s gender ‘for all purposes’. This stance was challenged in court by a group of feminists, Women for Scotland, and then taken to Appeal at the UK Supreme Court.
The case hinged on the everyday and common-sense meaning of words – an interesting turnaround for any post modernists still totally wedded to the notion of perpetual deconstruction. The five judges came to a unanimous decision. This ruling leaves little room for nit-picking by future dissenters. It underlines the critical importance of deciding this issue in terms of equality law. “The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004” (UKSC [2025] para 2).
Rationale for the judgment
The judgement carefully combs through past law, ranging from the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) 1975, through the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004, to the Equality Act (EA) 2010. It notes that, in each case, the term sex implicitly refers to ‘man’ or ‘woman’, i.e. using a binary biological framework. This use of a binary biological framework for legal purposes is actually nothing new, and can be traced back to the watershed case of Corbett v Corbett, which annulled the marriage of April Ashley, in 1971. The Scottish Government’s case, advised by the statutory Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), was that the advent of GRCs produced anomalies and disadvantageous consequences for trans people in a number of specific areas, such as the law on discrimination. Ultimately, the EHRC suggested, these difficulties might require fresh legislation to resolve.
The Supreme Court worked through each of these problematic areas in turn. These included discrimination on grounds of pregnancy and maternity, protection against sexual orientation discrimination, single sex services and communal accommodation. There is almost a sense here that the Supreme Court was rather testily marking the cobbled-together homework of the EHRC, and finding it not quite up to scratch. It could be that the proposals were the product of an earlier, highly activist version of the EHRC. The latter was then closely aligned in its trans ally role in relation to the Scottish Government, rather than in its perhaps more pragmatic and much less ideological present incarnation.
Potential impact of ‘certified gender’ on other protected groups
The judgment then goes on to work through a wide range of potential impacts of the adoption of GRCs as denoting a holder’s acquired gender ‘for all purposes’. This ranges from discrimination in employment, provision of single sex services, single sex higher education, to sport. In each case, it concluded that relying upon GRC-certified gender rather than biological sex can have adverse consequences for fair treatment under equality law. For example, permitting GRC holders to access single sex higher education, or sex-based accommodation, undermined the original intended purpose of these facilities, which was to reserve them for one biological sex. It also sets up unworkable distinctions between trans people with GRCs and those without, with no clear means for service providers to distinguish between these two groups.
This focus on the discursive method used by the Supreme Court might seem a tad pedantic, but it is critically important. Anything less than a ruthlessly systematic approach to analysing parliamentary intention, its use of language, prior case law and legislation, and review of the effects of GRC policy across a wide range of social contexts, would simply open the door to further appeal against this judgment. Summing up, the judgement states: “… the words “sex”, “woman” and “man” …mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man. These and the other provisions to which we have referred cannot properly be interpreted as also extending to include certificated sex without rendering them incoherent and unworkable” (UKSC [2025] para 264).
Responses to the judgment
The most striking image capturing the Supreme Court decision has been the dramatic photos of the women claimants euphorically celebrating on the steps of the court. There is no mistake that this is a very significant legal victory, which has been won (almost exclusively) by the efforts of women and by their own advocacy organisations defending women’s rights. According to leading campaigner, Maya Forstater: “…the judgement was about ‘recognising rules and reality’. If you’re a man, you can call yourself what you like, you can dress how you like, but you cannot work in a rape crisis centre, you cannot go into a woman’s changing room…” (Carrell, 2025).
Sometimes landmark events such as this are mainly registered at a visceral, rather than an intellectual, level. Hence, “We are devastated, and in tears,” says Jane Fae, director of the advocacy group TransActual UK, the judgement was like a “physical punch” (BBC News, 2025a). Stonewall similarly said it was deeply concerned for the “widespread implications” of the Supreme Court ruling. Chief Executive, Simon Blake, said: “It will be incredibly worrying for the trans community and all of us who support them” (BBC News, 2025b). This repeated focus on the seemingly overwhelming emotional impact of the judgment for many trans people has been a key theme in public responses to the judgement, with important implications in turn for therapy organisations.
The end of transgender rights?
Other responses were even more final and catastrophic in their tone. According to India Willoughby, a trans media pundit, “today was the day that transgender rights in the UK died” (2025). While not previously noted as a legal commentator, there may well be significant element of truth in this reaction, that is, if transgender rights are properly understood as a rousing, open-ended set of claims for entitlement, rather than a specific set of carefully circumscribed legal rights.
The immediate focus of outrage against the judgment has been directed against the conclusion that the Equality Act 2010 does not permit trans women (i.e. men) with a GRC to claim the rights of biological women. Nevertheless, the judgment was at pains to explore and confirm “…the important protections available under the EA 2010 for trans people with a GRC as we have explained. …this potentially vulnerable group remains protected in the ways we have described” (UKSC [2025] para 264). However, this perspective clearly does not fit the persecution narrative, which is so absolutely central to trans ideology (Jenkins, 2024).
The current crisis in psychotherapy
The Supreme Court judgment also feeds into and deepens the current crisis enveloping therapy in the UK. Counselling and psychotherapy in the UK have been profoundly caught up by the post-modernist turn in academia, and by the growing influence of gender identity ideology on membership, research, publication, training and practice. Therapy has adopted a series of political policies, such as seeking a legal ban on alleged conversion therapy, which have been used to stifle formerly open debate amongst members. Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) have assumed ever-greater significance within therapy professions’ policy development. A notable shift towards encouraging political activism by members is also evident.
All of these factors apply in the case of the largest UK professional therapy association, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). This has a claimed membership of around 65,000. To some extent, the BACP can be taken as representative of the processes impacting on the therapy field as a whole, although each organisation, such as the British Psychological Society, or United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, will each have their own distinctive profile in these matters.
BACP’s political turn
The BACP has clearly taken the need to embrace a more political approach to therapy very much to heart, to the extent that it would be hard put to identify the composition of its own membership with any accuracy. While still overwhelmingly female in terms of its composition, the BACP’s own workplace audit seems to have moved to categorise its membership in terms of protected characteristics. Hence the audit confirms that in terms of ‘gender identity’, 80% of members “identify as a woman” (BACP, 2024: 8). This might suggest that BACP has embraced ‘identifying as’ in terms of a legitimate designator for some purposes. However, ‘identifying as’ does have very real limits. However hard BACP members might wish upon a rainbow, they cannot (yet) identify themselves as an ‘Accredited Member’, nor identify themselves as rightly belonging within the much coveted ‘Column C’ for senior practitioners, under the controversial SCOPED bands regulating future employment pay scales. Some things are clearly far too important to BACP to be left to the vagaries of ‘identifying as’, it seems.
So, maybe this focus on protected characteristics flows from the pressure by the Professional Standards Authority? This enjoins BACP “to embed EDI across its regulatory activities”? (PSA, 2023: 2). If so, BACP badly need to brush up their knowledge of EDI – gender identity is not a protected characteristic, but sex most definitely is. If the audit is not based on protected characteristics, then BACP has just effortlessly erased sex as a category for analysing and reporting on its own membership base. Following the Supreme Court judgment (and probably for as long as records have been kept) women do not identify as women, but are female from birth. Perhaps a minor detail, but one to which BACP now needs to rapidly adjust, in order to remain in step with developing equality law.
BACP’s response to Supreme Court judgment
The BACP’s knee-jerk response to the Supreme Court judgment is also indicative of the skewed values which now dominate its public discourse. In common with other outraged organisations, the BACP (2025) issued its own statement:
“The UK Supreme Court ruling on women and sex has prompted huge anxiety and concern for trans, non-binary and gender questioning (TNBGQ) people and their futures. We want to offer our support to the TNBGQ community, not just at this incredibly difficult time, but to let you know we stand alongside you always. We aim to be a fully inclusive membership body and charity for all TNBGQ people.”
Several points are worth making here. The BACP, for reasons best known to itself, has broken with the convention of using the acronym ‘LGBT’ (or other variants of this) and devised its own select category of ‘trans, non-binary and gender questioning’. This may be a belated and welcome recognition that LGBT actually rests on a forced teaming of quite different categories, with distinct and separate interests. These are based respectively on sexual orientation and on gender identity. If so, then does BACP really have nothing of importance to say to the wider LGB community, including its own members, on this crucial judgment?
The risks of performative politics
Making a statement of this kind perhaps offers us a uniquely performative kind of politics. Being seen to do or say the right thing is all that matters. However, even this kind of virtue-signalling can carry its own unintended costs for a professional association, such as the BACP. Sex Matters, one of the interveners in the Supreme Court case, has advised extreme caution for organisations in making public statements of this kind about the ruling:
“Do not make statements that the organisation disagrees with the Equality Act (including the Supreme Court judgment) or that disparage or celebrate people with particular protected characteristics… Making statements that favour or prioritise particular groups (such as statements of allyship or solidarity in favour of one group at the expense of another) will lead to an unbalanced approach and risk of unlawful harassment and discrimination” (Sex Matters, 2025: 12).
BACP may not have intended to do more than to hastily express support for an allegedly marginalised group. However, the statement seems absurdly lop-sided, in not acknowledging that the court’s decision can also be seen as strengthening the legal rights of women, of gay men and of lesbians (presumably some of whom will also be members of BACP). BACP does not have a history of issuing public statements on the major events of the day. This suggests that the organisation’s values are driven by a powerful form of trans exceptionalism. According to this stance, intervening to express solidarity with one particular grouping, i.e. TNBGQ, is therefore self-evidently appropriate and requires no further justification.
‘Identifying as’ and its impact on therapy
Important as these examples are, perhaps the most damning instances relate to the damaging impact of gender identity ideology on actual therapeutic work with clients. ‘Identifying as’ a different sex can have profound implications for therapy, for clients and for therapists. These direct and adverse effects have yet to be properly acknowledged by BACP. At one level, therapists have lost their jobs and livelihoods for holding and expressing gender critical beliefs, despite these being fully protected by the law since the Forstater case. At another level, clients, often extremely vulnerable clients, such as women seeking therapy following rape and sexual assault, have been left uncertain and uninformed as to whether their therapist is actually male or female.
One of the central issues resolved by the Supreme Court concerned restrictions on the right of men identifying as female to access safe spaces for women, such as women’s refuges for survivors of sexual assault. These safe spaces are protected in law by the Equality Act 2010. Many therapy organisations appear to have prioritised the preferences of male trans activists over the legal sex-based rights of women in this respect. This overturning of women’s rights has important implications for women as survivors of sexual assault, as the following client’s email to a captured agency sharply illustrates:
“To hear you are CEO of a Rape Crisis Centre say that I am a bigot because I could not bear to be in the proximity of my husband yesterday let alone a male who is a complete stranger was an absolute punch in the gut. The idea of reframing my trauma to make him, or any male more comfortable while trying to hold myself together and not descend into that all too familiar dark spiral makes me incredibly angry.
I also happened to be a trainee counsellor (which is always why this episode, being raped has been nagging at my consciousness) and the assertions of your CEO that “therapy is political” are so completely abhorrent I felt compelled to write this email. … How can you run a Rape Crisis Centre based on the belief that a deeply recently traumatised female does not have the right to say she does not want to be alone with a male and if she does express that she is a bigot?… My heart goes out to any women who will no longer feel they can turn to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in their darkest hour” (ET 2024, para 17).
Impact on therapist of questioning ‘identifying as’
The above anonymised email was sent by an outraged client to the management of a rape crisis centre, where the policy was not to reveal the sex of therapists to clients, even if requested. It is taken from the Employment Tribunal record of the case for constructive dismissal brought by Roz Adams against her employer. The damaging impact of permitting ‘identifying as’ to over-ride legal protections for women as clients also extended to women as therapists. Roz Adams, a counselling support worker, experienced sustained peer and managerial pressure after raising reasonable concerns about agency policy. This led to her resignation and to her eventually successful court case. However, this came at some personal cost, illustrated by her response to the disciplinary case brought against her:
“She [Roz Adams] was absolutely horrified to find that questions and conversations she had had from a year before which had never been raised with her were suddenly being all brought together. She felt it was extremely unjust. She also found it terrifying. She felt that the references all the way through the meeting to her being transphobic was not at all representative of her. It appeared that she was being shoehorned into this definition. She felt that it was like a lens was being put on everything she had ever said” (ET 2024, para 97).
Conclusion
The Supreme Court judgment presents a profound, existential challenge to the major therapy professions. Their policies are out of synch with the law and have been for some time. If anything positive emerges from this debacle, it is that words matter. Reality matters. Sex matters.
And to give the very final word to Kathleen Stock (2025), evicted from her job at the University of Sussex for her gender critical views:
“We told you so.”
References
BACP (2024) Workforce Mapping Report Work: October 2023 – September 2024. bacp-workforce-mapping-survey-report-2023-to-2024.pdf
BACP (2025) Statement of support for the trans community. https://www.bacp.co.uk/news/news-from-bacp/2025/24-april-statement-of-support-for-the-trans-community/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Orlo
BBC News (2025a) “Campaigner: ‘Devastated and in tears’, this feels like a ‘physical punch’”; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t
BBC News (2025b) “Incredibly worrying for trans people – Stonewall.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t?page=2
Carrell, S. (2025) “Legal definition of woman ‘is based on biological sex’: Supreme Court ruling may have far-reaching impact on trans rights”. Guardian, 16th April. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/16/critics-of-trans-rights-win-uk-supreme-court-case-over-definition-of-woman
Jenkins, P. (2024) Gender identity ideology and how it damages UK healthcare. Save Mental Health. https://www.save-mental-health.uk/article-17
Stock, K. (2025) “Letters to the editor”, Times, 18th April. https://www.thetimes.com/comment/letters-to-editor/article/times-letters-court-ruling-on-the-definition-of-a-woman-pkvvwx79g
Professional Standards Authority (2023) Guidance for regulators: assessing performance against Standard 3. https://www.professionalstandards.org.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/Guidance%20for%20regulators%20-%20assessing%20performance%20against%20Standard%203.pdf
Sex Matters (2025) Supreme Court Judgment Summary and Practical Advice. https://sex-matters.org/posts/publications/supreme-court-judgment-summary-and-practical-advice/
Willoughby, I. (2025) “I don’t care what Supreme Court judges say – I’ll always be a woman.” Metro. 16th April. https://metro.co.uk/2025/04/16/dont-care-supreme-court-judges-say-always-a-woman-22919816/
Legal references
Adams v Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (2024) Employment Tribunals (Scotland) 4102236. 4102236 – Judgment – 14.05.2024 (redacted).pdf – Google Drive
Corbett v Corbett (otherwise Ashley) [1971] P 83 https://sex-matters.org/posts/case-law/corbett-v-corbett/#:~:text=This%20was%20the%20first%20time,regardless%20of%20any%20psychological%20condition.
For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent) [2025] UKSC 16 https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042
Forstater v. CGD UKEAT/0105/20/JOJ. Maya_Forstater_v_CGD_Europe_and_others_UKEAT0105_20_JOJ.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017). https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/peter-jenkins
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