LIVERPOOL, England (OSV News) — A British Catholic bishop has welcomed a ruling by the U.K. Supreme Court that a woman is defined solely by biological sex.
Justice Patrick Hodge, the court’s deputy president, said in the April 16 judgment that the terms woman and sex in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”
The ruling means that any man who legally changes sex, or asserts a feminine gender, will not have access to women’s sex-based rights.
The decision is expected to prevent people who identify as transgender women from accessing female-only spaces such as bathrooms, changing rooms and hospital wards or competing in female-only sports, carrying out strip searches on women if they are police officers, or serving in parts of the armed forces.
Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth said in an April 16 written statement to OSV News that he was very pleased by the ruling.
Bishop Egan said: “I’m delighted that the Supreme Court has stood firm against the gender ideologues by affirming that biological sex is a God-given reality: ‘male and female he created them'” (Gen 1:27).
“Males and females are equal and complementary and this is the basis of marriage, family life and society,” he said. “Our biological sex is moreover the basis of our own personal identity and our vocation in life.
“I am pleased too that the Supreme Court is by implication here also upholding the importance and dignity of the human body,” wrote Bishop Egan.
“At the same time however we must always lovingly respect and care for those who for whatever reasons, physical or psychological, are struggling with their gender identity,” he added.
The case was brought to court by a feminist advocacy group called For Women Scotland, which challenged the decision by the Scottish government to include transgender women in its definition of women.
In the ruling, Justice Hodge said: “Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ … and, thus, the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way.”
He said: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.”
The judge said that the ruling should not be interpreted as “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another,” adding that transgender individuals remain protected from unjust discrimination by other parts of the Equality Act.
The ruling was welcomed by the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who praised the tenacity of the campaigners on X, and added: “Spare a thought today for the UK employers, government departments, health boards, academic institutions and sporting bodies who’ve been breaking equality law to appease activist groups. So many HR manuals to pulp. So many out-of-court settlements to pay.”
Evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins also took to X to praise the court ruling, describing it as “a stunning victory for women. And for science. Nice to have something to celebrate, for a change”.
Gender ideology emerged in the early 1990s and spread throughout the world in succeeding decades.
It dismisses biological and scientific categories of male and female in favor of an individual constructing a “gender” of their own choosing.
In the last decade, it has caused an explosion in the number of people across the Western world who want to change their sex.
Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken against gender ideology. In paragraph 155 of “Laudato Si’,” his 2015 papal encyclical on the environment, he said:
“The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology,” the pontiff wrote.
Pope Francis has since denounced the ideology publicly as part of a “great enemy of marriage” and as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations.”
In April 2024, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith explicitly rejected gender ideology in a declaration called “Dignitas Infinita” (“Infinite Dignity”) because it “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”
The dicastery said that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.”
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