Women who transitioned decades ago feel their safety and security has suddenly been removed
Last week’s supreme court ruling sent shock waves through the UK’s trans community.
The unanimous judgment said the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs).
That feeling was compounded when Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is preparing new statutory guidance, said the judgment meant only biological women could use single-sex changing rooms and toilets.
When you transition, you in a very literal way change your sex. Chromosomes do very very little for sex differentiation. All a Y chromosome, or specifically the SRY gene, does is tell the gonads to develop into testes. From there on, everything is hormonal. Biological sex is largely determined by hormones, not genetics.
And moreover, very few ever actually have their chromosomes tested. If you think sex is chromosomal, well, you don’t actually know your own sex.