Why UK Supreme Court may be about to destroy lesbian identity

The UK Supreme Court is about to issue a landmark ruling on the definition of a ‘woman’

Edinburgh has been the location of some of the most important landmarks in lesbian history. It was at a UK Women’s Liberation Movement conference held in the capital in 1974 that a new demand was added to their campaign for women’s rights: “The right to self-defined sexuality. An end to discrimination against lesbians.”

Nearly 50 years later, it was in the Edinburgh home of one of the founders of the grassroots campaign group For Women Scotland that the decision was made to take the Scottish Government to the highest court in the land to decide on the simple question: what is a woman?

And it was in a city centre hotel last Wednesday that one of the UK’s most prominent lesbians and feminist campaigners, Julie Bindel, said she would “put a limb” on the Supreme Court deciding in favour of For Women Scotland and confirming, once and for all, that a woman is an adult human female.

The UK Supreme Court is about to issue a legal ruling that may or may not agree with the statement that 'trans women are real women' (Picture: Jonathan Brady) | PA

A concert, then rape

Bindel, a 62-year-old powerhouse of a woman, was in the city to launch her new book, Lesbians: Where Are We Now?, at an event organised by the aforementioned For Women Scotland. Speaking to an audience of 200 women and a handful of men, she told of her working-class upbringing in the North East of England and coming out as a lesbian as a teenager in the 1970s.

Without a hint of sensation or self-pity, she told the audience how, when she was 16, an older man – “a cool, hippy type” – had taken her to an AC/DC concert and then raped her afterwards. “What was telling was the way I instantly blamed myself. I had no context for understanding what had happened to me,” she said.

That was before she moved to Leeds, where she became immersed in the growing women’s liberation movement and met feminists who reassured her that she was not a freak or a pervert or “really a boy”.

She was sexually assaulted again by two men, but this time was different, as she recalled. “It was pretty harrowing, but it was utterly night and day compared to the rape, because I was angry. I immediately talked about it to my friends. I felt no shame.

“This told me something really important… about male violence. That it is not about individual women, it’s about misogyny, and men’s feeling of entitlement. It was a baptism of fire, but I think a lot of women come to feminism because of similar experiences.”

The Lesbian Project

Bindel has spent her adult life campaigning for the rights of abused and marginalised women across the world, from Uganda to Canada. She was the first journalist to write about the grooming gangs that terrorise young girls in a 2007 article for the Sunday Times magazine.

She highlighted the challenge to women’s rights raised by the trans movement 20 years ago in a column in the Guardian newspaper, writing “I don't have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s [jeans] does not make you a man.”

And in 2023, she set up the Lesbian Project with Professor Kathleen Stock, the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. The Lesbian Project joined forces with grassroots group Scottish Lesbians and the LGB Alliance to make a submission to the Supreme Court in support of For Women Scotland’s position that sex matters.

‘Visiting a parallel universe’

Perhaps more than any other group of women, the definition of sex matters to lesbians. As Bindel writes in her book, lesbians fought long and hard for their social and political spaces back in the 1980s.

The Scottish Government’s position, that a man with a gender recognition certificate should be legally recognised as a lesbian, with access to lesbian associations, clubs and dating apps, threatens the very freedom that Bindel has fought all her adult life to secure.

She described sitting in the Supreme Court for two days last November with, among others, Joanna Cherry KC, the former Edinburgh South West MP, listening to the Scottish Government’s arguments, as a surreal experience, “as if we were visiting a parallel universe”.

A momentous legal judgment

At 9.45am on Wednesday, April 16, the President of the Supreme Court, Lord Reed, a Scot who studied law at Edinburgh University, will hand down the court’s decision on what the law means by “sex”. The judgment is not limited to Scots law. The Supreme Court is deciding how the 2010 Equality Act should be applied across the UK.

Bindel is confident that the judges will rule in favour of material reality. That a man, even one with a certificate, cannot be a lesbian. She has at least one limb resting on that outcome.

But if the judges rule in favour of the Scottish Government’s position that men are lesbians provided they have the correct paperwork, then as the submission by the Lesbian Project, LGB Alliance and Scottish Lesbians argues, “authentic lesbianism would once again become the love that cannot speak its name”.

Something magical

Last Wednesday night, towards the end of Bindel’s interview by Mandy Rhodes, editor of Holyrood magazine, a member of the audience asked what would happen if the Supreme Court supported the Scottish Government. Before Bindel could answer, Marion Calder, a director of For Women Scotland, shouted “it will be war”. The room erupted in cheers.

Something magical happened across Scotland a few years ago. Lesbians and straight women stood shoulder to shoulder, united in their anger at the way the government was trying to erase their female identity.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, a grassroots women’s movement, unfettered by state funding and beholden to no political party, is about to change history. I think a young Julie Bindel, full of revolutionary zeal, would approve.