{"id":8675,"date":"2025-05-13T11:41:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T10:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/?p=8675"},"modified":"2025-11-11T15:39:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T15:39:13","slug":"the-supreme-court-ruling-a-response-from-the-centre-for-the-study-of-sexuality-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/2025\/05\/13\/the-supreme-court-ruling-a-response-from-the-centre-for-the-study-of-sexuality-and-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court Ruling: A Response from the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[et_pb_section bb_built=&#8221;1&#8243; admin_label=&#8221;section&#8221; fullwidth=&#8221;on&#8221; next_background_color=&#8221;#000000&#8243; global_module=&#8221;322&#8243;][et_pb_fullwidth_menu global_parent=&#8221;322&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;3.17.6&#8243; menu_id=&#8221;8&#8243; submenu_direction=&#8221;downwards&#8221; fullwidth_menu=&#8221;off&#8221; module_class=&#8221;main-navigation&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; \/][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=&#8221;1&#8243; fullwidth=&#8221;off&#8221; specialty=&#8221;on&#8221; prev_background_color=&#8221;#000000&#8243; next_background_color=&#8221;#1d1d1d&#8221;][et_pb_column type=&#8221;2_3&#8243; specialty_columns=&#8221;2&#8243;][et_pb_row_inner locked=&#8221;off&#8221;][et_pb_column_inner type=&#8221;4_4&#8243; saved_specialty_column_type=&#8221;2_3&#8243;][et_pb_post_title _builder_version=&#8221;3.0.106&#8243; title=&#8221;on&#8221; meta=&#8221;on&#8221; author=&#8221;on&#8221; date=&#8221;on&#8221; categories=&#8221;on&#8221; comments=&#8221;on&#8221; featured_image=&#8221;on&#8221; featured_placement=&#8221;above&#8221; text_color=&#8221;dark&#8221; text_background=&#8221;off&#8221; locked=&#8221;on&#8221; parent_locked=&#8221;off&#8221; \/][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;3.17.6&#8243; background_layout=&#8221;light&#8221; parent_locked=&#8221;off&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court issued a ruling on the meaning of \u2018sex\u2019 in the Equality Act 2010 (EA), after a group called For Women Scotland challenged the Scottish Government\u2019s interpretation of the Act. The Scottish Government had interpreted safeguards that are provided in the EA for the protected characteristic of \u2018sex\u2019 to include people who have legally changed their sex and hold a \u2018gender recognition certificate\u2019. The Supreme Court ruled that, for the purposes of the EA, \u2018sex\u2019 means only what they term \u2018biological sex\u2019. Initial reactions to this ruling, such as from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, suggest it could have far-reaching consequences for trans rights in the UK. Members of the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture respond below to various aspects of the ruling, drawing on their research in gender and sexuality studies to do so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>On Sex and Gender<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">To understand how the Supreme Court ruling has legitimised the idea that trans women \u2018are\u2019 \u2018biological men\u2019, and trans men \u2018biological women\u2019, it\u2019s helpful to look at the way the judgment positions transition as a process of \u2018gender reassignment\u2019 that leaves \u2018sex\u2019 unchanged for the purposes of the Equality Act. The distinction between sex and gender is often assumed to be a useful tool for explaining transness: we commonly hear, for example, that a trans person is anybody whose \u2018gender identity\u2019 differs from their \u2018sex assigned at birth\u2019. In the judgement and in its interpretation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, however, the notion that sex is immutable even if gender is variable has the effect of erasing the efficacy of transition. Those with the protected characteristic of \u2018gender reassignment\u2019 are produced as a class unto themselves. In the language of anti-transness, they are now \u2018trans-identified\u2019, rather than people who have become men, or people who have become women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How did we get here? \u2018Sex\u2019 used to be transition\u2019s ordinary organising term. By this we just mean that it was via the category of \u2018sex\u2019 that transition was imagined \u2013 hence the 1980 BBC documentary about Julia Grant, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Change of Sex<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, in which the word \u2018gender\u2019 is rarely used. It&#8217;s spoken once or twice by the psychiatrist Dr John Randall, which hints at its clinical history: the use of the term \u2018gender\u2019 to signify the social or cultural dimensions of sex first emerged in the mid-century thinking of John Money and Robert Stoller, who worked with intersexuals and transsexuals respectively. Before then, \u2018gender\u2019 was mainly a linguistic term for grammatical relations between words. At the outset of the 1970s, Money and Stoller\u2019s ideas were picked up and reworked by feminists such as Ann Oakley, the British sociologist, and Kate Millett, a literary critic for whom \u2018gender\u2019 helped to name the associations and expectations patriarchal society superimposes on sexual differences between females and males. Millett also suggested that gendered life might sometimes have skewed our sense of what those sexual differences are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The uptake of \u2018gender\u2019 was initially uneven \u2013 only a few feminist texts used the word in the first half of the 1970s \u2013 but the concept became a powerfully generative site of feminist thought. Nevertheless, terms like \u2018sex role\u2019 and \u2018sexual identity\u2019, which used to mean something more like gender expression than sexual orientation, continued to be used into the 1980s by feminists and trans people alike. Black feminists such as Hortense Spillers showed that the sex-gender distinction was a racial arrangement by pointing out how gender as a vector of familial inheritance was refused to the enslaved. In the 1990s, the term \u2018transgender\u2019 started to circulate, gradually overtaking \u2018transsexual\u2019 as the preferred term of many Western trans people and, following its adoption by institutions, helping to popularise Stoller\u2019s distinction between sex and \u2018gender identity\u2019 \u2013 a person\u2019s own sense of themselves as sexed \u2013 as a way of explaining what a trans person was. The academic humanities were animated by discussion of gender. Sex, a category that was once as much social as biological \u2013 just look up the word in a nineteenth-century realist novel \u2013 was increasingly, though not exclusively, left to the scientists.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Supreme Court states that it is not its role to adjudicate on the meanings of sex and gender in the public domain. Yet it would nonetheless seem that a version of the sex-gender distinction has implicitly informed their decision: the version of Sex Matters, for whom sex is an unalterable fact, gender a fanciful notion that seeks to deny or conceal sexual reality, rather than, as 1970s feminists suggested, reveal the ways in which reality is shaped by relations of power. At the same time, gender and sex are still used interchangeably, as they are in the Gender Recognition Act: the judgement speaks of both \u2018acquired gender\u2019 and \u2018acquired sex\u2019 and somewhat begrudgingly grants sexual biology a limited mutability when it acknowledges that transition may involve \u2018a change in physiological or other attributes of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">what must necessarily be <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">biological sex [my emphasis]\u2019 (para 200). Ultimately, the judgement decides it is feasible to assign women rights based on \u2018sex\u2019, trans people rights based on \u2018gender reassignment\u2019. In doing so, however, it excises the efficacy of transition, even as it admits to the possibility that biological sex can be modified.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Indeed, by exempting sex and gender from history \u2013 from the social and political forces that have informed their meanings \u2013 we risk collectively forgetting that \u2018sex itself\u2019 is a site of change: in the words of feminist historian of science Sarah Richardson, \u2018a history of contestations\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Suggested Readings<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Germon, Jennifer. 2009. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lavery, Grace. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pleasure and Efficacy. On Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">2023. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Millett, Kate. 1970. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sexual Politics<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oakley, Ann. 1972. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sex, Gender and Society<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. London: Temple Smith.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Richardson, Sarah S. 2013. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Spillers, Hortense. 1987.\u00a0 \u201cMama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diacritics<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, 17, No 2: 64-81<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wilson, Ara. 2021. \u201cGender Before the Gender Turn.\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diacritics<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 49, no. 1: 13-39<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>On the Biological<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the founding maxims of second-wave feminism was Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s widely cited phrase from <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Second Sex<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> (1949):<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2018<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2019 (p. 293). As Beauvoir writes: \u2018If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the \u201ceternal feminine\u201d, and if we nevertheless admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?\u2019 (p. 4-5). To answer this question through the prism of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">becoming<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is to draw attention to the multiple ways this category is socially produced and lived in different historical and cultural contexts \u2013 varying both between those bodies named by it and within one embodiment across a lifetime. For Beauvoir, the answer to this question cannot be <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">found<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in biology, since biology is not simply a set of determining \u2018data\u2019; rather, it is a contested field of knowledge about living things that has continued to evolve since the early nineteenth century (Foucault, 1970). As Beauvoir argues: biology is not irrelevant; but neither is it destiny.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Becoming<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> a woman requires navigating a set of deep-seated social expectations and prohibitions. Since the 1970s, feminists have rejected the institutionalisation of biological determinism that has justified prejudicial assumptions about women\u2019s inferiority. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective stated that \u2018any type of biological determinism\u2019 is a \u2018dangerous and reactionary basis on which to build a politic\u2019. Since then, Black feminists have repeatedly demonstrated how naturalised definitions of \u2018womanhood\u2019 mobilise racial and class inequalities and idealise white, middle-class femininity (Lewis, 2018). The language of biology disguises the prescriptiveness of changing cultural norms. For example, the UK\u2019s Football Association banned women between 1921 and 1971 (purportedly because their breasts would get in the way); yet in 2022, the Lionesses were celebrated as UEFA champions. If a woman <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">were<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> merely a self-evident biological category, how could we account for the profound changes across the centuries and generations in terms of how she looks, acts, labours and desires?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So how has this language entered legal and regulatory discourses to redefine the categories of \u2018sex\u2019, \u2018woman\u2019, \u2018man\u2019 in ways that are currently curtailing the established rights of trans people in the UK to access public facilities, to receive appropriate medical care and to live with dignity?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 2025 Supreme Court ruling and the subsequent Equality and Human Rights Commission interim guidance, each adopted the term \u2018biological sex\u2019, without ever defining it. As if it <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">were<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> merely a set of data, the Supreme Court mobilised biology to exclude trans women<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as women<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from the Equality Act. In a letter to Rt. Hon. Bridget Phillipson, a group of biologists and doctors have subsequently criticised this strict binary definition of sex, rejecting it as \u2018an over-simplification \u2026 not capable of capturing biological diversity present in human populations\u2019, and concluding therefore that this is \u2018<\/span><b>an unsafe basis for policy<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2019 (emphasis in original). Rather than being determined by one phenomenon, they argue, \u2018sex\u2019 refers to several different biological elements, including: \u2018external genitalia, gonads, chromosomes, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics\u2019.\u00a0<\/span>Similarly, on 28 April, the resident doctors\u2019 wing of the BMA passed a conference motion declaring that\u00a0to impose a binary definition on either sex or gender\u00a0\u2018has no basis in science or medicine, while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people\u2019; they dubbed the ruling \u2018biologically nonsensical\u2019 and \u2018scientifically illiterate\u2019. As these protests make clear, it is wrong-headed and misleading to define the category woman legally through an appeal to the biological as self-evident data, which it is not.<\/p>\n<p class=\"x_MsoNormal\">\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1988, Section 28 of the Local Government Act naturalised the heterosexual family to prohibit any state-funded <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2018promotion<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> of homosexuality as a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">pretended<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> family relationship\u2019 (emphasis added). In hindsight, this law is widely regarded by all political parties as unjust and discriminatory, designed to humiliate and segregate. The homophobic media coverage of Section 28 represented lesbians and gays as \u2018having gone too far\u2019 in wanting more than simply to be quietly tolerated. The parallels with the transphobia currently circulating widely in media and public debates are striking. It remains to be seen how history will judge this moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Suggested Readings<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Combahee River Collective. 1977.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">de Beauvoir, Simone. 2010 [first published 1949, first translated in 1953] <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Second Sex<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier. London: Vintage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Foucault, Michel. 2018\u00a0 [first published in translation 1970] <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Order of Things<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. London: Routledge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lewis, Gail. 2009. \u2018Birthing Racial Difference: Conversations with my Mother and Others\u2019. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Studies in the Maternal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, 1:1, pp. 1-21.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Riley, Denise. 1988. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of \u2018Women\u2019 in History. <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">London:<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Palgrave Macmillan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Scott, Joan W. 2013. \u2018The Uses and Abuses of Gender\u2019. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tijdscrift voor Genderstudies<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Nr 1. pp. 63-77.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>On Common Sense<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A number of media responses to the UK supreme court\u2019s recent ruling on the meaning of \u201csex\u201d in the Equality Act 2010 claimed it as a victory for \u201ccommon sense\u201d. Such responses take it for granted that there is a simple meaning to words like sex, woman, and man and express relief that we can finally just let them mean what we \u201cknow\u201d they all mean. While the authors of the ruling stopped short of calling it \u201ccommon sense\u201d, they nonetheless presented it in terms of similar kinds of unquestioned certainty: what is \u201cclear\u201d, \u201cunambiguous\u201d, \u201cobjective\u201d, \u201creasonable\u201d, \u201csensible\u201d, \u201cplainly intended\u201d or in the \u201cordinary meaning of the words used\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But for decades scholars have questioned the belief in certainty like this\u2014in ideas or positions that are seemingly so clear as to be unquestionable. Scholars like Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Clifford Geertz and, more recently, Sara Ahmed have in various ways argued that what passes for \u201ccommon sense\u201d is in fact a set of values that have come to seem normal and eternal, but are actually rooted in the biases of their particular historical moment. We only have to look at how ideas that might previously have seemed like common sense no longer do\u2014ideas about race, or marriage or disability\u2014to see that \u201ccommon sense\u201d is not a stable and unchanging basis for reasoning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The judgment itself implicitly seems to suggest that what is plain or obvious might not be quite so straightforward insofar as it requires more than 80 pages of complex, technical legal argument in order to establish what is supposedly unambiguous. Indeed, if the express purpose of the judgment is to ascertain the intended meaning of terms in the Equality Act, one might argue that a more obvious or \u201ccommon sense\u201d approach would be to consult someone who was closely involved in drafting it. For example, Melanie Field, the senior civil servant who oversaw the writing of the Act, has been clear that Parliament\u2019s intention at the time was to give trans people with gender recognition certificates the same sex discrimination protections as those living in their gender assigned at birth. The supreme court therefore has issued a judgment that goes against what was \u201cplainly intended\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What emerges through the judgment is that what seems plain or obvious to the Justices actually reveals that they take a very particular (and not necessarily \u201ccommon\u201d) approach. For example, part of their reasoning for why a \u201cbiological\u201d definition of sex is the only one that makes sense is because, if a broader definition were to be adopted, this would create a category \u201cwoman\u201d that includes trans women and this would be \u201ca confusing group to envisage\u201d (para 239). This is because there would apparently be nothing that unites this group: no \u201cshared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group\u201d (para 172). Here, they can only imagine a group united by a narrow vision of biology, yet elsewhere they recognise that groups are constituted by \u201csocietal expectations or structures affecting their group\u201d (para 153). This latter point is more in line with some feminist scholars who have argued that women as a group are constituted by their social position within patriarchy and by their shared vulnerability to patriarchal violence, rather than by biology. Indeed, it would be hard to see how trans women do not share this vulnerability and do not also have need to access some of the \u201csingle-sex\u201d services that the judgment believes they should have no automatic right to access: rape crisis centres, domestic violence refuges and related counselling services, amongst others. Rather than expressing a general common sense, the Justices\u2019 view betrays a deep biological determinism, an easily questioned belief that what unites women or gives them coherence as a group is some kind of shared biology (exactly what biology is shared is unspecified).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is plain to see is that what passes for common sense changes over time. Rather than appeal simply to what is apparently clear, obvious and unambiguous, surely it\u2019s more helpful to interrogate what makes a given idea seem unquestionable and think about whose interests are served in the process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Suggested Readings\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ahmed, Sara. 2023. \u2018Common Sense as a Legacy Project\u2019. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Feminist Killjoys<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> blog &lt;<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/feministkilljoys.com\/2023\/05\/30\/common-sense-as-a-legacy-project\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">https:\/\/feministkilljoys.com\/2023\/05\/30\/common-sense-as-a-legacy-project\/<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">&gt;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Geertz, Clifford. 1975. \u2018Common Sense as a Cultural System\u2019. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Antioch Review <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">33, no. 1: 5-26<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hall, Stuart et al. 1978. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">London: Macmillan<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mackinnon, Catherine A. 2023. \u2018Exploring Transgender Law and Politics\u2019, \u2018Feminist Frictions: Key Concepts and Controversies\u2019, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Signs Journal <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">&lt;<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/signsjournal.org\/exploring-transgender-law-and-politics\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">https:\/\/signsjournal.org\/exploring-transgender-law-and-politics\/<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">&gt;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Where Next? On Ordinariness<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">At a time of such intense hostility towards trans people, it may seem odd to talk about ordinariness. Rightly, many people have pointed out that trans people make up a tiny minority of the population. Yet it also seems important to remember that everybody has a relationship to sex and gender. Everybody, moreover, experiences some form of sexual change during their lifetime: puberty, menopause, lowering testosterone levels. Sexual change is ordinary, but its different forms lead to particular needs. Menopause is routinely treated with HRT, for example. Every human being carries the genetic information that could lead to the development of male and female secondary sexual characteristics: our chromosomes condition the hormonal environment that influences those characteristics\u2019 development, but hormones change, leading to alterations in how our genes are expressed. Those whose lives move them towards transition, whatever form it may take, are no less worthy of respect and appropriate care than anybody else, and as Henry Rubin suggested, they, we, have the right to desire ordinariness too \u2013 to go about our everyday lives \u2018unmarked by suspicion and hostilities\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dr Gareth Gavin, Professor Jackie Stacey, Dr Ben Nichols<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture<\/span><\/p>\n<p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_post_nav _builder_version=&#8221;3.0.106&#8243; in_same_term=&#8221;off&#8221; show_prev=&#8221;on&#8221; show_next=&#8221;on&#8221; prev_text=&#8221;Previous&#8221; next_text=&#8221;Next&#8221; locked=&#8221;on&#8221; parent_locked=&#8221;off&#8221; \/][et_pb_comments _builder_version=&#8221;3.0.106&#8243; show_avatar=&#8221;on&#8221; show_reply=&#8221;on&#8221; show_count=&#8221;on&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;light&#8221; 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The Scottish Government had interpreted safeguards that are provided in the EA for the protected characteristic of \u2018sex\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7522,"featured_media":9193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-insight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8675"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9194,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8675\/revisions\/9194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/humanities-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}