On 7 May 2025, Trade Unionists for Trans Rights held a day of action across Britain to defy the 16 April, UK Supreme Court ruling in the case of For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers. The ruling they opposed was the unanimous determination that when The Equality Act 2010 uses the terms “woman” and “man”, it exclusively refers to the biological sex a person is assigned at birth and not their true gender, even when a person holds a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). This wasn’t the first time the UK labour movement had collectively opposed LGBTQAI+ discrimination. In the 1980s, they led the fight against Section 28, a deeply controversial, homophobic law introduced by Margaret Thatcher that banned the “promotion of homosexuality” in publicly funded bodies including schools and libraries.
The 16 April ruling effectively erases trans people’s affirmed gender thereby undermining their rights and protections especially in respect of single-sex spaces and services, including council-run leisure centres. It increases the risk of workplace discrimination as exemplified by Barclays Bank’s response, which indicated they would ban trans women employees from using female toilets. Others have acted in the wake of the ruling too, including Edinburgh Women’s Aid (EWA). The EWA position statement now cites the equality act to exclude transgender women and non-binary people from their service. These alarming responses exacerbate existing oppressions such as exclusion from generational wealth and other forms of family support.
The Ruling and the North of Ireland
The ruling deals with parts of the UK Equality Act which don’t apply in the North of Ireland. While the North’s Equality Commission plans to issue ‘guidance’ on the ruling, transphobic forces haven’t wasted any time in trying to make the most of the court’s determination to further erode trans rights, and politicians from every unionist party in Stormont made speeches calling for its conclusions to be followed in the North. Whether trans women in the North will be made to feel the sharp end of the judgement will depend on a political struggle for trans rights. Relying on the other main parties in Stormont – Sinn Féin, Alliance, SDLP – in this struggle would be a mistake: in August last year the Stormont Executive banned puberty blockers for trans youth at the behest of Westminster. The decision was taken despite the medical ‘evidence’ underlying it being entirely spurious, proven by the fact that such blockers are not banned for non-trans youth. It also contravened the stated party policy of both Sinn Féin and Alliance, emblematic of how Stormont kowtows to British Government diktat at every turn. The lone voice in the parliamentary chamber against this decision was People Before Profit’s MLA, Gerry Carroll, who tabled a motion in April calling for an end to the ban, receiving no support. Outside Stormont, however, the movement for trans rights is growing, in size and in anger. Thousands took the streets in May in Belfast, in one of the largest trans rights rallies seen to date in Ireland. Meanwhile multiple Pride organisers across the North, including Belfast Pride and Derry Pride, have banned Executive parties from participating in their parades this summer. This represents an important step where parties claiming to be in support of LGBTQAI+ rights are being judged on deeds and not only words.
Rowling’s Ruling
For Women Scotland Ltd were backed by the author JK Rowling who reportedly donated £70,000 to fund the challenge. This forms part of a growing list of transphobic actions by Rowling including mocking the use of inclusive language and a tirade of online abuse especially targeted at trans women. In 2024, Rowling inflicted online bullying on the cis female Olympic boxer and gold medallist Imane Khelif when she learned Khelif had been controversially disqualified from in the world championships one year earlier because Umar Kremlev, a Russian official in the International Boxing Association, which is no longer recognised by the International Olympic Committee due to corruption allegations, claimed at different points that she either had naturally occurring, elevated testosterone levels or XY chromosomes.
It is important to note that Khelif’s disqualification restored the undefeated record of a Russian boxer and the IBA has refused to substantiate these claims. If Rowling is concerned about women’s sport, why is she silent on real problems like ongoing pay differentials, uneven media coverage which impacts investment, representation at leadership level and the ongoing prevalence of sexual harassment? Instead, the negativity Rowling and other so-called ‘gender critical feminists’ show towards a tiny percentage of our population can lead to great harm, especially for trans women who are much more likely to be the ones at the receiving end of male violence, including in prisons. And it won’t stop here. According to some reports online, Rowling is planning on using money from the future reboot of her Harry Potter books to fund similar future actions.
The Trans Healthcare Landscape in the South of Ireland
The UK’s Supreme Court Ruling comes at a time when, thankfully, increasing numbers of trans people are finding the confidence to live openly and to access gender-affirming care (albeit with limitations). In Ireland, these rights are somewhat protected by The Gender Recognition Act (2015) which, like laws in Norway, Argentina and Malta, accepts self-determination as the only required criteria. In other words, there is no need for a medical diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ as is required in the UK. The reason Ireland has any law at all isn’t because of enlightened establishment politicians, but because of a decades-long legal battle fought by Dr Lydia Foy with the support of the Free Legal Aid Board and other trans rights activists including Trans Equality Network of Ireland (TENI).
But this growth in visibility has been matched with a significant global rise in transphobia and transmisogynistic violence, including homicide, some of which is fuelled by ‘hostile media reporting’, including in Ireland, which perpetuates negative stereotyping and fuels misinformation. The threat of interpersonal violence is a constant reality, especially for trans women, most of which is never reported to the authorities for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, Irish-based trans children are more likely to be bullied and excluded in school and there has been a 29% increase in hate crimes captured in 2022 Garda statistics with crimes against LGBTQIA+ people second only to race-related assaults.
One of the most profound forms of discrimination trans people face is in accessing appropriate healthcare with trans affirming healthcare often shrouded in secrecy. This is despite the fact that hormone therapy, mental health care and gender-affirming surgeries, which are all more available than they once were, result in significant positives for trans people including improved mental health, less self-harm, and less alcohol and drug misuse than before transitioning. Little wonder there is a welcome growth in demand with more people than ever before, but still a tiny minority of people, seeking gender-affirming care. And although transphobes like Rowling spread disinformation about high levels of regret following gender-affirming surgeries, experts put this figure at as low as one per cent.
Medical transition has, broadly speaking, been understood in conflicting ways by many in the trans community and by the medical establishment. For the former, it can reduce the risk of violence and discrimination and allows agency in moulding bodies in line with a person’s own image. For the establishment, it means reducing the number of people openly transgressing gender norms – coercively integrating some into respectable white-collar society and casting those deemed too deviant to the margins. And as is sometimes also the case internationally, Ireland’s trans healthcare is shrouded in the legacy of the Catholic Church’s involvement. Our National Gender Service, delivered from Loughlinstown Hospital and operated by the religious order St. John of God, follows a long history within the medical establishment where doctors, backed by a legal landscape of stigmatisation, still hold a near monopoly on determining what constitutes healthcare for trans people.
The reality of the National Gender Service is that many people wait years simply to get an initial assessment, then navigate a service where their ambition becomes to get out the other end with as little trauma as possible. Just as bodily autonomy was denied in Ireland throughout its abortion ban, people are left with no choice but to seek hormone therapy through online forums or word of mouth connections and fly overseas for surgical procedures that are often expensive. And that’s without considering other barriers, including the cost of travel and the luxury of having the time to step away from whatever responsibilities a person holds. As is the case when abortion bans are in place, barriers such as these disproportionately impact poorer people, disabled people, migrants, people with care loads and/or people in coercive relationships where it is difficult to get away.
Beyond specialist services, people seeking gender-affirming care can face prejudicial attitudes from GPs who are reluctant to prescribe hormone therapy despite regularly prescribing these to cis people for all sorts of reasons including delayed puberty, menopause and when treating some cancers. Some doctors also neglect people’s basic right to healthcare by falsely presuming that any issue a trans person presents with somehow links back to their gender identity. Ireland still has no dedicated trans healthcare for children and no plans to introduce any despite research that demonstrates significant decreases in suicidality and marked improvements in well-being for children and young adults. Instead, in 2023, access to care was publicly undermined by two leading doctors who worked at the NGS, when they lodged a complaint against the HSE for referring children to overseas services where the model is trans affirming. This and other interventions likely contribute to the fact that, across Ireland, 80% of Irish-based trans people have considered suicide at some stage with nearly 45% having engaged in some type of self-harm.
The Establishment’s Attack on Trans Rights
Moving away from healthcare, another contextual feature of the Supreme Court ruling is the extent to which, as with Sunak and Starmer in the UK, Trump in the US and Meloni in Italy, some centrist politicians have leaned into anti-trans discourse. One reason for this is to shore up conservative voters. Another is as a scapegoating tactic that distracts people from the systemic causes of the many challenges people face, including economic inequality and underfunded public services. Neoliberal politicians share the goal of maintaining the cis-heteronormative family structure: for the former, the motivation is economic; for the latter, the far-right agitators are motivated by a return to traditional roles of masculinity and femininity. These same people are soft on gender-based violence and strong supporters of abortion bans.
Establishment politicians and the wider apparatus of the neoliberal state have also become experts at pinkwashing – a practice where companies, organisations and the state promote themselves as LGBTQIA+ friendly to distract from or downplay negative aspects of their own behaviours that are the very opposite. Pinkwashing is a particular feature of Pride – an annual global celebration that immortalises the Stonewall riots of 1969 which began when butch lesbians like Stormé DeLarverie, and “street transvestites” (who would now likely be understood as transgender women) such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera led the successful prevention of a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York. Today’s Pride is increasingly underpinned by corporate donations and political performativity and not any real attempt to address the genuine concerns of LGBTQIA+ communities, including the barriers to trans healthcare and the constant threat of violence talked about earlier.
Ways forward
Thankfully, gender-critical feminism has been slower to take root in Ireland than in the UK and the US. Part of the reason for this may be that the National Women’s Council of Ireland has condemned all forms of transphobia. There have also been several counter demonstrations when transphobes and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) have attempted to mobilise. It is sad to see that some people on the left in the UK have welcomed the ruling, often adopting specious arguments about defending women’s rights. Some have even claimed that LGBTQIA+ survival is a mere cultural tangent to women’s real material oppression, which stems from postmodernism. As Holly Lewis’s recent article notes, such a view not only confuses biological capacities with social relations, but also ignores the complexity of scientific enquiry, not to mention leaving out trans and intersex people while claiming universal liberation.
As socialists, our task is to champion trans liberation, viewing it as an essential part of our struggle against all forms of oppression. Creating a society where the ideas of Rowling and other transphobes are isolated and dismissed includes refusing to ally with anyone that minimises the importance of trans rights or seeks to weaponise transphobia as a distraction from the root cause of injustice, namely capitalism. As stated earlier, transphobia does not exist in a bubble. It is cultivated by the media and neoliberal state to reinforce gender roles that uphold the cis-heteronormative family structure and, by extension, capitalist exploitation. We should take our lead from, and indeed emphatically back, Trans and Intersex Pride (est. 2018) who, in the last few years, have organised an anti-fascist block at Dublin Pride as well as running a separate annual march which has grown in number from a few hundred in 2018 to several thousand in 2024. We should also continue to agitate within our unions, as some workers have within Barclays in an attempt to undermine the power of employers to marginalise trans people. Instead, these workers are promoting a culture of inclusion.
Socialists must also draw connections between gender freedom and economic justice. Capitalism thrives on fixed and dependable features, including cultural norms that surround strict binary divisions of gender, a division which, through the cis-heteronormative family structure, keeps the wheels of capitalism turning.
As for JK Rowling, there’s no chance we’ll be watching the reboot.
