Open letter to UoE’s Information Services Group management
UCU LGBT+ badges and lanyard
Dear ISG management,
UCU Edinburgh is deeply disappointed by your statement published circa 2 May 2025, titled ‘Clarification on sex-based rights,’ in which you welcome the Supreme Court ruling on 16 April 2025 for its supposed, unclarified benefits for women while also making no explicit recognition of the harms the ruling does to trans staff and students. In replicating anti-trans legislation in Republican states in the U.S.A. as well as in authoritarian, anti-LGBTQI+ countries like Hungary and Russia, this ruling has led to calls by the U.K. Government and its equalities watchdog the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to undo decades of trans-inclusive legislation by establishing nation-wide segregation of trans people in public spaces. This includes trans people no longer using the gendered facilities of their identified gender, while it more broadly removes the legal status of trans people’s identified gender, with an entrenchment of this position likely to be enforced this summer through the EHRC’s statutory guidance.
To clarify our concerns, the statement firstly welcomes the ruling for strengthening women’s rights, though it does not specify how or why you think the statement represents all women. The statement does not mention, for example: the condemnations of the Supreme Court ruling by female politicians such as the former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (who said the ruling’s implications risk making trans people’s lives “unliveable” (6 May 2025)) and Labour MP Nadia Whittome (referred to the ruling as “harmful” and potentially “discriminatory” as it places trans women “at greater risk of violence” (24 April 2025)); the public statements made by women’s groups such as Engender, UCU Women Members’ Standing Committee; the open letter ‘Not In Our Name: Feminist Academics and Educators Speak Out Against Transphobia.’; and large protests across the U.K condemning the ruling. It is not at all clear that the majority of women in the U.K. support this stripping away of trans people’s human rights for some unexplained benefit to women’s safety and dignity. Rather, the shock and distress of trans people in being stripped of their legally gendered status and assigned a segregated status for public facilities is matched by the anger and support of allies – men and women – across the country. Instead, the statement claims the Supreme Court ruling is,
relevant particularly for our context because sex matters when we talk about pay gaps, pension gaps, Women in STEM, Women in IT, representation on boards and interview panels, workplace policies on menopause, pregnancy, breastfeeding and access to single-sex spaces for religious reasons, dignity, privacy and respect etc.
This listing of women’s rights gives the impression of a conflict between trans people and women’s rights and how the segregation of trans people will benefit women. Yet it does not specify how taking away trans people’s rights will help women address the “pay gaps [and] pension gaps,” nor benefit “Women in STEM [and] Women in IT.” Concerning “representation on boards,” which was the ostensible justification for the tribunal that led to the Supreme Court ruling, it is worth highlighting the relatively tiny population of trans women in the U.K. – 48,000, according the latest census (ONS, 2022), or less than 0.069% of the U.K. population – compared with 34.49 million cisgender women, or over 50% of the U.K. population. The idea that stripping trans women of their legal status as women will benefit the representations of cis women on boards, or for that matter, “interview panels,” does not recognize this minimal presence of trans women in public life. It is unclear how removing trans people’s legal status and the enforced blanket bans will benefit cis women in terms of “workplace policies on menopause, pregnancy [and] breastfeeding” – are you claiming that trans people are responsible for obstructing these important policies for women at either a local or national level? In what way, and where is your evidence? Finally, to address your claim of how the ruling is relevant to “access to single-sex spaces for religious reasons, dignity, privacy and respect etc,” it has been a historical pattern that LGBTQI+ people are viewed as undermining the dignity or privacy of cisgender people in gendered spaces, with those claims accompanied by groomer and predator narratives aimed at gay men and lesbians in gendered spaces, but this is not a reason to uphold such discriminatory beliefs against trans people.
The problematic framing of the ISG statement as speaking on behalf of “women” is highlighted by the number of open letters by women’s groups condemning the ruling. The open letter by Feminist Academics and Educators says, in protest at the Supreme Court ruling and the subsequent EHRC and Government pronouncements, “We do not need protection from trans people. We need action against sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and everyday sexism … Trans people are being used as scapegoats and a distraction from the problems that we actually face in society.” Similarly, the UCU Women Members’ Standing Committee says, “we do not recognise a conflict between the rights of cisgender women and transgender people … [and] We unequivocally reject the ruling’s reduction of ‘womanhood’ to ‘biology’ … This ruling is not in our name, and we stand in solidarity with our trans, gender nonconforming and nonbinary siblings.” Finally, an open letter by U.K. academics working in the field of women’s and gender studies states,
We reject the framing in the media and in public discourse that puts women, and/or feminists, at odds with trans people. This is especially the case in relation to the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces. Womanhood is lived; it is not biologically given or legally bestowed. The rights of trans people and the rights of cisgender women are inherently connected. As academic experts on sex and gender, we do not agree that biological sex is ‘self-explanatory.’ As feminists, we see the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ to vilify and exclude trans people as shameful.
To return to a second element of the statement that caused us concern, you describe how the ruling “clarifies that legally ‘women’ means biological woman.’ But again, in what way? No clarification was given by the ruling of what characterises a ‘biological woman’ (are trans women not biological?) and why this should exclude trans women. Evidently, this new notion of a ‘biological woman’ – previously absent from the Equality Act – does not include chromosomes or gametes, given how trans men are likely to share or to have shared these characteristics but they are also likely to be banned from women-only spaces; nor does it involve hormones or secondary sex characteristics, given that trans women are likely to share these same characteristics as cis women. In a critique of the vague and exclusionary use of the word ‘biological’ for legal purposes and its failure to clarify who gets to qualify and enjoy its protections, the motion by the British Medical Association’s Resident Doctor Committee condemned the “scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court” and stated, “sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people” (29 April 2025).
Given the significant role of ISG in the running of the University of Edinburgh, as well as the likelihood that trans people and allies are among your staff, we call for more sensitivity, awareness, compassion and consideration in your public statements about rulings that so adversely affect the lives of disempowered others, statements that align with those who publicly celebrated the ruling with cigars and champagne at the outcome of the stripping away of trans people’s dignity and human rights. As an editorial by the Guardian on the ruling concludes,
The supreme court’s decision might, for some, revive a Victorian idea: to protect women legally, we must define them biologically. Efforts to ringfence women’s spaces could end up excluding trans people entirely. The worry is that a narrow legal clarification becomes a cultural victory lap. The bigger danger? That liberal societies struggle with those who don’t fit neat categories, leaving trans people in a third sphere: neither male nor female, nor completely welcome. (23 April 2025)
For ISG to make a public statement in support of a ruling with such delegitimizing and exclusionary consequences for trans people – to make their lives potentially “unliveable” in the public sphere – and for the statement to simultaneously make no direct reference to the distress and fear caused to trans people, is a matter of huge regret to us and we ask you to consider carefully your future public statements and their impact.
UCU Edinburgh Branch Committee
