The Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow expresses dismay in response to the recent ruling by the UK Supreme Court that a ‘woman’ should be defined in terms of ‘biological sex’.  Bringing an historical perspective to this ruling lends weight to current and widespread concerns about how this ruling creates peril both for trans people and for cis women, who are at risk from biological essentialism.  We reject the construction of trans rights and women’s rights as being in opposition to each other.  History teaches us the following lessons that can be brought to bear on the present moment:

  • Understandings of sex and gender have never been static nor always binary. They have instead varied considerably across time and place with greater or lesser degrees of fluidity and flexibility.  These categories are historically and culturally contingent and subject to varied scientific, ideological and experiential interpretation as well as differing degrees of regulation, discipline and enforcement.
  • Categories of sex and gender, and their expression, are open to political manipulation in service of a variety of agendas. The rigid imposition of norms of gender and sexuality is a form of power particularly (although not exclusively) associated with authoritarian regimes.  Othering, stigmatising and discriminating against vulnerable groups—such as trans people—is a strategy used by governments to create false impressions of threat as a means of bolstering support and to detract attention from policy failings.
  • Essentialist understandings of sex in terms of binary difference are not currently supported by medical research. It is hard to think of a single historical context in which biological determinism has served women’s rights and an equality agenda – whereas there are many instances in which essentialist understandings of sex have supported the restriction of women’s equal access to resources, education, representation, and reproductive choices. 

We recommend the following historical research as the starting point for an historically informed and sustained engagement with the discriminatory dynamics of the Supreme Court’s Ruling, and as the basis for our rejection of its core premise:

Jeanne Boydston, ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’, Gender & History 20, no. 3 (2008): 558–83

Paisley Currah, Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2022)

Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021)

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024)

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (London: Basic Books, 2022)

Adrian Kane-Galbraith, ‘Male Breadwinners of “Doubtful Sex”: Trans Men and the Welfare State, 1954–1970’, in Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present, ed. Matt Houlbrook, Katie Jones, and Ben Mechen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024)

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992)

Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska, eds., Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Patricia Simon, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (2011)

Emily Skidmore, ‘The History of Sexuality and LGBTQ+ History’ in The Cambridge World History of Sexualities, ed. Merry Wiesner Hanks and Mathew Kuefler (2024)

Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2019) 

First published: 6 May 2025

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