353: ‘The madness is over’ | Helen Joyce on the Supreme Court trans ruling
The spiked podcast
The spiked podcast
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Transwomen are not women and sex is biological. So says a landmark ruling on gender from the UK Supreme Court. Here, Helen Joyce – director of advocacy at Sex Matters – explains how the judgment kills off a raft of ‘trans inclusive’ policies, reasserts biological reality and protects women’s rights.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Fraser here. What you're about to hear is the audio from a video we've just published on our YouTube channel, an interview with Helen Joyce. |
| 0:08.0 | To make sure that you never miss great video content like this, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com forward slash spiked. |
| 0:17.0 | Hello, I'm Fraser Myers, Deputy Editor of Spiked. I'm delighted to be joined down the line by Helen Joyce, Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters. |
| 0:24.6 | Hi, Helen. |
| 0:25.6 | Hey. |
| 0:26.6 | Helen, you're joining me the day after the Supreme Court has made a momentous decision to define sex in the law as biological. |
| 0:36.6 | Could you just unpack that decision for us and explain why it's so |
| 0:40.7 | significant? Sure. So it specifically was a judgment about the Equality Act, which is this Hortmanteau Act |
| 0:46.8 | that rolls up all anti-discrimination law into one massive bundle. It brings in the Sex Discrimination Act |
| 0:52.3 | 1975, the Race Relations Act and a bunch of |
| 0:55.7 | other things about disability, age, etc., etc. And the trouble is that by the time the Equality |
| 1:01.0 | Act was passed in 2010, we had had the Gender Recognition Act, which allows some people, |
| 1:06.4 | it's only happened 9,000 times, some people to get a piece of paper saying they are members of the opposite |
| 1:11.5 | sex for some legal purposes. And the question was, is the Equality Act one of those legal purposes? |
| 1:17.7 | And on the face of it, it looks like it is, because there's a line in the Gender Recognition Act |
| 1:22.1 | that says for all purposes. But if you do this, you turn sex discrimination provisions |
| 1:27.3 | into something that applies to two mixed sex categories, because there are men now in the women bucket and women in the men bucket. |
| 1:35.7 | And women have been fighting for years to get this fixed in a way to take the spanner of the Gender Recognition Act out of the Equality Act, so the Equality Act can go back to working for women |
| 1:44.7 | the way that sex discrimination provisions did before the Gender Recognition Act. |
| 1:49.9 | And is it fair to say this is basically a vindication for biological reality? |
| 1:55.1 | And if so, why has it been such an uphill struggle to have that recognised? |
| 1:59.8 | It's a vindication for two things, biological reality and the women who have been fighting for years |
... |
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