A landmark ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on the legal definition of a woman under the Equality Act 2010 could mean firms need to “de-trans” their employment policy documentation.
Earlier today, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
But the court also pointed out that transgender people still have legal protection from discrimination.
The Scottish government had argued that sex-based protections applied to transgender people with a gender recognition certificate. But campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) said only people born female are entitled to these protections. The Supreme Court ruled in favour of FWS’s argument.
Jacqueline McDermott, employment lawyer at Keystone Law, told Benefits Expert that the ruling has implications for employment policies.
“Currently as they [employer policies] are worded, they may be worded to include transgender women. In fact they should only include biological women such as with maternity policies,” McDermott explained.
“It’s a bit like the common anecdote about hospitals and the NHS describing pregnant women as ‘breast feeders’.
“If they’ve got wording like that in their policies, they might want to go through them and ‘de-trans’ it if you like and refer to biological women.
“A transgender man might identify as a man but they are still a biological woman.”
But McDermott added she did not know of many clients that have amended wording to conflate transgender women with biological women.
“But certainly there are policies, as with maternity and paternity policies, where they just need to check the wording, so they haven’t changed it to conflate transgender women to biological women,” she concluded.
