A remarkable thing happened in Britain: Its Supreme Court looked at legislation from 15 years ago and concluded that when Parliament used the word “sex,” it was referring to the biological, male-female binary, and not to a delusional or perverted individual’s feelings. Sadly, the same cannot be said of our Supreme Court, which, given the same opportunity a few years ago, concluded that Congress in 1964 had the transgender crowd in mind when it used the word “sex.”

For many years, a group called For Women Scotland (“FWS”) had been battling with the Scottish Government over what constitutes a “woman.” The catalyst for the battle was the “Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.” That law required that, for Scottish public bodies, colleges, and universities, board membership must have women represented at exactly 50% because women make up 52% of the Scottish population. (But of course, the law assures us, everything must be done on a merit basis.)

Image (edited) by Terry Ott. CC BY 2.0.

The problem, though, was figuring out what was meant by the term “women” in the act, since the Act hadn’t bothered to define the term. The Act’s accompanying statutory guidance, however, purported to make that point clear. All I see is a paragraph of gibberish:

There is no definition of “woman” set out in the Act with effect from 19 April 2022 following decisions of the Court of 18 February and 22 March 2022. Therefore "woman" in the Act has the meaning under section 11 and section 212(1) of the Equality Act 2010. In addition, in terms of section 9(1) of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, where a full gender recognition certificate has been issued to a person that their acquired gender is female, the person's sex is that of a woman, and where a full gender recognition certificate has been issued to a person that their acquired gender is male, the person's sex becomes that of a man.

So clear...

What’s important to know is that the FWS said the Scottish law is inconsistent with the UK Equality Act 2010, which is the final word on the subject. The problem with the Scottish law is that the Equality Act actually acknowledges some exceptions to the “men can be women and women can be men” leftist fantasy. When a Scottish court heard about this, though, the judge was unimpressed, informing FWS that “women were ‘not limited to biological or birth sex’.”

If none of this makes sense, don’t worry. What matters is that, to decide the Scottish dispute, the British Supreme Court had to look at the Equality Act 2010 and determine what that Act meant when it used the word “woman.”

The Act is an Orwellian nightmare intended to make everyone totally equal under the law by defining seemingly every type of identity possible—Age, Disability, Gender Reassignment, Marriage and civil partnership, Race, Religion or belief, Sex, and Sexual orientation”—and then mandating what must be done or cannot be done with regard to each of those definitional groups. It’s an endless, obsessive law—212 subsections and 28 “schedules”—that only a bureaucrat could have written. As noted, it also provides special protection for women in some contexts.

Looking at this 2010 law, which carefully breaks out sex, homosexuality, and (the fallacy of) transgenderism, a unanimous UK Supreme Court ruled that the term “woman” means what it has meant since the dawn of mankind: a biological woman possessed of XX chromosomes and belonging to the class of people that, if all systems are working well, carries eggs that, when fertilized, turn into babies.

The ruling should be enjoyed while it can, because my prediction is that Britain’s hard left government will immediately amend the Act to erase the notion of womanhood entirely.

Meanwhile, though, it’s important to point out that our Supreme Court, ostensibly less woke than the British Supreme Court, hasn’t displayed that same wisdom. In 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the decision in Bostock v. Clayton County.

That misbegotten case examined the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the context of employment and concluded that the word “sex” doesn’t mean men and women. Instead, it must be understood to encompass sexual orientation and so-called “gender identity,” two non-existent concepts back in 1964. Since that decision was issued, we’ve added to the Court a justice who doesn’t even know what a woman is.

If we are to have sanity in America, the United States Supreme Court must reverse the Bostock decision. Congress in 1964 did not intend for the word “sex” to mean anything other than the male-female, XY-XX binary. Until that disgraceful misreading of the Civil Rights Act is erased from our jurisprudence, we are actually in worse shape than the uber-woke United Kingdom.