I skimmed through the actual ruling (not in detail because holy shit that is a lot of words for a whole lot of nothing), and even I, with my superficial understanding of UK gender law, can tell that the ruling is inconsistent with existing UK laws and is going to make a mess of so many things.
Their final argument is that if they don't use assigned birth gender (or what they understand to be "biological sex") as the criteria to define somone as a woman under the equality act, then the equality act is impossible to enact or enforce...
Which is mindboggling if you have even a moment's awareness of what the gender recognition process says it does by law, which is legally change the recognised sex identifier of individuals who go through the process. Like, if you can't be recognised as a woman through the process specifically legally created to do that, then every reason the government has given to why people can't get gender affirming care is up for a legal challenge on a fundamental level, because apparently it no longer does exactly what it says it does by law!
It's absolutely incoherent even from a legal perspective, never mind everyone's lived experience.
They try to reign in the scope of their judgement by saying they think trans people should be very represented in public life, and that this definition should only be applied when counting how many women are employing for reporting purposes under the EA, but it's just like... How do senior judges get to that position and apperently not have the ability to understand that rulings like this create precedence that are inevitably applied beyond that scope?
Such fucking absolutely transparently incoherent bullshittery.
The UK government itself has declared it won't change the gender recognition process or allow for self-identification because it has a "robust process that recognises the seriousness of changing gender" - but this now makes that a lie! Because apparently their process doesn't let anyone change shit in the eyes of the law, even though under the eyes of a different law it absolutely does!
What this reveals is that either the EA is inadequate and needs to be changed to recognise gender as a direction of oppression and marginalisation, or absolutely every part of the gender recognition legal framework needs entirely overhauling.
Neither of these is going to be fun for the UK government, and both routes leave room for TERFs to try to remove gender as a legal concept, but it is going to be so fucking painful for all these culture war bullshit politicians who haven't realised that the TERFs are vastly outnumbered in the real world.
