The Chiffon Borg

ALT Slide 1 Image text: Cardiff March for Trans Liberation. Monday April 21st 1PM. Aneurin Bevan Statue, Queen Street, Cardiff. Join us to protest the Supreme Court ruling excluding Trans women and femmes from womens spaces. There will be indoor space available after to rest, decompress, and support each other. The logos for We Exist, Trans Pride Cardiff, Black Lives Matter Cardiff & Vale, and Trans Aid Cymru are across the bottom. An image of people wearing progress and trans pride flags is in the background.

ALT Statement: On April 16, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the definition of a “woman” as stated in the Equality Act 2010 refers to ‘ biological women and biological sex.” The case relates to an appeal by anti-trans group For Women Scotland, against the Scottish Government. This ruling legally excludes trans women—even those with Gender Recognition Certificates—from protections designed for women, setting a dangerous precedent that reinforces the authority of the state to dictate our bodies and right to self determination. This decision was made without a single trans voice permitted to speak in court. Three of the four intervenors were explicitly anti-trans, and a retired trans judge, Victoria McCloud, was blocked from offering evidence. The court’s ruling was not only unjust, it was engineered to be. When the people most affected are denied the right to speak, it is a show trial in service of state violence.

ALT Statement: This ruling will have devastating consequences for transwomen, who already experience disproportionately higher rates of domestic and sexual violence, discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare and police harassment and surveillence. It will legitimise and further embolden those already trying to bar trans women from changing rooms, shelters, health care, domestic violence shelters, sport and community spaces. We will see an increase in medical neglect, state surveillance, and societal violence against our community—especially against those who exist at the intersections of state oppression: black, brown, migrant, disabled, poor and sex workers. For our intersex siblings this is another in a long line of state-imposed violences: pathologisation, forced surgeries, and now, further legal erasure under a binary sex system that was never designed to reflect the reality of their bodies or lives.