- - - Landmark ruling on trans women by U.K.'s top court sparks heartbreak and confusion

Astha RajvanshiJuly 20, 2025 at 4:00 AM

Protestors during a march in support of transgender rights in central London, on May 25. (Henry Nicholls / AFP / Getty Images)

LONDON — Soccer fans know it as “hallowed ground,” so when Billie Sky Walker walked onto the field at London’s Wembley Stadium two years ago, she achieved a dream held by players around the world.

Before a Community Shield men’s match between Manchester City and Arsenal in August 2023, she proudly donned an official shirt as a representative of the Football Association, the regulatory body for soccer in England, that read, “The FA is for all.”

Today, the 28-year-old is barred from playing in FA-organized tournaments following a landmark judgment by Britain’s Supreme Court in April that said the legal definition of “woman” is based on biological sex — a huge blow to campaigners for transgender rights that could have far-reaching implications for a wide range of life in the U.K., be it admission to changing rooms, and decisions on hospital beds, equal pay claims and domestic violence shelters.

After the judgment, a number of sporting governing bodies, including the FA, changed their rules so that only those born biologically female are allowed to play, excluding Walker and 28 other transgender players across England from the association. The Scottish Football Association followed suit, and Northern Ireland’s Irish Football Association appears likely to do the same.

Describing the ruling as “confusing and upsetting,” Walker said she had been welcomed “into this space” by her cisgender peers, or biological women.

Billie was accompanied by her friend Lorna to the match at Wembley stadium in London. (Courtesy of Billie Sky Walker)

Calling the decision to bar Walker “heartbreaking,” her former teammate Lucy Leiter, 24, said it was not the case that “only trans women think they should play,” adding, “The support has been unequivocal from everyone I’ve ever played with.”

Walker, who said she felt that she was a girl from the age of 5 and transitioned at the age of 24, said that playing soccer on a women’s team “really established a huge essence of who I am, because it gave me the safety and comfort and knowledge that I’m enough.”

Intense debate

The Supreme Court ruling came amid intense and sometimes toxic public debate in the U.K. over the intersection of transgender and women’s rights. The debate has also simmered in the U.S., where President Donald Trump has made it one of his signature issues by signing an executive order in February banning trans women from women’s sports at the national level.

In December 2022, Scottish lawmakers approved a bill that allowed anyone over the age of 16 to change their gender identity using gender certificates, removing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the medical term for the distress that results from the conflict between someone’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth.

The campaign group For Women Scotland later brought a legal case against the semiautonomous government, arguing that sex-based protections should apply only to people who were born female.

And Britain’s central government blocked the law the following year, invoking for the first time a section of the 25-year-old act that gave the Scottish Parliament control over most of its own affairs.

The For Women Scotland case nonetheless worked its way through the court system, reaching the Supreme Court this spring.

After the court’s 12 justices ruled unanimously in the group’s favor, the presiding judge, Lord Hodge, said the decision should not be seen as “a triumph of one side over the other,” and emphasized that transgender people remain protected under the law.

For Women Scotland campaigners celebrated the verdict with hugs, tears of happiness, and champagne as they left the courtroom.

“There was elation and disbelief and, yes, I was absolutely thrilled,” Susan Smith, one of the group’s co-founders, told NBC News in a telephone interview last month. “If people were entitled to say that their sex in law had changed, you can’t control who applies for that.”

For Smith and her group, the issue of legal gender recognition touches on who gets to make decisions about women’s lives and bodies, including their access to spaces from hospital wards to rape crisis centers and prisons.

Women's rights campaigner Susan Smith, left, celebrates the judgement outside court in London in April. (Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)

While she acknowledged “gender reassignment is also a protected characteristic,” Smith cited the case of Isla Bryson, a convicted rapist who changed gender while awaiting trial. “These things are at the extreme; they’re not common, but being rare is not a reason for ignoring an issue,” she said.

Far-reaching implications

While there is no robust data on the U.K.’s trans population, in the latest census, in 2018, the government estimated that around 200,000 to 500,000 people — less than 1% of the population — identified as transgender.

Some, like Willow, a 31-year-old delivery driver from the county of Cheshire in northwest England who uses the pronouns they/them, are already feeling the implications of the ruling at a basic level. NBC News agreed not to use Willow’s last name because they feared for their job.

Willow said they had long avoided using the women’s toilets at work, opting instead for the one disabled toilet because it was “a safer option,” although “the men at work often use it.”

On one occasion, Willow said they had no choice but to use the women’s toilet and were later reprimanded for doing so.

“It was upsetting and I actually ended up walking out of work that day,” they said, adding, “I just feel like I’m not treated equally to everyone else at work, like I’m seen as lesser.”

Willow’s predicament highlights the issues legislators now face as they attempt to interpret the Supreme Court ruling.

After initially issuing guidance that “trans women should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities,” Britain’s rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), was forced to backtrack following a legal challenge. Its latest guidance says, “Toilets, showers, and changing facilities may be mixed-sex where they are in a separate room lockable from the inside.”

The Good Law Project, an advocacy group that challenged the guidance, said in a statement that the EHRC had conceded a key point in its case and that it was “considering our next steps.”

Smith said For Women Scotland’s case was never about toilet access. “No one is standing at the door checking who goes in and out,” she said.

But there has already been some pushback against the Supreme Court ruling.

The doctors’ union at the British Medical Association said in a statement it was “biologically nonsensical,” adding, “Attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine.”

More than 20 of the U.K.’s leading charities and service providers, including Refuge, the country’s largest charity for women affected by domestic abuse, and the mental health charity Mind, have also urged the EHRC to think carefully before drawing up new guidelines.

Meanwhile, transgender hate crimes in the UK have jumped 11%, from 2,253 in 2018–19 to 4,732 in 2022–23, official statistics show. The country’s interior ministry said this increase may be due to transgender issues being “heavily discussed by politicians, the media, and on social media over the last year.”

Level playing field?

Over the past two years, a handful of international sporting associations, including track and field, cycling and swimming, have banned trans women from elite games, citing unfair competitive advantage. The International Olympic Committee changed its rules in November 2021 to allow individual sports to determine whether trans athletes can compete.

And the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said in April that it would not set any policy on transgender athlete eligibility ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games, despite Trump’s Executive Order 14201 — Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports — threatening to upend protocols for participation.

“Biology in sport cannot be ignored,” former British swimmer Sharron Davies and an Olympic medalist, said in a telephone interview last month. Women “already have huge unfairness and inequality,” she said, adding, “It’s up to men to make men’s sport welcoming for all men, including nonconforming males.”

Those views were echoed by Smith from For Women Scotland, who said that “women just wouldn’t get the opportunity” unless there were “separate sex categories.”

But an April 2024 study funded by the International Olympic Committee found that while transgender female athletes had greater handgrip strength than biological women, they also had lower jumping ability, lung function and cardiovascular fitness.

Given the physiological differences, the authors stated that the study’s most important finding was that trans women are not biological men.

A consensus statement from the American College of Sports Medicine a year earlier also noted that trans women held the same advantages as men by typically outperforming women due to fundamental differences dictated by their “sex chromosomes and sex hormones at puberty, in particular, testosterone.” But, it noted, those differences were reduced if a trans person underwent hormone therapy.

As for Walker, while she can no longer play for London Galaxy, her second team, Goal Diggers FC, withdrew from FA-affiliated leagues so she could keep playing.

But the association’s decision nonetheless cuts deep.

“Imagine taking 24 years to get from hiding my identity from everyone, including my parents, to then being invited by ciswomen to play a sport I love and finding my place in the world,” Walker said.

“Now, that’s all being taken from me.”

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Source: “AOL Sports”