Here’s a powerful and compassionate blog post that honours the trans community and concludes with a moving original poem in response to the UK Supreme Court’s ruling:
Yesterday, the UK Supreme Court overturned decades of progress by ruling that the legal definition of “woman” must be based on biological sex, effectively undoing the dignity and protections once assured under the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It is a day that marks not just a legal shift, but a moral failing one that leaves trans women, once again, out in the cold.
In 2004, the law recognised that a trans person who had received a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) was, in the eyes of the law, to be treated as their acquired sex. It was a step forward rooted in humanity, dignity, and the understanding that gender is about more than chromosomes and genitalia. Today’s judgement reverses that protection not with evidence, compassion, or scientific rigour, but with fear, exclusion, and prejudice.
The Court, in its refusal to listen to trans voices or consult gender identity experts, took a position fuelled not by evidence but by ideological hysteria. The so-called “threat” trans women pose has no statistical factual grounding.
No Olympic medals have been stolen.
No female hospital wards have been endangered.
No “infiltration” of bathrooms has occurred.
Instead, trans women have continued, quietly and courageously, to live. To stand in line at loos. To care for their loved ones. To contribute to society. To love themselves into existence in a world that keeps trying to write them out.
This ruling isn’t about safety. It’s about power. It is about asserting control over bodies and identities that challenge the rigid binaries upon which the status quo is built. The language used to describe trans people as “dangerous,” “invaders,” or “predators” echoes the ugliest chapters of history where Jewish people, Black communities, and migrants were cast in similar roles to justify their exclusion or erasure.
This isn’t just a rollback of trans rights. It is a warning. For when governments decide that some people are too different to deserve dignity, they rarely stop at one group. The organisations driving this anti-trans campaign openly admit they want more: bans on abortion, the rolling back of gay rights, the enforcement of conservative Christian ideology on everybody, in every home, in every school.
Britain is becoming a place where trans people are expected to be invisible, silent, erased. But with our allyship they will not be. Because trans people are not a threat.
They are teachers, sisters, nurses, engineers, daughters, mothers, friends.
They are brave. They are beautiful. And they are not going away.
To every trans person reading this: you are not alone. Your existence is sacred. Your identity is real. Your life is yours to define.
And to those in power: History will remember your cruelty.
We Will Not Unbecome
They say the law has had its say,
But truth and law drift far away.
For justice lives in hearts, not writ
Not inked by hands that choose to split.
We’re not defined by form or frame,
Nor bound by someone else’s name.
We’re shaped by hope, by pain endured,
By love that stayed, by strength assured.
We’ve stood before the mirror’s light,
And whispered who we are at night.
When silence wrapped us in its thread,
We spoke our truth and lived instead.
No ruling from a court of stone
Can take the life we’ve made our own.
The morning peace, the warm embrace,
The knowing smile on a stranger’s face.
They call us danger, threat, or flaw
Yet we know fear in every law.
We sit, we wait, we cross the street,
We count our breaths, conceal our heat.
But still, we rise with quiet grace,
With tender hearts and steadfast pace.
With all the care that women bring
The strength to weep, the will to sing.
Let them erase us from the page,
We’ll still exist, defy the cage.
Our names will echo, clear and true,
In every place that honours you.
We won’t retreat, we won’t succumb,
We won’t be shamed, silenced, or numb.
We are, we breathe, we overcome
And we will not, will not, unbecome.
Alyson Malach 17.4.2025.