In Friday’s New York Times, White House correspondent Michael Shear was filing from London, as if offering a warning to left-wing trans activists in the United States: The bigots are coming for you too! “U.K. Court Ruling on Trans Women Is Part of Wider Debate on Sex and Gender.”
Shear characterized the measured decision by the U.K. Supreme Court with fiery, loaded language.
The legal assault on trans rights is being waged on both sides of the Atlantic. This week, Hungary’s Parliament approved a constitutional amendment banning public events by members of L.G.B.T.Q. communities. President Trump sued Maine for allowing trans athletes in schools.
And Britain’s highest court ruled that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s equality legislation is based on biological sex. Trans women, the court said in a headline-making 88-page document, do not meet that legal definition.
The justices said their ruling was based on the precise language of the particular law and not “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another,” and that trans people were protected against discrimination under another part of the equality law. But anti-trans groups still claimed an immediate victory, and trans-rights activists decried what they said will have harmful effects on trans people.
“Anti-trans groups” is a hostile way to describe those who want to protect women’s spaces in sports, restrooms, prisons, and hospitals.
The political and legal moves in the United States, Britain and Hungary underscore the power of an issue that animates right-wing movements. They also highlight the stakes for trans people in countries across the world as governments grapple with how to adjudicate competing demands for rights and restrictions.
The losing left-wing side was quoted first.
“Trans communities are devastated by today’s ruling,” said Helen Belcher, the chair of TransActual, a British group that campaigns on behalf of trans people. “Irrespective of the small print, the intent seems clear: to exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society. Today, we are feeling very excluded.”
Susan Smith, the co-director of For Women Scotland, the group that brought the legal case, praised the decision, saying that “it’s just about saying that there are differences, and biology is one of those differences.”
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The justices cited concerns about a need to have separate spaces in public life, including changing rooms, hostels, communal accommodations and medical services — echoing the spirit, if not the aggressive language, that Mr. Trump and many Republicans have used for years when discussing trans people and those public spaces.
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Mr. Trump railed against trans people during his 2024 campaign and has moved quickly in his second term to put his words into reality by threatening to withhold federal education funding from states that allow trans athletes to compete in schools….
Trump is not outlawing “trans athletes” ability to complete. They are free to complete alongside other members of their biological sex, as they have in schools for decades.
Shear tried guilt by right-wing association as a tactic.
In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has spoken out forcefully against trans rights. Beatrix von Storch, a leader in the party, has criticized a law that made it easier to make gender changes on official documents. Addressing the country’s Parliament in 2023, she mocked the government’s policies toward “all those who don’t know if they are male or female.”
The article closed as it began, with pro-transgender propaganda.
“We’re seeing a really global, organized, anti-L.G.B.T. backlash,” said Jess O’Thomson, a researcher and writer at the University of Leeds who focuses on trans rights. “Reducing women, the category of women, down to just biological sex is harmful to all women, not just trans. Britain tries to be more polite in its transphobia, but the content isn’t that different.”
