Women's Institute to ban transgender women after U.K. Supreme Court ruling

The largest women's membership organization in the United Kingdom says it has been forced to ban transgender women after the U.K.'s Supreme Court ruled they are not legally considered women earlier this year.

The Women's Institute will no longer offer formal membership to trans women going forward, the organization announced Wednesday. CEO Melissa Green said in a statement that "this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice."

"To be able to continue operating as the Women’s Institute — a legally recognised women’s organisation and charity — we must act in accordance with the Supreme Court’s judgment and restrict formal membership to biological women only," Green said. "However, this change is only in respect to our membership policy and does not change our firm belief that transgender women are women."

Scotland, which is part of the U.K. but has a semi-autonomous government, passed a law in 2018 that all Scottish public organization boards must have an equal number of men and women members. Trans women were included in the number of women board members if they had a gender recognition certificate.

For Women Scotland, a right-wing organization dedicated to so-called women’s "sex-based rights" — a dog whistle used by anti-trans activists to exclude trans people from public spaces and reduce women to their genitals — filed a lawsuit against the government challenging the inclusion of trans women. They initially lost their case in Scotland before appealing to the U.K. Supreme Court. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling helped fund the anti-trans legal challenge.

The court ruled in their favor, determining that trans women aren't legally considered women under the nation's Equality Act. The ruling has already been applied by some agencies, including the Football Association, which banned trans women from playing women's soccer in May without mentioning trans men.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission — the United Kingdom's leading human rights agency — issued guidance in August banning trans people from single-sex facilities, even those that match their sex assigned at birth in some cases. The guidance affects bathrooms or changing rooms in organizations that provide public services, including schools, hospital wards, sports clubs, domestic violence shelters, prisons, charities, and some shops.

The Women's Institute will be launching a national network of local "sisterhood groups" in April, Green said, which will "offer monthly opportunities for all people, including transgender women, to come together to socialise, learn from each other, and share their experiences of living as women."

"We know that many of our members will find this decision extremely painful," Green continued. "We have been actively seeking alternative ways — outside of formal membership — of continuing to extend fellowship, sisterhood, and support to transgender women, who have been such an important part of our WI family."