For Women Scotland
11
MENTIONS
6
EPISODES
5
PODCASTS
Search complete. 11 mentions across 6 episodes found for "For Women Scotland".
Sep 28, 2026
AlanHOST
So we're fortunate today to have Dr Michael Foran, Associate Professor of Law from the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keeble College.
AlanHOST
Today's talk, as I briefly said at the beginning, is examining the implications for higher education institutions following the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in For Women Scotland for the Scottish Ministers.
AlanHOST
And Michael is an expert in equality and in anti-discrimination law, whose work has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
AlanHOST
His first book, Equality Before the Law, Equal Dignity, Wrongful Discrimination and the Rule of Law, was published in 2023.
9 MINS LATER
Michael ForanGUEST
Well, we get a little bit more confirmation about what the law understands by biological sex and how we deal with people who have what are now known as differences or disorders of sexual development, but which may at that time have been classed
AlanHOST
as intersex conditions.
Michael ForanGUEST
So this was something the law was considering, you know, about just over 20 years before the Supreme Court decision in For Women Scotland.
Michael ForanGUEST
And in that case, the House of Lords distinguished what it described as physiological from non-physiological indicators of sex.
Nick de SouzaHOST
Difference feminists believe that women in society should sometimes remove themselves from the patriarchy instead of challenging it.
Nick de SouzaHOST
This has led to their support for separate facilities, women-only swim times, for example, and the support for the For Women Scotland case that was ruled upon in the Supreme Court in 2025.
Nick de SouzaHOST
For these difference feminists, the perfect society is one that preserves these separate spaces.
Nick de SouzaHOST
The recent creation of a women-only commune by Yazidi women fleeing war in Syria demonstrates the divides within radical feminism.
Alice SullivanGUEST
So that was an extraordinary case, which is still rumbling on because, as you know, the...
Alice SullivanGUEST
City of London is refusing to respect the For Women Scotland judgment that says single sex services must be provided according to sex.
Alice SullivanGUEST
It's such a strange sentence to be saying.
Alice SullivanGUEST
I know, I know.
Peter WalkerGUEST
... whole crux of this issue is how do you balance the right of spaces which are necessarily single sex, particularly spaces where women are particularly vulnerable, like domestic refuges and also prisons, against the right of transgender people to be treated as the gender into which they are living.
Peter WalkerGUEST
And then there was this Scottish group called For Women Scotland who challenged it.
speaker_4SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
We never set out to change the law.
speaker_4SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
We were very sure this was the law, and we just wanted the law to be enforced in places and services and spaces where it really, really matters to have single-sex facilities.
Caroline O'ReillyHOST
If you are listening to this episode on its transcript page on the website supporting this podcast at www.twts.co.uk, you will see a link to the Buck Angel Wikipedia page where you can see a photograph of Buck.
Caroline O'ReillyHOST
And according to the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 in the case brought by For Women Scotland, a person must now use facilities in line with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Caroline O'ReillyHOST
I wonder how a member of For Women Scotland would react if they were using a woman's toilet and Buck rocked up to use the same facility, which, according to this ruling, they were entitled to do so.
Caroline O'ReillyHOST
was born in the same year I was 1962 on the 5th of June and now is an advocate and sex educator and served on the board of directors of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation which advocates for sexual freedom as a fundamental human right and was founded in 2003.
Caroline O'ReillyHOST
At school Buck was bullied for their gender nonconformity and used alcohol and marijuana as a coping mechanism for their psychological distress and made many suicide attempts, which tragically still happens within the trans and non-binary communities today.
Maya ForstaterHOST
And, you know, if you remember at the time, they thought that.
Maya ForstaterHOST
they really thought that trans women and women at that point, they, you know, they definitely thought that the expectation was if you were providing a single sex service out in the world, not in school, but in public, you were supposed to, um, accept people as the gender they present as apart from in case by case or all of that, which has been swept away by For Women Scotland, which was never a correct understanding of the law, also informed the school's guidance that they published in 2014.
Maya ForstaterHOST
And it says, it said, and it still says, trans girls and trans boys and trans children.
Maya ForstaterHOST
Whereas the Kixi safeguarding guidance no longer says that.