Thousands of people on Saturday rallied in London and Edinburgh in support of trans rights, after a landmark UK court ruling on the definition of a “woman.”
The British Supreme Court on Wednesday last week ruled that the legal definition of a “woman” is based on a person’s sex at birth, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how single-sex spaces and services are run.
Outside the UK parliament in London, activists, protesters, trade unions and community groups waved flags and held up banners with slogans such as “trans women are women” and “trans rights are human rights.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
“My main fear — the extremists will feel empowered by this decision,” said Eevee Zayas, a 32-year-old researcher from Spain, describing themself as non-binary transgender.
“Hate crimes against [the] trans community [will] go up,” Zayas added.
The court ruling said single-sex spaces and services including changing rooms, toilets and women-only hospital wards “will function properly only if sex is interpreted as biological sex.”
Joe Brown, a trans woman in the process of transitioning, said that “everything in the transition is going to be harder.”
“Coming here in big numbers is very important to stand against the Supreme Court decision,” Brown said.
Other fears included not being able to access healthcare and children being scared to come out as trans, Brown said.
London’s Metropolitan Police said it was investigating after seven statues “in the vicinity of the protest” were vandalized.
At least two statues in Parliament Square were daubed with graffiti during the rally including one of suffragette Millicent Fawcett, who was part of the campaign to secure the vote for women in the early part of the 20th century.
Last week’s court ruling followed a legal battle between the Scottish government and a campaign group For Women Scotland involving clashing interpretations of the Equality Act.
While the Scottish government argued that the law gave trans women with a Gender Recognition Certificate the same protections as a biological female, the campaign group disagreed.
In the Scottish capital Edinburgh, thousands more protesters marched.
Lauren Yeoman, 38, said she was “disgusted” by a ruling she felt effectively removed the human rights of trans people.
“We’re pointing fingers at people who aren’t harming anybody, such as trans people, while ignoring the real problems,” she said.
Speakers addressed the crowd using megaphones, and led the demonstrators in chants that included: “When trans rights are under attack, what do we do? Fight back.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS