Sir Keir Starmer has “hauled the Labour party back to the common sense position”, a Labour Party source said on Wednesday, following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the terms “women” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
The Government has said that the decision delivers “clarity” on the matter for hospitals and refuges of whether or not a person with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) identifying as female should be treated as a woman under equality law.
It comes after the Prime Minister has faced repeated questions over his definition of a woman in the five years since he became Labour leader, amid an increasingly heated culture war over transgender rights.
On Wednesday, justices at the UK’s highest court unanimously ruled that a GRC does not change a trans person’s legal sex under the Equality Act.
This means that transgender women with a gender recognition certificate can be excluded from single-sex spaces if deemed “proportionate”.
The Labour source said on Wednesday that Sir Keir had brought the party to a “common sense position” on the subject from an “activist” stance, and it was “one of the reasons” the electorate felt that they could back the party after the “disaster of 2019”.
But Independent MP Rosie Duffield, who resigned from Labour last year, said the party was trying to “backtrack” and “pretend that they were always on board”, but added that she hoped there would be a change.
Asked whether she thought there might be a broader shift in the way it approached gender, Ms Duffield told Sky News: “Possibly, I mean I’d like to think so.
“Certainly women like me and all of the gender-critical so-called feminists who have been very silent, very quiet in Labour and haven’t supported me, perhaps they’ll feel braver now about speaking up.”
Before Sir Keir, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had asserted that transgender women should be treated as women, telling the BBC in 2018 that “the position of the party is that where you have self-identified as a woman, then you are treated as a woman”.
The issue was a hot-button topic during the 2020 leadership election to replace Mr Corbyn, as the Prime Minister did not say whether he backed a series of pledges from a Labour campaign group which included a call for members deemed to be transphobic to be expelled from the party.
MPs Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey both gave their backing to the 12-point pledge card from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights during their leadership campaigns.
Sir Keir did express his support for pledges from the LGBT Labour group, which included the assertion “that trans women are women, that trans men are men, and that non-binary gender identities are valid and should be respected”.
When he won the party’s leadership election in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, he inherited a policy of committing to include self-identification for transgender people and reforming the Equality Act to “fully enforce” single-sex exemptions to allow for women-only spaces.
These pledges and @LGBTLabour have my full support. I stand in full solidarity with our LGBT+ members and the wider community, will defend LGBT+ rights and protections, and campaign with you for the changes rightly prioritised here. Look forward to the hustings! https://t.co/umSzlHfRbu
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) February 13, 2020
Ms Duffield resigned the Labour whip in September 2024, accusing the Prime Minister of “hypocrisy” and pursuing “cruel” policies.
Relations between the Canterbury MP and the party leadership had long been strained, particularly over transgender rights.
In 2020 Ms Duffield said on Twitter that “only women have a cervix”, something Sir Keir later said was “not right”.
In 2023 Ms Duffield wrote a piece for the UnHerd website accusing the party of believing the “transgender debate is nothing more than a culture war issue”, and claiming that her treatment by Labour reminded her of a former abusive relationship.
“When I come home at night, I feel low-level trauma at my political isolation,” she wrote.
Sir Keir said he wanted to see “respect and tolerance” in response to her comments.
The Prime Minister was asked repeatedly about his position on the matter in opposition.
In 2023, Sir Keir told the Sunday Times that for “99.9%” of women “of course they haven’t got a penis” but later that year he told BBC Radio 5 Live: “Firstly, a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.”
In April 2024 he said Ms Duffield was right to say “only women have a cervix”.
He told ITV: “Biologically, she of course is right about that.”
On policy, the Labour leader said in 2023 he disagreed with doomed proposals in Scotland that would have allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to apply for a gender recognition certificate.
The plans, which contributed to the downfall of Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, were part of a wider package of measures that would have made it easier to self-identify.
They were passed by MSPs in Holyrood but later blocked by scottish secretary Alister Jack using an unprecedented Section 35 order.
UK ministers said the legislation could infringe on the existing UK-wide Equalities Act.
The Labour leader’s position was ridiculed by then prime minister Rishi Sunak in early 2024, as part of a wider series of U-turns by the Labour leader since winning the leadership election.
The joke by Mr Sunak was made while the mother of Brianna Ghey, a teenager whose murder was motivated by transphobic hate, was in the chamber.
Saying “trans women are women” was never true in fact and now isn’t true in law, either.
— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) April 16, 2025
A victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious.
Women are women and men are men: you cannot change your biological sex.
The era of… https://t.co/IKjTxwkgoB
Mr Sunak refused to apologise in response to a request by Ms Ghey’s father.
Questions from the Conservative side of the Commons on the matter followed Sir Keir into Government.
The Prime Minister has faced repeated questions on the issue from the Conservatives, including leader Kemi Badenoch.
Reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday, Mrs Badenoch said that her party would be “holding the Government’s feet to the fire” on the issue.
She also appeared to call for further action from ministers, writing in The Telegraph that it is “clear that single sex changing rooms for women in workplaces are not just permitted, but required by law”.
She accused Labour of having “bent the knee” to ideology on the matter, and reacting to the ruling, said that “The era of Keir Starmer telling us that some women have penises has come to an end. Hallelujah!”
