THIS year’s STUC Women’s Conference marks 50 years since the achievement of two landmark pieces of legislation for women’s rights. Women trade unionists were at the forefront of winning the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Equal Pay Act, which came into force the same year.

In 1975 there was no doubt about the meaning of sex in the Sex Discrimination Act. It was obvious that women were a group whose labour power was devalued at work and who suffered common indignities, disadvantage, injustices and male violence because of their biological sex. It was obvious they had shared needs and interests as a group.

The universally accepted everyday understanding of sex, as something real, binary and unchangeable has been the law since the Act’s introduction and was not changed in the Equality Act 2010.  

The Supreme Court ruling this year clarified this. It confirmed a position long held and once taken for granted by women trade unionists. Certainly by the STUC’s first secretary Margaret Irwin, who organised the most exploited of women workers in Glasgow’s “sweated trades” in the 1890s. And by the STUC Women’s Committee a century later when it led the campaign for equal representation for women in a Scottish Parliament.

However today both the STUC and its women’s committee reject that. Congress policy, like the Scottish government’s, is that sex is an identity and on that basis the term “woman” should be inclusive of men. In practice, as the Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife employment tribunal has shown in spades, this puts trade unions directly in opposition to the rights of women workers.

Not so long ago the FBU women’s committee campaigned for separate changing rooms and sleeping arrangements for women firefighters. Trade unions wanted an end to the indignity of mixed-sex hospital wards. But today STUC Congress policy positively favours male staff being able to share a changing room with female nurses in NHS hospitals based on identity claims, the situation at the heart of the Sandie Peggie tribunal and that of the Darlington nurses. More than this, Congress policy denies there is any conflict of interest here, and claims any suggestion that there is, is a “divisive construct.”

There is a lot at stake here. Not only the credibility of the trade union movement but also potential legal risks. Sandie Peggie intends legal action against her union, the Royal College of Nursing, for failing her. It has also opened the door for the political right to pose as defenders of women’s rights and given ammunition with which to attack trade unions, and all in a context in which far right support is growing among working people.  

These are the dangers created when class organisations — trade unions — abandon material reality for the dead end of identity ideology. An ideology associated with the Establishment the far right is kicking against.

A serious rethink is needed. The position held by the STUC was comprehensively lost in the Supreme Court case For Women Scotland v the Scottish Government.

The court tested the government’s (and STUC’s) preferred definitions of sex, woman and man, against the Equality Act’s sex-based equality provisions and found these definitions made the Act “incoherent,” “illogical” and unworkable. It found that defining sex as identity cuts right across the human rights of women as a group, and specifically the rights of lesbian women and trans men, though unsurprisingly that has been completely ignored.

This should give pause for serious reflection. Unfortunately, the STUC response to a ruling about women’s rights was to double down, with Roz Foyer, its general secretary, describing it as “deeply troubling.”

That is despite the court’s careful explanation that its ruling makes no difference at all to the legal rights and protections for transgender people. These are needed to counter the prejudice trans people experience — and remain unchanged. Transgender people retain all the rights of their own protected characteristic while also being protected from indirect discrimination on the grounds of their perceived sex.

What should be deeply troubling for the STUC is that, after the Supreme Court ruling, so many of its policies and positions have been confirmed as incorrect and even unlawful.

At its 2024 conference, the STUC women’s committee opposed a motion on the Sex Discrimination Act because it contained the words “women’s sex-based rights.” A women’s committee statement said these words were not acceptable as they were “…not trans-inclusive and not related to the Equality Act.”  Patently, women’s rights in the Equality Act are based on the protected characteristic of sex and are therefore precisely “sex-based.”

The term “gender critical” is designed to reframe the universal understanding of sex as biological sex as something exceptional. It’s about “othering” a majority view. Nevertheless the fact is the 2021 Forstater judgment established in law that so-called “gender critical” views are a protected belief under the 2010 Equality Act, and “worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

STUC Congress policy, made the following year, is that “gender critical” views are “right-wing,” promote “direct harm” to trans people, and are “a springboard for attacks on the rights of other groups.”

This remains the formal position of STUC. It is divisive, intolerant and puts trade unions in conflict with the majority of their members and the public. In the present political climate it’s the road to ruin.