Sturgeon warns court ruling risks making trans lives 'impossibly difficult'

The lives of transgender people in the UK are at risk of being made "unliveable", Nicola Sturgeon has said in her first public comments about the supreme court ruling on the legal definition of a woman, which was prompted by legislation she oversaw in the Scottish parliament.

- Libby Brooks

The UK supreme court ruled that the terms "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act referred only to a biological woman and to biological sex. This was the conclusion of a long-running court action by the gender critical campaign group For Women Scotland, who objected to a law passed at Holyrood aimed at improving women's representation on public boards being extended to transgender women.

Sturgeon said that the supreme court's ruling - "by very definition...the law of the land" - could not be questioned but expressed profound concerns about interim advice published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission amounting to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets and other services of the gender they identified as.

"The question for me, and I think for a lot of people, is how that is now translated into practice; can that be done in a way that, of course, protects women, but also allows trans people to live their lives with dignity and in a safe and accepted way.