Gender Against Prosperity

Sertaç Sehlikoglu

In a landmark ruling that has sent shockwaves through academic and activist circles alike, the UK Supreme Court has determined that the terms "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act refer exclusively to biological women and biological sex. The unanimous decision by five judges represents a significant victory for self-described "gender-critical" activists while creating profound concerns for transgender rights and broader understandings of gender as a social construct.

This ruling sits at the intersection of what Michel Foucault termed "biopower" – the regulatory control of populations through the governance of bodies. What we are witnessing is not merely a legal technicality but a dangerous manifestation of state power inscribing biological determinism into law, thereby creating categories of legitimate and illegitimate bodies within civic space. This legal codification of biological determinism directly threatens our collective prosperity by establishing precedents that can be weaponised across borders and contexts.

The celebration from groups like For Women Scotland, financially backed by JK Rowling, reveals how biological determinism has become a rallying point for diverse groups – conservatives, certain feminist factions, and religious organisations – who might otherwise share little ideological common ground. This coalition demonstrates what we've observed in our research on populist movements: the deployment of gender norms as political currency that can mobilise heterogeneous groups toward specific political objectives.

This ruling does not exist in isolation but forms part of a coordinated global assault on gender-expansive understandings of humanity. Within the same 48-hour period, Turkey witnessed an echo of the same biopower through heated debates about controlling women's reproductive choices; by determining what would be the 'normal' birth and how women should be 'encouraged' (if not forced) for vaginal birth against c-section. In the United States, the ongoing battles over abortion rights continue to exemplify how biomedical power becomes codified in law. In Hungary, Russia, and Brazil, aggressive pronatalist policies seek to force women into reproductive roles defined by the state. The systematic exclusion of trans women from womanhood through legal mechanisms is directly connected to these pronatalist measures – both rely on state power to define, restrict, and control bodies based on reproductive capacity.

These are not coincidental developments but rather interconnected manifestations of a transnational assertion of biopower that threatens prosperity by narrowing human potential to biological functions. When bodies are regulated based on reproductive capacity – whether excluding trans women from women's spaces or pressuring cisgender women to reproduce – we witness the same logic of control at work.

The court's reasoning – that allowing trans women the same legal status as biological women could affect spaces designed specifically for lesbians – reveals the instrumental use of one marginalized group to restrict the rights of another. This divide-and-conquer approach typifies how heteronormativity, as our research has shown, can align itself with other forms of oppression to maintain dominance.

Lord Hodge's concern about "two sub-groups" creating confusion for organizations exemplifies how administrative convenience often trumps human dignity. When policy prioritizes categorical clarity over lived experience, we see biopower operating at its most efficient – sacrificing complex human realities for bureaucratic simplicity.

The government's statement welcoming the "clarity and confidence" for women and service providers signals how biological determinism is framed not as restriction but as protection. This rhetorical framing – the strong protecting the vulnerable – echoes precisely the masculinist restoration we've documented in our research on gender politics. Just as the Christchurch shooter justified his actions as a "strong man" protecting "white women," so too does this ruling present itself as protection rather than control. This masculinist protectionist stance undermines true prosperity by restricting autonomy and imposing rigid categories that limit human flourishing. When state authorities define who counts as "woman" based on reproductive anatomy, they establish a dangerous precedent that reduces human worth to biological function – a logic that inevitably constrains all bodies, not just transgender ones.

What makes this ruling particularly concerning is how it creates what Judith Butler would call a "domain of unintelligibility" – spaces where certain bodies cannot be recognised as legitimate. When trans women with gender recognition certificates cannot be legally acknowledged as women in certain contexts despite having been acknowledged as such in others, we see the law creating impossible subjects – recognised in some spaces but not others, legal in some contexts but not all.

The human cost of such legal determinations is devastating and measurable. While "gender-critical" activists celebrate this ruling as a victory for their narrow vision of prosperity and protection, they remain tellingly silent about the alarming rise in suicide rates among transgender children and adolescents. This "exclusive" prosperity – one that protects only those bodies deemed legitimate by the state – is no prosperity at all when it drives vulnerable young people to despair. When we allow biopower to determine which lives are recognized and which are relegated to legal limbo, we create conditions where some youth cannot imagine a future for themselves. A society that measures its success by the flourishing of only some of its members while systematically erasing others has fundamentally misunderstood what prosperity means. True prosperity must be inclusive or it is merely privilege masquerading as progress.

As scholars and citizens, we must recognise that biological determinism is not merely an abstract ideology but an instrument of control with real consequences for human lives and bodies. The UK Supreme Court ruling represents not an isolated legal decision but part of a coordinated global assault wherein gender becomes weaponised against prosperity. This attack threatens not just economic prosperity, but the social, cultural, and psychological prosperity that emerges when individuals are free to live authentic lives recognised by law and society.

The connections between excluding trans women from legal recognition in the UK and forcing cisgender women into specific reproductive roles in countries with pronatalist policies are neither coincidental nor tangential – they are different manifestations of the same biopolitical logic. Both deploy state power to regulate bodies according to reproductive capacity rather than recognising the full humanity of individuals. Both sacrifice human potential on the altar of biological determinism.

Global prosperity demands gender justice. Every legal decision that entrenches biological determinism creates ripple effects across borders, emboldening similar movements worldwide. We cannot achieve truly prosperous societies when some bodies are deemed illegitimate, when reproductive capacity becomes the measure of citizenship, or when state power is deployed to narrow rather than expand human potential.

The path forward requires tackling such inequalities and the extractive relations that emanate from them. Only through scholarship and activism that centres rather than marginalises gender analysis can we hope to develop the conceptual and practical tools needed to counter the biological determinism now enshrined in UK law and its dangerous counterparts around the world. Our collective prosperity depends on it.

Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a Principal Research Fellow at the IGP. Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist specialised in subjectivity, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East. Her work often focuses on the intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life, such as intimacy, agency, desire, and imaginaries.