The legal assault on trans rights is being waged on both sides of the Atlantic. On Monday, Hungary’s Parliament approved a constitutional amendment banning public events by members of L.G.B.T.Q. communities. Two days later, President Trump sued Maine for allowing trans athletes in schools.
On Wednesday, Britain’s highest court added its voice to the debate, ruling that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s equality legislation is based on biological sex. Trans women, the court said in a headline-making 88-page document, do not meet that legal definition.
The justices said their ruling was based on the precise language of the particular law and not “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another,” and that trans people were protected against discrimination under another part of the equality law. But anti-trans groups still claimed an immediate victory, and trans-rights activists decried what they said will have harmful effects on trans people.
The political and legal moves in the United States, Britain and Hungary underscore the power of an issue that animates right-wing movements. They also highlight the stakes for trans people in countries across the world as governments grapple with how to adjudicate competing demands for rights and restrictions.
“Trans communities are devastated by today’s ruling,” said Helen Belcher, the chair of TransActual, a British group that campaigns on behalf of trans people. “Irrespective of the small print, the intent seems clear: to exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society. Today, we are feeling very excluded.”
Susan Smith, the co-director of For Women Scotland, the group that brought the legal case, praised the decision, saying that “it’s just about saying that there are differences, and biology is one of those differences.”
For much of the last two decades, Britain has been moving toward greater legal rights for trans people. In 2004, Parliament passed the Gender Recognition Act, which allows adults who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria and meet certain conditions to change their legal sex. In 2010, British lawmakers passed the Equality Act, which said women should receive certain protections on the basis of their sex.
In the case decided on Wednesday, the judges sought to resolve contradictions between the two laws that people on both sides of the argument said needed clarification.
“On the one hand, women, who make up one half of our population, have campaigned for over 150 years to have equality with men and to combat discrimination based on their sex,” the justices wrote. “On the other hand, a vulnerable and often harassed minority, the trans community, struggle against discrimination and prejudice as they seek to live their lives with dignity.”
The justices made it clear that the Gender Recognition Act remains in force, and that trans people are still covered by provisions that prohibit harassment and employment discrimination.
“This conclusion does not remove or diminish the important protections available,” the court’s five justices said of their ruling.
But they concluded that the 2010 Equality Act was clearly meant to refer in most cases to a person’s biological sex, not a “certified” sex under the Gender Recognition Act.
The justices cited concerns about a need to have separate spaces in public life, including changing rooms, hostels, communal accommodations and medical services — echoing the spirit, if not the aggressive language, that Mr. Trump and many Republicans have used for years when discussing trans people and those public spaces.
“Similar incoherence and impracticability arise in the operations of provisions relating to single-sex characteristic associations and charities, women’s fair participation in sport, the operation of the public sector equality duty and the armed forces,” the court wrote.
Mr. Trump railed against trans people during his 2024 campaign and has moved quickly in his second term to put his words into reality by threatening to withhold federal education funding from states that allow trans athletes to compete in schools. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday sued Maine, accusing the state of “defiantly flouting federal anti-discrimination law” by allowing some transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
In his address to Congress last month, Mr. Trump called on lawmakers to “pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.” He went on to say that “our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
The president has framed trans issues as part of his broader campaign against what he calls the “woke” ideology of Democrats.
“We’re getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military, and it’s already out, and it’s out of our society,” he said in the address to Congress. “We don’t want it. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad.”
Across Europe, right-wing politicians have embraced trans issues as a way of appealing to populist voters.
In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has spoken out forcefully against trans rights. Beatrix von Storch, a leader in the party, has criticized a law that made it easier to make gender changes on official documents. Addressing the country’s Parliament in 2023, she mocked the government’s policies toward “all those who don’t know if they are male or female.”
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has pushed his country to enshrine anti-trans and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiment in its laws and Constitution.
In 2020, its Parliament voted to end legal recognition of trans people, a move that was widely condemned around the world. Those efforts have continued since, with Mr. Orban praising the effort by saying, “We won’t let woke ideology endanger our kids.”
Britain’s right-wing politicians hailed Wednesday’s ruling.
“The lunacy is over,” Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform U.K. party, said on X. “The supreme court has declared that a woman is somebody who was biologically born a woman. An outbreak of common sense from our judiciary.”
Trans rights activists in Britain said that despite the careful language, the court’s ruling could bring the country more in line with a broader anti-trans movement.
“We’re seeing a really global, organized, anti-L.G.B.T. backlash,” said Jess O’Thomson, who is writing a Ph.D. on trans rights and laws at the University of Leeds. “Reducing women, the category of women, down to just biological sex is harmful to all women, not just trans. Britain tries to be more polite in its transphobia, but the content isn’t that different.”
Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent for The Times. He has reported on politics for more than 30 years.
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