Every organisation in Britain has been told to revisit their equality policies after the Supreme Court ruled that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex. The decision means that hospitals, prisons and businesses will have legal backing to protect single-sex spaces such as changing rooms and women’s shelters. White House officials say a trade deal with Britain could be finalised within three weeks. A Washington insider told The Daily Telegraph that London is in a “good position for a rapid deal”, but will be in a second wave of announcements, after Japan, India and South Korea, which Donald Trump is prioritising to try and isolate China. Scientists say they’ve discovered the strongest evidence yet of life beyond Earth. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope has shown with 99.7% certainty that the atmosphere of the K2-18b planet, 124 light-years away – it would take around 194,000 years to reach it in our fastest spacecraft – contains at least one gas that, on Earth, is only produced by living organisms. 🛸

A victory for women and common sense

Finally, says Janice Turner in The Times, the question that has made politicians sputter – or in the case of Nicola Sturgeon, “implode their careers” – is answered. After seven years of harassment and vilification, the brave Scottish women who battled all the way to the chandeliered grandeur of the Supreme Court, have been vindicated. In the words of Lord Hodge: “The terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.” Campaigners waited for niggly legal caveats, but none came. The law is clear: the concept of a woman does not include men who, “with a bit of admin and £6”, have acquired a “gender recognition certificate”. Or as a placard outside the court put it: “Women are born. Not some bloke with a form.”

This really matters. “Self-ID” (the idea that anyone has the right to enter women’s changing rooms, say, based on “nebulous inner gender”) is cooked. Services and protections that generations of women battled to create – from rape trauma support groups to female sports – no longer have to worry about being sued by trans-identifying men. The capture of our national institutions by this “misogynist ideology” is not over, but this ruling will now be required reading for every civil servant, sports body, NHS trust and HR department in the land. “The end is in sight.” The fact that it took vast sums of JK Rowling’s money (as well as taxpayer funds and crowdfunded donations) for the highest court in the land to “rule the bleeding obvious” is a national disgrace. But at last the law has confirmed what every sensible person has always known: “sex is real.”

It’s like we’ve been under a kind of “maligned spell,” says Allison Pearson on Planet Normal. How many politicians have spent the past few years dreading the question: “What is a woman?” One of the strangest aspects of the whole madness has been the “perversion of language”, like mothers in some NHS trusts being referred to as “birthing persons”. This “unbelievably ugly, cumbersome language” has been like a cage over the truth. “Well, now the truth can breathe again.”