Hybrid Lecture – Legally Speaking: Understanding Gender and Sex in the Shadow of Law

On 30th October 2025 by Mark Walters

Thursday 5 March 2026, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm GMT, online and London, UK

 

Speaker: Prof. Sharon Cowan (University of Edinburgh)
Chair: TBC

Public discourse in the UK has been saturated with controversies and conflicts about the definition and significance of gender and sex, to the extent that some have described this moment as one of gender / sex ‘culture wars’ (Duffy 2025; Cammaerts 2022). In many of these clashes, the legal system is expected to arbitrate disputes about apparently conflicting rights, often by ‘balancing’ the needs and interests of vulnerable groups, such as women, and trans people. Opponents in these disputes have appealed to law to police the categorical boundaries between gender (as social) and sex (as biological) and, between women and men. Most recently, in April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 means ‘biological sex’, the effect of which is to preclude trans people with a gender recognition certificate from accessing equality laws in their legally certified gender. This lecture focuses on the crucial question of the part law has played in the formation of contemporary understandings of gender and sex. It asks when, why and how our legal system became a central forum for debating the meaning and salience of gender and sex; and what the impact of law’s engagement in complex gender and sex disputes has been on those whose rights are called into question.

 

Find more information and book your free place here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2026/mar/clp-legally-speaking-understanding-gender-and-sex-shadow-law

This event will be held online and at Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London, UK.