CLP - Legally Speaking: Understanding Gender and Sex in the Shadow of Law

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.

Professor Sharon Cowan completed an LLB (Hons) from Strathclyde University, and an MPhil in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. She undertook two years as a researcher at the London School of Economics before going on to complete a PhD at Brunel University, London. Sharon was a lecturer at the University of Warwick for three years prior to her arrival at Edinburgh. She joined the University of Edinburgh in 2004.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

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