The decision by the UK’s supreme court on the meaning of the term “woman” for the purposes of its Equality Act created a small but noisy reaction among trans activists.

The court held that “the concept of sex is binary” – that is, there is a male and a female sex. This outcome is reassuring for many people who have become increasingly alarmed and bewildered by the claims of trans ideologists that gender is, somehow, entirely separate from sex and is a social and psychological construct rather than observable reality.

In Ireland, the Oireachtas enacted the Gender Recognition Act 2015 with an understanding that sex was not divorced from gender and that a person issued with a gender recognition certificate would if he was previously considered a man thereafter be regarded as a woman or if previously considered a woman thereafter be considered a man.

The Irish legislation was unusually deficient, in my view, in that it required no form of corroboration whatever from those applying to have their gender legally changed. UK law only recognises male and female genders. The UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave people with gender dysphoria legal recognition based........

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