Various questions about the terms 'woman', 'lesbian', 'bisexual', 'gay' in relation to FSS

Date published:

Request

Your request was about the following information:

1) Actions that you have carried out for women (as defined by the supreme court ruling in the case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers)1 in the calendar years 2015 to 2019? (please break that down by each calendar year ideally or fiscal year, and only if achievable within cost limit, the action taken and the amount spent on each action). 

2) Actions you have carried out for (each and separately) lesbian, gay and bisexual people (each term as defined by the supreme court ruling in the case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers) broken down in the calendar years 2015 to 2019? (please break that down by each year, for these years) and only if achievable within cost limit, the action and the amount spent on each action. 

3) Copies of any funding agreements, or contracts, or other documents held by your organisation in this time period (2015-2019) with any LGBT organisation or organisation that has LGBT+ issues as its main focus, specifying the purpose of the funding. 

4) The total amount of spend in this time period (2015-2019) for grants, funding, donations, contracts, or any other financial support, membership fees or subscriptions to LGBT diversity schemes or programmes provided by your authority to organisations that work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, ace, pan or intersex people or any other related or associated equality issues. 1 On 16th April, 2025, in their ruling: ‘For Women Scotland Ltd vs The Scottish Ministers’, The Supreme Court concluded (at paragraph 264): “the words ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man… mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man.” 2 On 16th April, 2025, in their ruling: ‘For Women Scotland Ltd vs The Scottish Ministers’, (at paragraph 206) “a person with same sex orientation as a lesbian must be a female who is sexually oriented towards (or attracted to) females, and lesbians as a group are females who share the characteristic of being sexually attracted to females” 

5) A breakdown, where held, of this spend for each year from 2015/2016 to 2018/2019 that you have on file. Ideally, please provide this broken down by calendar year. Please provide by fiscal year if you do not have it in calendar format. 

6) A breakdown, where held, of this funding by recipient organisation, including their name, amount provided per year and a brief description of what it was for (including, but not limited to: mental health support, equality training and education, awareness raising initiatives, youth projects, sport or health services). 

Response

We have received confirmation from the Scottish Government FOI Unit that your two FOI requests will be closed, consistent with the approach taken across all other agencies that received the same submissions. This decision has been made on the basis that the matters raised are now being managed centrally by the Equalities Division within SG Core. Any further handling or updates will therefore be undertaken through that centralised process.

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