Care quality commission think they can replace Sex with gender & it means the same

[Kit19]

Seen this on James Kirkup’s time line. The CQC are the body charged with inspecting all regulated health & social care services in England

Apparently it’s fine to replace sex with gender because gender includes sex as well whereas some ppl might get upset if you use sex because feelings. they believe they still comply with the equality act 2010

[Redshoeblueshoe]

I think I'll pop over to Twitter. I imagine Maya is wiping the floor with them

[littlbrowndog]

But there’s lots of genders isn5 there

So how can they process any information if they don’t mention all the genders

Maybe some people don’t even have a gender

The gender free people

[SerenityNowwwww]

I assume they have been stonewall-Ed (like being tango-Ed but more unhealthy).

[Redshoeblueshoe]

Serenity I've just put that on Twitter and have already had 3 likes, which is 3 more than the CQC got

[midgebabe]

But gender upsets some people's feelings


Ah...but those people tend to be women so don't count ?

[littlbrowndog]

They have go5 i5 wrong

[SerenityNowwwww]

Alice got a new job then?

[CharlieParley]

@Kit19

Seen this on James Kirkup’s time line. The CQC are the body charged with inspecting all regulated health & social care services in England

Apparently it’s fine to replace sex with gender because gender includes sex as well whereas some ppl might get upset if you use sex because feelings. they believe they still comply with the equality act 2010

Nope. I discussed this with an EHRC staff member and they said you cannot omit a single protected characteristic. You cannot alter it, expand it, add to it or change it. It must be listed exactly as written in the Equality Act which is an Act of the UK Parliament and it takes another Act of Parliament to alter the wording.

Now they are free, of course, to add characteristics that are relevant to their work - some add education, some class, many do add gender or gender identity. That's fine. But they cannot be in compliance with the Equality Act if they refuse to ensure their policies do not discriminate against those with a protected characteristic.

The Equality Act has been a thorn in the side of trans rights organisations since it was first signed into law, because it restored women's sex-based rights that the Gender Recognition Act had superseded. Hence the widespread misrepresentation from day one.

[persistentwoman]

All these government bodies who change the law to suit themselves because they want to. Ann Sinnot's judicial review cannot come soon enough.

[unwashedanddazed]

Excellent piece by Maya
a-question-of-consent.net/2020/09/16/doctors/

[NiceGerbil]

How do I find this on Twitter is there a link? I don't do Twitter and find it confusing!

[BoomBoomsCousin]

twitter.com/MForstater/status/1306564826102149120

[ChattyLion]

Great Maya blog and twitter thread there thank you for posting those.

[highame]

Hasn't Ann Sinnott given the EHRC until the end of the month to comply fully? In other words, although they've acknowledged their fault, they haven't shouted it out loud and clear and let all those organisations who they have wrongly advised, know that they got it wrong.

[Kit19]

Maya is spot on as always. Thinking of it in terms of social care, it means intimidate care could be provided to ppl with disabilities or older ppl by someone of a different sex & if you complained to the cqc they could say “yes but they identify as the same gender as the person receiving the service so it’s fine” In fact a complaint by a service user about a TW/TM if they wanted somone of their same sex could feasibly result in a threat to withdraw the service. Choices made under the threat of service withdrawal are not free choices

[highame]

Choices made under the threat of service withdrawal are not free choices This is the case for women's refuges 'be inclusive of MtF trans people or don't get funded'. Great way to make policy

[Kit19]

Exactly highname!! So often ppl say “oh but so and so women's charity or service is fully trans inclusive” but then you find out it’s a condition of funding do there’s no choice

[littlbrowndog]

From James on twitter in case you aren’t on twitter

[ChattyLion]

OK so (as well as the very serious problem of deviating from EqA)- I wondered where in CQC’s statutory bases which create CQC as a lawful regulatory body, can they point to themselves having been given any power for inventing or varying the CQC’s own remit/activities?
That power is reserved to Parliament surely.

And surely it represents a variation to CQC’s own legal remit or activities to decide to purposely cease to recognise sex as CQC have said they are doing. Because this materially affects how they could go about their statutory duties - like collecting information and setting standards and inspectIng health and social care services?

Effectively by leaving out sex do they not risk both omitting to fulfil some legal obligations and potentially be acting beyond their powers?

Parliament tends to be very prescriptive and rightly so about what the powers of regulators actually are. So who has actually authorised this?

Has anyone FOI’d to seek the minutes of where the decision to change away from sex to gender was made? Either by their Board of commissioners or by their Chief Exec and Exec team? Also presumably an FOI is needed to see how far across CQC’s activities the use of ‘gender’ to replace sex has gone.

Organisations are free to add extra characteristics beyond the legally protected ones under EqA as Charley says to gather info about trans people’s needs and they certainly should involve trans people as health and social care users, as they do involve other groups. Fine and good.

They would not be free though to ignore or omit or conflate legally protected characteristics.

Likewise I am suggesting any regulator would not be free to act outside of their own legal remit by not fulfilling some of their statutory obligations, if that is the effect of making a change from sex to gender.

And that with Board approval a regulator could add things to their workload on top of their statutory obligations if they wanted to do that- but only on a clearly voluntary basis for them and also that everyone that they regulate or provide services to or whoever they have obligations to as a regulator (which presumably extends as far as the general public) is quite clear that nobody has to comply with this change of or extension to legal remit. Legal remit should remain untouched in this scenario. The rest is optional extras.

In which case, the regulator should make it clear that they have no legal power of enforcement or compulsion for anyone else to accept them working on extra stuff which the law has not obligated them to do.

So does it go beyond their legal powers to adopt gender instead of sex across their work? Especially if they don’t appear to be giving anyone a choice about working within this, eg in their data collection as they have said that they think gender includes sex.

[ChattyLion]

Bumping for any updates around this

[wellbehavedwomen]

If they erase sex and replace it with gender they remove the specific protections female people have under the law, when dealing with the exceptions. This is precisely why Stonewall tried so hard to achieve it.

Are CQC Stonewall Diversity Champions, by any chance?

[wellbehavedwomen]

You know, the more I think about that last tweet, the angrier I am.

The protected characteristics aim to exclude other groups. They are there precisely and specifically to narrow the human population down to those who may suffer detriment, and need specific protection as a result - they are not MEANT to be 'inclusive' of anyone else. So by cavalierly deciding to ignore the law, and openly stating that you've decided to make a very specific legal category 'more inclusive' by adding in those intentionally excluded from it, then by definition you are diluting the very protection that Parliament originally determined was necessary. You are diluting the rights of a protected class.

Gender reassignment is already covered. They don't need to double dip with that. Sex is how women are allowed to have specific spaces, and provision, free of males... regardless of gender. By altering 'sex' to 'gender' they erase that completely - which allows them to say that yes, a hospital are providing single gender care, when the issue is whether it's single sex. It also erases the sex-based exceptions, which can defeat an asserted gender, altogether.

The CQC are seeking to erase sex as a protected class. That's not the law, they have no right, and it's exactly what women have been fearing, and told would not happen.

[MichelleofzeResistance]

It's the ongoing Schroedingers' single sex spaces that was the one thing Liz Truss fudged around in her speech this week.

Three things mentioned in that speech: gender identity, legal sex and biological sex: ie three separate things with separate meanings to be recognised.

Single sex spaces can be protected under law, exemptions allow for this as needed where people of a biological sex need separate provision from those of a gender identity/legal sex that is not of that biological sex.

and something about people accessing services and spaces according to their gender identity.

And as everyone pointed out: the two things cannot exist at one and the same time. Hoping that this whole issue just somehow goes away and they never have to pin down the contradictions in what they say is really not going to hold for much longer.

[MichelleofzeResistance]

The CQC are seeking to erase sex as a protected class. That's not the law, they have no right,

And it's what happens to a democracy that permits regulatory capture by a partisan political lobby with extremist views (such as that female people shouldn't have rights).

The DfE have got this sorted: this is something all government departments are going to be forced to put down with a firm hand before they're mired up in some really serious scandal.

[ChattyLion]

YES. That’s a brilliant post wellbehaved