Consultation on Self ID to progress

Amending the GRA is a red herring. We already effectively have self id via the Equality Act.

We need to be concentrating on ensuring that the sex protections in the Equality Act are fit for purpose and can be invoked without putting institutions at risk of vexatious litigation.

Our focus should be on getting women to be vocal about how we need these protections and that any political party that ignores the problems with them will lose votes.

I think we need to provide the government with evidence of what will happen if women feel their safety is compromised.

Really good points being made by everyone.

I'm going to book an appointment with my MP - I've written several times already and has successively less hostile responses each time. Best to book before consultation is announced or after, tactically, does everyone think?

They have been downgraded in the sense that the equality duty is for general consideration not specifically considered by completing the assessment as originally required.

I can see the cause for confusion but honestly in real terms it's just a change in the form of the document that the civil servants use to record the impacts. The duty is still the same - legislation here if you're interested www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/149
And they do have to have some kind of document recording the equality impacts (even if it's not called an Equality Impact Assessment since the edict from Cameron came down) to prove that they have complied with the duty, because otherwise the Government would lose every Public Sector Equality Duty challenge.

And in fact there has been one quite helpful case which has made the duty more difficult for the Government to fulfil. There's a Court of Appeal case where the Government released a ridiculously positive document addressing the equality impacts of a policy and the Court basically said that it wasn't good enough. They do have to acknowledge if people will be screwed over.

What I'd be really interested to see though is a case where women's right to privacy under the Human Rights Act is put up against transwomen's right to privacy. That would be substantive rather procedural. All the cases so far have only considered the rights of transpeople afaik.

I do see that a duty to complete an assessment is not a safeguard of any meaningful outcome but the public sector people I know who have mentioned it said having to sit down and work through an EIA used to highlight issues which doesn’t happen in that step by step way any more.

They have been downgraded in the sense that the equality duty is for general consideration not specifically considered by completing the assessment as originally required.

Pratchet absolutely agree.
a consultation like this should normally be open to anyone to respond to, so we can start talking now to as many Guides families and volunteers as possible so they know what the issues are with bringing in legal gender self ID.

It sounds like some of the Guides discussion boards/online groups haven’t wanted to allow gender critical discussion so the alternative is I guess word of mouth and using the GG annual general meeting or any formal opportunity that GG members have to raise points in front of each other. With the change in chief executive there may be more of these opportunities.

Then when the consultation opens we have to keep prompting everyone who is worried about this to submit their responses in the limited time that is given (normally 12 weeks). + write to their MP to say they have done this and make their points again.

One more thing if it’s reassuring to anyone who is worried to use their own name when responding to consultation/writing to MPs:

-consultations often have a box that you can tick to say whether or not your happy for your name to be used, or for your response to be quoted, in the reports they write.
-your personal information (like your name and address which you should give every time you write to your MP, so they know you are a constituent) when they are given in correspondence with your MP, remain confidential between you and the MP’s office in any of the circumstances I can think of that would be relevant here.

There are also equality impact assessments which would be massively relevant here although the duty to consider these has been downgraded by the government since they were first introduced.

In what sense? I don't think they have been downgraded, although again it's really just a procedural requirement again unfortunately. There's a Court of Appeal case which confirms that the Government can acknowledge that a policy will totally screw people over and as long as they have thought about this before making the decision then they will be complying with the duty.

David Cameron decided that equality impact assessments were no longer required... as part of doing away with unnecessary red tape

They still exist though and are just given a different name - eg there is usually a section headed 'equality impacts' in consultation documents. They still have to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty.

David Cameron decided that equality impact assessments were no longer required... as part of doing away with unnecessary red tape

There are also equality impact assessments which would be massively relevant here although the duty to consider these has been downgraded by the government since they were first introduced.

researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06591

Olennas thanks for link. Ok so the Cabinet Office guidelines via that link say you should consider adding more time if you are eg consulting over the summer holidays. Secondly that you should include an impact assessment. There are different types of these.

Impact assessments in government consultations are often very badly done by civil servants. They are not always specialists and may not be given time to get to understand the issues or who only listened to a few points from select lobby groups.

ICO- the data regulator- have guidance on privacy impact assessments.

ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1595/pia-code-of-practice.pdf

‘What do we mean by privacy?
Privacy, in its broadest sense, is about the right of an individual to be let alone. It can take two main forms, and these can be subject to different types of intrusion:
 Physical privacy - the ability of a person to maintain their own physical space or solitude. Intrusion can come in the form of unwelcome searches of a person’s home or personal possessions, bodily searches or other interference, acts of surveillance and the taking of biometric information
 Informational privacy – the ability of a person to control, edit, manage and delete information about themselves and to decide how and to what extent such information is communicated to others. Intrusion can come in the form of collection of excessive personal information, disclosure of personal information without consent and misuse of such information.
It can include the collection of information through the surveillance or monitoring of how people act in public or private spaces and through the monitoring of communications whether by post, phone or online and extends to monitoring the records of senders and recipients as well as the content of messages.’

I would say both areas are potentially relevant.
Privacy-physical- eg maintaining the right to single sex spaces which bringing in legal gender self ID would erase.
Privacy- informational- you could make the case that eg legal self ID breaks the link entirely between sex-based public record keeping and the biological sex of the population, so it would render all public statistics referring to sex unreliable and redundant. There must be equality duties to collect these statistics.

on holiday

We have tech.

waddyagonna do by the pool? Read Munroe in Grazia?

Can I suggest a two step process?

Before the consultation is published, we shoudl continue to talk about the issues raised and make explicit reference to the forthcoming consultation. And when writing to our MPs we should be explicit that we expect the consultation to be a full public consultation - this bit is important, because we want a full, bells and whistles consultation that meets the agreed Government guidelines, particularly about being a genuine consultation and allowing adequate time for responses. TBH publishing over summer is a bit shitty - it's when stuff that needs to get buried gets put out, as journalists and others who might prove the detail tend to be on holiday. Twelve weeks is the minimum time period that the consultation should run.

Once the consultation is published, obviously we need to see what it says and consider the best way to respond to the questions asked. I'd hope that the obvious interest groups will be aware, but we should all make sure that bodies such as professional organisations and large employers are also aware. We need a diverse range of respondents, not just lots of enraged TRAs and Mermaids

We should also respond as individuals - even though our responses are less likely to be read by decision-makers, the volume of responses (including selected answers to specific questions) will tell its own story

I am concerned that they framed it as a competition with countries that are ahead of them in rolling back women's rights.

I think we have to be persistent and pragmatic and organised. We don’t need MPs to particularly understand or agree especially with what we are saying. That’s going to be too much to expect from some MPs. We just need them to vote against gender self ID.

We need to tell MPs the facts and the issues. Repeatedly. In large numbers. they need to hear this specifically from local constituency people. From a cross section of the local electorate do they know this is unpopular across their whole voter base.

If the MP does understand and agrees with a gender critical position that’s a fantastic bonus. But many of them won’t give a shit about women, but they might decide not to support legal gender self ID coming in eg because they are worried about losing support from a large local religious community who may have religious practices which require men-only or women -only spaces. If on that basis alone that MP opposes gender self ID then, that’s fine. It all helps.

MPs all want to keep their seats. They will be very worried about pissing off a massive cross-section of their electorate if they are getting a big postbag from load of local women, local sporting clubs, local religious groups, local trans people, local men’s groups, local children and young people’s groups etc- all telling the MP that they don’t agree with self ID.

This is why we need to talk and make links way beyond our own political groups to raise awareness and to get anyone worried about this to contact MPs saying that bringing in legal gender self ID is wrong and give their reasons.

We need to get in the media and make the case on as big and as mainstream platforms as possible- Daily Mail etc. This can’t be written off as some niche thing that ‘only feminists care about’ or seen as some kind of hard-to-understand legal concern that the policy people can sort out, nor assumed to be the last bit of the gay rights struggle that needs to be sorted out legally against bigotry..

Urgh. I have to say I'm not super hopeful about this whole thing I'm afraid.

Whilst the Government has to consult when the proposals are in their formative stage, they can have a preferred option and even if the public overwhelmingly hates something they can basically say 'Thanks for telling us your thoughts, but we're going to go ahead with what we wanted anyway'. It can effectively be a fait accompli as long as none of the politicians are silly enough to say anything which gives this away.

Further, legal challenges for unlawful consultation are essentially at best a delaying tactic. If a Court holds that the first consultation was unlawful the Government can rerun it until they get it right. This might be a good strategy if one of the parties was against the proposal and the plan was to try and delay things until the next election, but Labour seem even more gung-ho.

Sorry, I'm just feeling a bit like this is all hopeless tonight. I guess all we can do is respond and hope the Tories realise this might cost them votes...

Thinking aloud.

What about a glut of images of women (and girls?) of different appearances, head and shoulder shots, with a black masking tape cross over their mouths? Carefully posed/shot so there is no inference of porn/sexualisation, of course. Or something similar (a hand obviously not hers pressed over her mouth?). If I saw that I’d stop and wonder what it was for.

Silenced women.

Hmmm.

Could create a lot with that, actually. Silent protests. Opposite of the stereotype of the nagging women.

Silence is really loud when you use it effectively.

There must be lots of us who would help with a campaign....I will!

What concerns me is how threatened many are likely to feel about speaking out against the proposals in a public consultation. ( I wonder if we need to draw attention to how intimidated people feel speaking out as a part of the messaging of the campaign).

Without women’s refuges and lots of women’s organisations speaking out I think it will be very hard to win the argument- are there any refuges that have expressed concern ?