Last week the Women and Equalities Select Committee recommended EHRC write a new Code of Practice covering single sex exemptions. This article sets out exactly what needs to be considered.

From fairplayforwomen.com/single-sex/

"Trans advocacy groups have been closely linked to the development of official guidance. The EHRC is a “Stonewall Equality Champion” and provided funding to establish the organisation Gendered Intelligence. The EHRC’s Trans reading list is dominated by groups and authors holding this viewpoint. It worked in close cooperation with Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence in announcing the development of new guidance for schools. Gendered Intelligence also wrote the Government Equalities Office Guidance to business on Providing Services to Transgender Customers and influenced government policy placing males into female prisons.

"Stonewall tells schools that it is a “legal requirement under the Equality Act” to allow a trans young person “to use the toilets and changing rooms of their self-identified gender rather than of their assigned sex” (it isn’t). East Lothian Council said “Stonewall Scotland recommends that the term ‘gender’ is used rather than ‘sex’ as it is more inclusive”. "

Surely, EHRC declaring itself a "Stonewall Champion" and providing funding to establish the organisation Gendered Intelligence expresses a serious degree of bias?

Exactly who has control of the EHRC?

These paragraphs [brava to the author!]:

"At the same time telling trans people that their rights depend on their appearance is also inhumane. How can someone book a service online if they may be told at the desk that they don’t look or sound female enough? Should a person wanting a place in a female halls of residence or a female sleeper carriage be turned away on the day if they don’t look feminine enough? Who is to judge? Is someone ‘less trans’ because they don’t pass? Isn’t this imposing sexist stereotypes about what it means to be a woman? Doesn’t everyone have a right to be included in public life regardless of what clothes they wear, whether they wear makeup or not or how they wear their hair? Why should it be anyone else’s business whether someone has had surgery or not? Why shouldn’t someone be out and proud about being trans?

"The idea that the right to access to intimate single-sex spaces, or programmes intended to promote the education or health of women and girls should be based on criteria such as the quality of someone’s personal grooming and the femininity of their appearance is demeaning, unworkable and risks humiliating all concerned."

We must campaign for all the relevant Exceptions in the UK Equality Act 2010 be made mandatory.

This way any organisation that wants to opt-out of that mandatory provision and render a single-sex space or single-sex service as mixed-sex will be required to conduct and Equality Impact Assessment and justify the purpose of such an opt-out.