Tougher transgender guidance for schools is unlawful, Sunak told

OK. You'll have to overturn more than just Goodwin, and I don't much fancy your chances - but have at it.

But until you successfully deploy that strategy or the UK leaves the ECHR, the international obligation remains.

It's not so much that they are fine - those countries without gender recognition are also in breach of their international obligations.

It's just that there is no particular means to force a state to do something to comply with its obligations.

On the other hand, there are (internal, domestic) means by which a state is prevented from doing something that breach its international obligations - namely that ministers and civil servants are not allowed to break the law.

So we continue to bring cases on behalf of women and girls. Sooner or later one or more of them will end up in ECHR where we can show a fuckton of evidence that there are after all huge factors of public interest, and huge effects on the human rights of women and girls, to weigh against the interests of those who wish to falsify their birth certificates. We get Goodwin overturned and then repeal the GRA.

What do people think about Gillian Keegan’s statement today?

<Shrug>

I'm prepared to hear arguments either way.

But considering that belonging is doing fuck all in preserving women's rights, child safeguarding, harassment for belief, prejudical policing yada yada, if it's going to be clung to as the bastion of support for continuing to oppress and subjugate women and gosh what a shame we can't stop?

Then it probably needs reviewing as to whether it's still the good thing it used to be, or has just become another outpost of political capture to a highly dodgy idology.

The European Court of Human Rights has found that Article 8 encompasses a right to legally change gender. That's not a matter of opinion, it is an objective fact.

But we dont have a legal gender in the UK?

Is that why its called the Gender Recognition Act? We acknowledge that the individuals with a GRC have a gender? What we can stop is those obtaining a GRC being issued with a new birth certificate?

Or does gender mean sex? Everyone has the right to change their sex. But that cant be correct - its impossible to change sex.

There is a practical difference between not taking active steps to comply with an international obligation, and taking active steps to contravene an international obligation.

Ministers and Civil Servants are prevented from doing anything that breaks the law. Including international law.

This is the crux of the ECHR issue to me. Yes other countries didn’t open Pandora’s box so they are fine

The U.K. did and now is stuck

Unless they exit the ECHR

Other legal interpretations may come up on the thread but this is what I am taking from the pp

Except it's not tenuous.

No GRA, no ECHR.

You're perfectly entitled to support that approach. Plenty of people who object to immigration also want to leave the ECHR.

But you shouldn't pretend that you can scrap the GRA and remain compliant with international law.

I mean you can keep setting out all the reasons you disagree with the ECHR.

The point is that the ECHR position is pretty clear, and scrapping the GRA is not compatible with it.

This is going to be the new 'thing' now isn't it?

Women can't ever have equality back cos EHCR membership stuff type tenuous thingy.

The goalposts keep on shifting. It's a bloody awful law that was created for all the wrong reasons and does not work for anyone other than a small group of people who do not mind the damage they are doing to others' rights and equalities. It needs to go.

I'm not sure how you can disagree with an objective fact?

The European Court of Human Rights has found that Article 8 encompasses a right to legally change gender. That's not a matter of opinion, it is an objective fact.

Scrapping the GRA is not compatible with the ECHR.

We all have all sorts of highly sensitive personal data which we sometimetimes need to disclose in certain circumstances. That's what data protection laws are for. GDPR provides robust protection especially for the most sensitive kinds of data.

It makes no sense to allow one tiny group of people to falsify their data because they find it distressing. Especially as even the ECHR has not managed to outlaw the evidence of our eyes and ears.

Lots of people with no father named on their birth certificate might find it distressing when they are called upon to disclose it. Perhaps they should be allowed to make one up?

Yes, that's fair enough.

To be clear, I don't think the guidance that was supposed to be issued by now should be striving to be a comprehensive guide to all things gender-related.

I think that's too ambitious and unrealistic given where we are, and I think this huge question about social transition, while a very important long-term question, is not appropriate to be shoe-horned into urgent guidance that schools need right now to deal with actual issues on the ground.

Since the government doesn't have clarity on where they stand legally on social transition (which they obviously won't do as it would require more clinical research and more clarity around what gender identity is, and if the NHS don't know what to do for the best yet, why would the government know any better?, and so on), then they at least need to produce some interim guidance on the issues they can currently guide schools on, such as single-sex spaces, how to deal with gender critical views, and so on.

I think delaying the guidance until legal clarity on the whole issue is achieved will mean that no guidance ever materialises, and it will end up being settled through employment tribunals and discrimination cases against individual schools/councils anyway, as schools are inevitability going to be forced by circumstance to make the difficult decisions the government is still grappling with, and most schools won't be able to keep everyone happy in making those decisions (and yes, I agree that most people won't take legal action and will simply move on to different jobs or schools through necessity).

While the government can hold off on issuing guidance, the schools can't hold off on making operational decisions on these issues involving actual pupils. They can't just close schools until they have appropriate guidance, and a single child, for example, can't be both prohibited from using the toilets of the opposite sex and allowed to use them, so there will be no option for schools to sit on the fence the way the government is. Schools are going to have to continue having a stab at getting all of this right, regardless of whether or not the government intends to keeps shifting the scope of this fabled guidance until they run out the clock.

That's not how jurisprudence works. The precedent stands unless and until it is overturned. And there is no indication of the court wanting to overturn it - quite the opposite. It has actually expanded the right in recent years.

So obviously you're welcome to disagree with the Court's decisions on this. But the fact remains - while we remain ECHR members, repealing the GRA (or significantly weakening it) would be a breach of international law.

sorry not legally are not: in material reality are not.

The word salad of all this is mind numbing.

I don't agree that repealing the GRA has anything to do with the EHRC.

It's a bad law, it is no longer needed for purposes of equality, no one should be able to be anything that they legally are not.

And you are trying to equate women stating reality to point out their own needs with harassment. It is not.

Yes, that's the part that is summarised in the quote I included above. As I said, with 21 years' worth of hindsight, it looks highly questionable.

Or as @Froodwithatowel says, 'It has been destruction tested and the impact on others is too great to tolerate, it needs to go.'

OK - if you firmly believe in repealing the GRA, then you firmly believe in withdrawing from the ECHR too, and should own that fact.

As for an absolute right to express a belief in the workplace, no one has ever had that right.

Is Suella Braverman really the threshold now for sound legal advice?

She was appointed to that role for one reason and one reason only - to give Boris Johnson the right advice when it came to breaching international law on the NI Protocol. I agree, she would probably have given politically convenient rather than legally sound advice in this situation too.

"Since there are no significant factors of public interest to weigh against the interest of this individual applicant in obtaining legal recognition of her gender re-assignment, it reaches the conclusion that the fair balance that is inherent in the Convention now tilts decisively in favour of the applicant."

Para 93. The judgment was not narrowly about whether Christine Goodwin had the right to marry. It was more broadly about whether she had a right to legally change her gender. Marriage and pensions were mentioned as reasons, but so were lots of other factors - mortgages, insurance and other areas where she might need to show her birth certificate.

This is particularly the case when it is the gun held to women's heads to say:

You cannot say you need a single sex space because it's offensive to me.
You cannot say you need a right to single sex sport because it's offensive to me
You cannot say that lesbians do not shag men because it's offensive to me.
You cannot call yourself a woman or a mother because it's offensive to me.

Women at this point have been fucking offended for years by all this shit without trying to take everyone to court to make them stop.

Can I ask something?

If Suella Braverman was still attorney general, do we really think this would have been her advice?

Not in a month of Sundays.

I am a firm believer in repealing the GRA. The inequalities that existed at the time have been resolved in other ways, and I believe that it is also wrong that anyone should be able to create a legal fiction of being something they are materially in reality not. It has been destruction tested and the impact on others is too great to tolerate, it needs to go.

Likewise the whole 'you can hold that belief but you must not express it' is also right out I'm afraid. You can try and make it sound like holding a racist belief or a homophobic belief where to speak it is harassment: this has been working very well for the TQ+ lobby for years now, but it has been proven in court to be what women said from the start. Stating a belief in reality is not offensive, and it is not reasonable to expect people to perform a belief or deny reality on the grounds that someone will be upset by it.

This requirement to create a fiction for others is a unique thing. It is unreasonable, it unreasonably tramples on others' rights, and it is not reasonable to require enablement in personal fiction at all times on the grounds that someone stating a reality you dislike and have rejected is offensive to you. It may well be, but this is no one else's problem to resolve for you.

LonginesPrime . Today 13:00
But we all need the government guidance to start with, in order to settle the legal issues over time. The legal challenges are a necessary part of untangling this whole mess.

Many people on here have spoken of using legal challenges to sort out the mess, but
a. most ordinary people cannot challenge

b. Who is to say it makes for an improvement? What about the Haldane judgement? Or the first Maya one?

So changing the GRA would be permitted, provided that the legal right to change gender (free from some of the constraints that the Court has since ruled to be violations of Article 8) remained.

The point is that scrapping the GRA entirely, with nothing to replace it, would be a breach of convention rights.

I don't think the judgment says that explicitly, but I'd have to read the article 8 part again more thoroughly. If the ECHR has ruled that there has been a breach of article 8, it is up to the member state to change their laws to comply with the ruling, but as far as I can see there is nothing in that judgment which says that the UK must pass a law permitting legal gender recognition.

If I'm wrong, perhaps you can point me to the paragraph which says this. As I've already said, IANAL and I do find legalese quite impenetrable sometimes.