Transgender Judge Seeks Leave To Intervene in FWS Case re Legal Definition of Woman

Great post that bears repeating.

That peaking and fury is evident if you read the hundreds of thousands of comments just on the Times & Telegraph sites. Men and women furious at all this and fully cognisant of the range of outrages - legal, criminal and ethical.
It always amuses me that the small number of anti women posters spend so much time on here looking for opportunities to repeat a bit of propaganda or spout their own half baked notions, bumping threads like this that allow knowledgable women to clarify complex issues.
The same thing is happening x10000 elsewhere yet they're somehow obsessed with the mummies & women on here. 😂

I don't have a problem with treating males and females equally. But sometimes we have to give females a boost, or extra protection, to mitigate for biology and the historic disadvantage that flows from it, and it's then that they swoop in to try and grab some of that for themselves.

I know I'm stating the bleeding obvious, but the Scottish government must surely employ some clever people? Why don't they understand that affirmative action needs to be laser focussed on the disadvantaged group (yes, trans are disadvantaged too, you can give them their own shortlist if you like, proportionate to prevalence in population), not sprayed around indiscriminately at anyone standing in roughly the right area?

Don't they just

I can pretty much guarantee that if an employer has employed a transwoman they will also be paying both sexes equally.
where an employee transitions whilst employed, I very much doubt their employer will reduce their wage based on a fictitious change of sex.
Unless you can prove otherwise?

Imagine this scenario at an employment tribunal
Employee “you’re not paying me the same as all the men who do the same job as me”
Employer “we pay you the same as all the other women though”
Employee “but I’m actually a bloke”
Employer “really? You’d never guess! Do you want the same pay as the men then?”

I suppose it could, just, have happened in the Birmingham Council case (where the male binmen were illegally paid more than the female dinnerladies and cleaners, for equally tedious work). I like to think that a transwoman working in the kitchen - particularly if too puny for hefting bins - would have benefited.

Of course there's a wider problem that 'women's work' is undervalued, so men who choose to do it, whether trans or not, are also undervalued. But we can't be solving all of the problems all of the time...

@fromorbit great post!👏

The very definition of cake and eat it.

This intervention is a good thing for the FWS case.

1 - GLP virtually always lose. Having the fox batterer against you is a bonus not a disadvantage. He has inappropriate legal skills, remember Joly Kimono is a TAX lawyer, trying to do complex equalities and constitutional law. Moreover he is more interested in making money, gaining publicity, than winning.

Trina on twitter pointed out this:

Crowdfunder is for £30k. Probably about 2x as much as needed for legal costs for an intervention. Why are they fundraising for something they haven't even been granted permission for? If they are turned down where does the excess money go? Surprisingly little detail on the page..

2 It is likely that GLPs badly designed intervention will give a great example to the supreme court of how batty TRAs are. They are at their most successful when they are sneaky. This attempt may not even be heard, but trying to do it, the publicity in papers like the Times makes the pro-woman side stronger because it gives a concrete example of the sexism going on. Because FWS employ competent lawyers rather than random grifters it may be they could even use aspects of the attempt to intervene during the case itself to show the threat to women's spaces.

3 GLP's reputation is mud amongst the senior legal profession because their grifting lawfare, which is not only time wasting, but as mentioned earlier is constantly incompetent. Lawyers admire winners, those who win cases, no matter what the cause they fight for. Again this helps the women side because it undermines the idea of TRAs as being victims.

4 It diverts money that might be spent on effective TRA campaigning into buying JM new kimonos.

5 It peaks people and gives FWS more publicity so raises more money for our side. The gardening plot has gone up another 9000 in the last few days over 150,000 now. Newsflash making women more and more angry is NOT a winning tactic. The longer the mumsnet thread, the more GC twitter rants the more powerful the pro-woman side becomes.

Thanks. Having seen @SaffronSpice 's reply, I realised that this case does not fit into the paradigm of our previous discussions, which were about impermissible discrimination (we agreed that discrimination against a trans person could be proved by comparison to a non-trans person of the same legal sex, or any person of the opposite legal sex, so possession of the GRC didn't ultimately make a difference).

This case is about permissible discrimination - mandatory representation of a previously underrepresented group. Needless to say I don't agree with you that historic underrepresentation of women can be fixed by turning some of the existing men into women!

So, a male announces he is a TW, and HR immediately re-writes their contact for 15% less wages?

Ha Ha Ha Ha.

🫣😂🤫

You're not wrong! Oppression cosplay would appear to be a thing.

Some people find the idea of being marginalised very attractive.

Why? In your mind, what specific disadvantages do you think women’s shortlists are aiming to address? Why do you think they are necessary?

Of course it seems reasonable to you. You're a man. You have no skin in the game. Just like our learned friend Master McCloud, it doesn't affect you so it's not a problem.

That's logically impossible. TW are the not women so can't be paid less as a result of being women. If they're one of the tiny tiny minority who pass (the fact that not one single well known TW passes, or one single TW whose been filmed harassing and intimidating women passes shows how unlikely it is) then they'd be discriminated against on the basis of falsely being believed to be women, not because they are women. I have nothing in common with a TW that I don't have in common with a man. Woman is not a costume.

I’m not sure of SP’s exact position on this, but from the earlier parts of the discussion, it sounds like her specific objection is to self-ID.

I think she might be one of the more middle-of-the-road campaigners who still feel concessions to transsexuals might be reasonable.

Of course the wheels always come off that one because as soon as you admit any man, you run into the problem that it’s “not good practice” to demand other men medically modify themselves to achieve the same rights. So the admission of any medically transitioned man, immediately results in any non-medically transitioned man having the same rights.

Lots of us started out objecting to self-ID but have gradually concluded the only way to protect women’s rights is to remove the GRA as it is fatally flawed because of that. There are still a lot of people arguing that middle ground though, to the point where there’s a significant split in our ranks at the moment.

Still, suffragists and suffragettes both existed and argued, but women still got the right to vote.

Why would a women-only shortlist include men who claim to be women, whether they hold a GRC or not? What would be the point of the list? What would the group have in common which merited being on a protected shortlist? A shortlist of the socially disadvantaged would make sense. I question whether men claiming to be women are socially disadvantaged, but even if that were the case, why distinguish between GRC holders and non-GRC-holders?
And more importantly, why leave out of the group other disadvantaged cohorts?

Laws should be workable and categories coherent and stable. A category of Women + Men Who Have Filled In Forms And Paid A Fiver is neither coherent nor stable. I phrase it like that, not to mock the concept, but because that is an objective description of the group. Women + Men Who Believe In Astrology makes as much sense as Women + Men Who Believe In GI. One group has an objectively verifiable, immutable, material characteristic, the second group holds a particular belief.

The only reason for a category of "women + men who claim to be women" is to indulge men who claim to be women.

What a whiny, bad faith set of tweets from the judge. One might think they had been written in order to present or quote out of context to make it seem as if the judge was responding to outrageous remarks.

I'm very surprised that SP's beef seems to be that some men claiming a "civil right" to be treated as women haven't made any attempt to present as women; to my mind the problem is the civil right itself. How they present is neither here nor there. Concerning.

I say "woman" not to dispute trans women's "womanhood" but to acknowledge that the definition of "woman" under which trans women experience "womanhood" is entirely different to the definition of woman under which female people where historically always known, and under which concepts like equal pay were formed. It is, therefore, entirely reasonable to ask to what degree the group of people who are "women" by the new definition but not under the old definition do, in fact, share any of the challenges of the original group.

One might indeed consider that if the new group had chosen to go under any other name than "women", why we might ever be trying to make both groups fit the same set of laws and rights at all.

Does that actually happen though, or do you just believe it must happen because it follows on from the assumption that if trans women are "women" than trans women's experiences of "womanhood" must run on identical lines to the experiences of those people born female, including the challenges faced by those born female?

@theilltemperedclavecinist yes, I broadly agree with this interpretation, but it would be useful to get some clarity, which is why I am in favour of this case. It seems reasonable to me that a women’s shortlist should include trans women, and it’s reasonable there might be exceptions.

Why does it always go from Lady Bountiful to Massively Indignant so quickly after women (politely) refuse the forced teaming and mansplaining?!

That male socialisation is hard to shake 😏

Next 2. It seems to switch them every time.