Our organisation has just published its response to the Supreme Court ruling

Gah, you could play this silly game with all the protected characteristics.

Race - what if someone is almost entirely white but their great great great great great grandmother was black, can they apply for a black person's grant?

Age - what if they were born at exactly midnight on a leap year or in a different time zone?

Sexual orientation - what if someone identifies as gay but has never been in a same sex relationship but lots of opposite sex ones?

Marital status - what if someone got married but it was immediately annulled?

etc etc

Sex is actually one of the easiest to define!

Sorry no time to read all posts but in this and other cases can everyone on FWR remember that the EHRC has published the interim guidelines on what the ruling means.

And it states it is about SEX.

Please can everyone use the web link, or download it as a pdf any just share it at work or whatever. Or post in response to nonsense on the internet.

Which I would suggest the OP does to their employer.

There is no discussion.

Unless as some TRAs are trying to do which is to say Baroness Falkner is the enemy and should be ignored and sacked.

But in the meantime like it or not (or her) these are now the current legal guidelines that everyone should be following.

Quote:

The Supreme Court ruled that in the Equality Act 2010 (the Act), ‘sex’ means biological sex.
This means that, under the Act:

• A ‘woman’ is a biological woman or girl (a person born female)
• A ‘man’ is a biological man or boy (a person born male)

• A trans woman is a biological man
• A trans man is a biological woman

Fucks sake.

Tell them: “It’s set out paragraph 7 of the judgment here as the sex of a person at birth. Screenshot attached. If you’re not sure of yours check your original birth certificate (ie the first birth certificate ever issued to you). Hope that helps ☺️”

Please let it be an ALB in areas other than health and social care.

Funny how those claiming not to know what a woman is always know where to aim their: unerring knowledge of which class of humans are required to function as support robots, expectations of silence and compliance on pain of punishment (usually being the process), accusations of bigotry, signs on lavatory doors demanding 'respect' of fellow service users, admonitions on toilet walls to protect others from harm by acting as human shields, doxing, tomato-soup missiles, rape threats, death threats ...

Common sense, commonly understood definitions is what the equalities act was predicated on.All of this nonsense about how "complex" the issue is, when it really isn't complex at all.

They could always try reading the ruling themselves. Nobody seems to want to go to source anymore...they jut want someone else to provide a precis, and these precises are themselves often just based on another ill informed or incomplete precis.

Yes, “vibes” is definitely what laws should be based on - there are far too many laws based on objective facts and evidence already.

Legal certainty is sooo boring when we could instead keep people and organisations constantly guessing whether they’re acting lawfully or not.

‘Biological sex’ was used by the Scottish government, and the SC just used their wording.

In this instance it just means ‘not acquired sex conferred by a gender recognition certificate’.

Just to add a little bit extra to that, Arthur Corbett was the eldest son of Lord Rowallan who, at that time, was the Governor-General of Tasmania and had also been Chief Scout up until a year before Arthur met April.

When his father died in 1977 Arthur became the 3rd Baron Rowallan until his own death in 1993.

Exactly. I knew we'd been slithering about in that swamp, I just hadn't really reckoned with the idea that we might be in a place where a final judicial decision could be treated as just another inconvenient fact for sophists to elide away.

(re whether Reform is inevitable, that line is the last one in Judges fwiw: the next thing that happens is that a king does appear)

@Another2Cats thanks for all that.
I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a film or a tv drama. Paris, London, Marbella, Casablanca. Sex clubs, cross dressing castration. Court, Divorce
It's quite a story

We have reached a point where either the govt and EHRC are going to have to force compliance with the law, or admit that law is on paper and in practice is whatever current fashionable/noisy lobby group can market. Currently it's GI, but the next lobby group could be Russian/extremist right wing/whatever. And there'll be no point whining about it.

It has been pointed out over and over to the GI lobby: the whole point of the laws and values set up at the end of WW2 was that equality for all is the key and law is for everyone. Even the people you hate. It's a standard thing everyone is entitled to. Once you get into the most powerful group can just push around or remove rights and protections from anyone they don't like or find inconvenient then no one has any protection at all: you're all in the hands of the most currently powerful group and you have nothing but hope that your own group is currently one of their mates. Sooner or later it won't be, and you'll be on the recieving end of what you were happily dishing out to others. With no recourse and no protections because you broke them.

Yes, I suspect we're in for years of whining, whingeing, wiggling around, any excuse to kick it in to the long grass and 'wait' for something else. And we can wonder why we pay MPs and the HoC so very much money to write laws that aren't actually meaningful or enforced, and what the point of them is. Or the point of going through the performance of voting.

This is one part of the picture that is looking increasingly likely to end in Reform getting into power.

"He met him in a sex club in Paris"

Just a small point, but they met for the first time at Le Caprice restaurant in London on 19 November 1960

"...if the man was unaware he was marrying a trans identified male"

It all gets very complicated but, basically, yes, Arthur Corbett was very aware.

The transwoman was born George Jamieson in Liverpool. At the age of 17 he started taking oestrogen while working as a female impersonator at a night club in France. Then, at the age of 20, he travelled to Casablanca in Morocco where a French doctor performed an operation to remove his genitals.

Following that operation, George, by now calling himself April Ashley, moved to London where he met Arthur Corbett about six months later.

Arthur himself was a bit unusual. He was a married man who was into cross-dressing as a woman and appears to have been bisexual. Arthur was aware at that time that April was a transwoman and that was actually the main reason why Arthur wanted to meet April.

They then had an entirely non-sexual affair for three years until after Arthur's wife got a divorce.

During this time, April became the subject of a series of articles in the News of the World which outed her to the whole UK.

Arthur had bought a villa in Marbella, Spain where April spent time while Arthur lived elsewhere in Marbella.
.

"How were they even able to marry at the time? Didn't you have to provide ID?"

While they were in Marbella they approached a lawyer in Gibraltar. This lawyer arranged a special licence for them. It is unknown whether they had any legal advice as to the validity of the marriage or how it was arranged.
.

"Was this the reason for the annulment or was be just using this to get out of the marriage?"

He was looking to get out of the marriage.

They got married on 10th Sept 1963. They attempted to have sex for the first time that night but April declined to continue stating that April was in pain. After this they spent a few days sleeping apart in different houses until April returned to London.

Arthur later followed April back to London and they spent about a week there in a flat together. There was disagreement between the parties as to what happened there and whether the marriage was ever actually consummated.

Arthur then returned to Marbella and April later followed him there. They spent about three days together in Marbella until April left for good and that was the end of their relationship.
.

Following on from this, April claimed that Arthur had promised to give the villa in Marbella to April and April also commenced a claim for maintenance under the then Matrimonial Causes Act 1965 (which has since been replaced by newer Acts).

Arthur then counter-claimed asking that the marriage be annulled.

Isn’t the clue in the word “biological”?

FWIW any man who describes himself as a woman but who has fathered a son has a Y chromosome. He couldn't have produced a son otherwise.

Also known as Willoughby's Law.

Surgical procedures and medical interventions are specifically excluded from consideration when deciding what sex someone is, thank goodness.

So they'd be on a hiding to nothing.

It hadn't really occurred to me that this is where do-gooder opinion might take this – that the SC decision still isn't clear, we don't know what all these other words mean, we'll have to await further expert guidance (maybe Stonewall can write it?)

If this is really where the issue is going to go, then there's no easy way out of it. It's like living through the Book of Judges: "in those days, Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes".

'We are defining it in precisely the same way we did for literally thousands of years, and which everyone found intuitive, simple and inarguable until some men decided it made them sad, at which point it all became terribly complicated.'

Twats.

And that other old chestnut, well some women have hysterectomies!

FWIW any man who describes himself as a woman but who has fathered a son has a Y chromosome. He couldn't have produced a son otherwise.

This is the next inevitable argument for the transwomen who have gone down the medical path.

GRC doesn’t change my legal sex, it is down to biology? Aha! Well then because I take shit tonnes of female hormones and have maybe had a boob job and therefore BIOLOGICALLY I am female! hormonally and aesthetically I am female and Nobody has ever tested my chromosomes! (even though you used to be called Barry and have two children created from your sperm before your AGP got out in public)

@GreenFriedTomato I'm fairly sure I read it on the wiki a while ago, but it has been removed from the page. All in all pretty scummy behaviour from Corbett. It's interesting that Ashley went after the law change to make him legally female rather than having same sex marriage recognised in law - the quiet part of this isn't that Corbett thought Ashley was a woman just like any other woman, but that the interest was specifically because Ashley was a 'woman' made from a man.

Yes, I think we are going to have to have a court case to definitively fix what 'sex' means in law. That will probably have to go through to the SC too. And then probably whether full stops in legal documents in some way mean women's rights can be disposed of. Or whether women can be said to have souls. Or whether we all exist at all and what 'exist' can actually mean once Judith Butler's been allowed to twaddle on about it.

The addled with far too much time on their hands will never cease to bore us all to death otherwise.

Thanks for the info @bubblerabbit It sounds familiar now wrt Paris and Sex club

@GreenFriedTomato FWIW, Corbett's main aim seems to have been to get out of paying Ashley any money - Corbett came from a v wealthy family and had an inherited title.