Women only Cambridge college Newnham welcome men who ID as trans

In Cambridge specifically? 😅

It is if you consider the increase in hate crimes against trans people.

This is an oversimplification.

Different groups of people violently offend at different rates. IE, Younger poorer heterosexual men offend at significantly higher rates than older, wealthier or homosexual men. Lesbian women offend at significantly higher rates than heterosexual women. In fact studies show that lesbian women violently offend at higher rates than gay men. Should the college therefore be refusing to admit lesbians?

In any case, given the minuscule trans woman population 0.5%, numbers are statistically insignificant to make any conclusions. And it's not as if th college can't individually risk assess applicants.

I would disagree with your use of the word "reasonably" in your second sentence. I don't think that's an accurate use of the word.

You misunderstand the EA2010, in a really important way.

It's not the holder of a protected characteristic that is protected. The EA doesn't define groups of people who get protection.

The EA protects everyone from discrimination which is done on the basis of a list of characteristics.

The characteristic of being married or in a civil partnership is still the criterion being used unlawfully to discriminate against a single person - it's the yard stick against which they are being measured. The use of "married" as the yardstick is the unlawful element. Not the outcome of that measurement ("they aren't married.")

Only in the case of disability is it lawful to treat someone who holds a PC better than someone who doesn't. For every other PC, including GR, you must be "blind" to the PC. You simply cannot lawfully take that protected characteristic into account - you must not even consider it - when making a decision to treat one person more unfavourably than another.

Women are safer in a single sex environment. His presence compromises the women's safety.

Why do women have to sacrifice their safety for his?

All there has to be is an exceptional circumstance. Given the current political climate it could be reasonably argued that at present in the UK, its unsafe for this individual to be educated in an all male or mixed environment. So the reason is purely about safety.

That is not correct. Being disabled, being married or civil-partnered, and gender reassignment are all protected characteristics that do not have a protected complement.

In your example, why is this person "safer among women"? Because they are trans. You can't argue your way out of a claim for direct discrimination by changing nothing but the language you use to describe the discrimination. Discrimination doesn't become legal if you say it's "because this person has a vagina" rather than "is a woman".

The reason might not be 'just 'cause trans' tho. It could be associated with being trans as in 'this person is safer among women' for example.

We simply don't know the reason yet.

I don't think I understand you - at least, to the point I think you're making, I disagree.

DIrect discrimination is unawful if it's "because of" a protected characteristic. The person being discriminated against can either have, not have, or be perceived to have (or not have) the protected characteristic. It's all forbidden.

So if the men admitted have personal characteristics that closely approximate the PC of gender reassignment, that's unlawful discrimination. it's only disability where you can treat people who hold a PC better than those who don't.

Presumably colleges are using their resources fully already, and don't have spare extra space etc hanging around.

So does Newnham admit these men in addition to their intake, or do they reject female applicants - who may need to be in a single-sex environment for all kinds of reasons, who therefore can't apply to the mixed-sex colleges, and who may have protected characteristics under the law - to make room for them?

I think that means there are now no single-sex women's colleges at Cambridge, as Murray Edwards isn't.

That would be illegal discrimination - on the grounds of belief. Being 'cis' is not a protected characteristic so the only PC in play is sex - which this provision is all about in the first place. I'd love to see that 'exceptionally' debated in court, but I wouldn't bank on winning.

I think this will fail if tested by the courts.

I don't think the "exceptionally" clause will be permitted to be used in an otherwise discriminatory way, i.e. to admit only students with a protected characteristic (such as GR).

You could not, for example, countenance a women's college that admitted men only when they are Sikh.

There is a clear difference between an exceptional circumstance (in which it might be lawful to admit a man) and then man is from an exceptional class of men (those with GR) but the circumstances of their admission are not exceptional.

I agree.
The baked in dishonesty gets to me. If these people are so uncaring about the history of women's activism, education, organisations (thinking of the WI as an example) then they need to be upfront and declare it.
"We care more about men's demands than we do about feminism / the rights of girls and women"

They need to be honest that they're dismissing the honourable history of women's suffrage, lesbian rights to same sex attraction, women's equality etc in favour of demands from a small number of rather grubby men wanting access to women when vulnerable.

We now see that the motivation of extreme transactivism is to identify anything women centred and to trash it. Those running these organisations should acknowledge that this is what they're colluding with.

Yes, they could amend their statutes to become mixed-sex but they haven't. Instead they are simultaneously a) applying their own interpretation of 'women' to the college statutes, and b) avoiding Equality Act implications by admitting a few men 'exceptionally'. I can't even begin to work out whether this is ok in law, for the usual reason that it reifies a ludicrous proposition about the natural world. But I don't think it's ok in practice that women who want single-sex study get less opportunity for it.

Well of course there's already a huge deficit of autistic men at Cambridge so it's important to squeeze a few more in by allowing them to identify as women.

Sarcasm for those who don't get it.

Presumably this will be another case where the delusional "TWAW / women can have a penis and women who think otherwise are bigots" nonsense will be exposed in our courts?

If I recall correctly, universities have been exposed as hotbeds of insane transactivism every time they've been forced to expose their thinking in court - the OU were certainly humiliated by what came out in the Jo P case.

Ah so 'special circumstances' apply only when convenient?
You can't have it both ways.

You can always rely on maximum malicious pettiness from Maya & the mob…

It also went into a bit of discussion on their general admissions policy.

It's so sad to see people in charge of single sex organisations being so contemptuous of women only organisations. The history of women only schools / universities is well established.
If Newnham feels it's no longer appropriate to be single sex, they need to own it. Just stop using women students as a support service for confused men.

Not disagreeing on this, just pointing out that they could also be discriminating against biological females who have changed all their documents to male (certificated sex = male but biological sex = female).

And, to complete my wall of posts.....

The instrument establishing Newnham as a college 'for women' was ratified by the King in 1917 and has the force of law against the college administration. I find it hard to believe that the college statutes expressly permit admission of male undergraduates at all. Maybe someone who is a lawyer and/or a member of the college can put me right on this?

The previous thread related to fellowships and was covered by Schedule 9 (sex-specific appointment permissible if mandated by an instrument pre-dating the Employment Act 1992).

I think this, and the previous post, are good reasoning for service providers under Schedule 3 and associations under Schedule 16, but I'm not sure it always applies to educational settings, because the Act has a lot to say about them specifically (including Schedule 12)