Sex Matters - Hampstead Heath Ponds -

I'm gutted for you, at least they didn't make you wait too long for the bad news. I hope the New Year brings you a new job. 💐

This morning's session:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2001229827622289718.html

This afternoon's session:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2001288829693505744.html

Hopefully this judgment doesn't get written with AI.

Last week I spent 35 hours on meetings and a presentation for an interview on Friday and didn't get it. 😭

Hopefully the New Year will bring something.

Preaching to the choir!

Do you want me to play devil's advocate? Just for fun?

Thanks for all the pasting. If another case comes up, do PM me or even @ me to see if I'm free to post.

I had nothing on today and didn't realise this case was being heard.

CoL's barrister today put the argument (one among many) that since the division is by gender identity, it's not trying to be a separate sex service.

But then don't you have to make this division clear and and exclude people with either the wrong or no gender identity?

If on the other hand you include all men without question, but have different criteria for allowing women to swim in the men's pond (and vice versa in women's pond), that doesn't seem to be division by gender identity.

Ah, so CoL argument rests on the semantics of Gender Feelz. Ok.

Thanks for all the posts from the front line, lets hope the New Year brings good news. 😁

Surely the only possible outcomes can be a protected bio female pond, or three mixed ponds, since by law there can't be a bio women+trans women pond?

We don't have a good precedent for "there can't be a bio women+trans women" pond yet. There's no judgement that makes it explicit.

CoL's barrister today put the argument (one among many) that since the division is by gender identity, it's not trying to be a separate sex service.

Yes that's what I thought and it's also why I think the Guides are in a pickle.

You tell one boy he can join because he says he's a girl, but you tell another boy he can't because he says he's a boy. That isn't fair on the second boy who might be interested in Guiding activities but not want to go as far as saying he must be a girl because he wants to do Guiding things!

So it's either only girls and mean it, or it's mixed sex.

The single sex pools protect people with the protected characteristic of sex. And the mixed sex pool provides an option for those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if they don't want to go in the pool for their biological sex.

It Really Isn't That Hard!

I also don't see how they can throw female bodied people out of the male pool if they are letting male bodied people into the female pool. That is quite clearly bonkers and sexist.

I did my best to follow TT today but found the discussion as dense as Christmas cake.

Why hasn't the Supreme Court ruling rendered the intricacies of this dispute irrelevant at a stroke?

I understand City of London Corp are still carrying out a consultation but the law is the law - what weight would members' opinions have in the context of the law? Or does this hinge on the notion of whether a sex segregated pond is a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim"?

Surely the only possible outcomes can be a protected bio female pond, or three mixed ponds, since by law there can't be a bio women+trans women pond?

It sounded to my untrained ear like they were going over old ground and fighting battles that I thought had been resolved by the Supreme Court ruling.

@Madcats thanks for this record- it was shocking they excluded all the responders who don't believe in 'gender identity'.

Thank you to the TT pasters today (rebooting my Mac seems to have unleashed all sorts of glitches), but hopefully I'll be back on in a couple of days (or maybe I'll just have to reinvent myself).

I'd forgotten just how biased the 2018 report was after Edward Lord and his team had removed nearly half the responses. I've retrieved the report in case it goes AWOL:

"There were 39,650 responses, with the large majority from members of the public. Almost half of these responses did not address any of the questions on gender identity. Once these were excluded there were 21,191 valid responses, which formed the basis for this evaluation.(1) For the
purposes of this report this group are referred to as ‘all respondents’ (2)......"

Footnotes:
(1) The 46% (18,459) response which were deemed invalid were respondents who primarily answered the introduction About You section which sought to identify the respondent’s stakeholder status. The one question some of this group answered was Q10 which enquired about their interest in the survey. 5% (989) responded with answers to this question ranging from
transgender rights, to protecting women’s spaces, feminism, equality, interest in the subject, being a visitor to London and social media promotion.
(2) To ensure that only relevant responses were included for analysis, and findings were not adversely skewed, the eligibility criteria for inclusion was determined as respondents who had answered one of the questions posed (in Section 2 and Section 3) rather than limited their contribution to commenting on Question 102. This group of valid responses is
identified as the core cohort. For the purpose of this report they are referred to as all respondents."

I diligently answered every qn for the current consultation. Let's hope that others did too.

Exactly. Why do trans women need to access the women's pond when there are two other options?

Hmm, let me think...

But wouldn’t Jewish women need to be amongst those bringing the case, or possibly intervene, in order for there to be any standing on this point?

One reason for this whole mess in the first place is courts only consider those in front of them and too often that hasn’t included women.

Likewise, as the number of Jewish women in the local area is significant. Overall in the neighbouring London Borough (Barnet), one in seven people are Jewish.