Trick to sidestep equality law?

I see no reason why there can’t be a club for children who like long hair and pink things. What they can’t do is say that the club is limited to girls.

girl guides also have in their set up said that they are for girls only, so they would have to make some significant governance changes to become mixed sex for children who like feminine things.

I would also imagine that most courts would take a very dim view of people inventing categories to avoid obeying the law (look I have a splot club exclusively for splot people. What do you mean they are all white/heterosexual etc and I’m excluding BAME and homosexuals? It’s splot only so surely I can do what I want? No?)

Akua Reindorf KC posted this the other day:

Associations are different. No-one wants to stop anyone associating with anyone. If women want to associate with transwomen they can (with a bit of legal wriggling – the Act is badly drafted here). Just don’t advertise an association as a women’s group when it includes men

Full thread, for those of you on X: https://x.com/akuareindorf/status/2044873605347983747

But how can a gender identity make someone literally a man or a woman when the definition of sex is legally biological?

And what feeling makes me a woman? Looking at an unscientific sample here, I'm guessing it's not fashion and frilly dresses for a lot of us? My own personal definition is human biology has worked nicely for generations and for the rest of it, people should be allowed to be what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else. It's like the definition of a joke. The moment you're 'joking' about isn't laughing then it isn't one and no amount of 'haven't you got a sense of humour' changes that.

Yes that would be entirely legal.

It would also be entirely legal to have a prettypinkfluffythings club that was open equally to males and females and regardless of gender identity, just open to everyone who likes prettypinkfluffythings. (it would of course be sexist to say that such a club is a club for girls because of course there is no requirement for girls to like prettypinkfluffythings and no requirement for boys to dislike prettypinkfluffythings)

It's not OK to have a club that is open to everyone female regardless of whether they like prettypinkfluffythings and to males ONLY if they like prettypinkfluffythings because that is treating males and females differently without meeting the requirements of the legal exemption of being a reasonable means to achieve a legitimate aim.

It does all girls a disservice for male children with a feminine gender identity to be admitted into any stage of the girl guides movement. It is directly contrary to the principles of freeing girls from gendered expectations to uphold a definition of girlhood/womanhood which boils down to "performs femininity" (that a male person can do) - performining femininity may be something that SOME women and girls may CHOOSE to do, but it plays no part in the criteria for what makes you female. Femaleness is not a club to which membership can be sought by those not born into it. The girls in guides who are tearful about how unkind it is that their transgirl friends are being excluded have been influenced by years of social pressure to subsume their own best interests into supporting the best interests of male people. They do not have the maturity or capacity to understand the damage that has been done to them by this.

@MyAmpleSheep I agree I expressed it in a rather mangled way!

Section 15 of the Equality Act as I understand it says that for protected characteristics, you can exclude everyone without that characteristic - so women-only WI, girls-only Guiding.

But it does have to be a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim. You can't say "no gays in this pub, straights only" or ban pregnant women from your gym, that's discrimination.

"Providing single sex spaces for safety and dignity" is a legitimate aim, as would be a menopause group for women only.

Everyone has protected characteristics. That's not free licence to exclude willy nilly as I read Section 15.

Yes, and there are several of those local to me.

Yes you can legally but whether such a group would be ‘fine’ is questionable

I think you have that almost exactly backwards.

The reason Guiding can exclude boys is because single-PC associations are an exception to the ban on membership discrimination for associations. It can be for a legitimate aim, an illegitimate aim, or for no aim at all - it's still legal.

But it has to be all or nothing; you can't have a membership criterion that is closely tied to sex but isn't a complete match. That doesn't get the benefit of the exception in schedule 16, which is narrowly worded.

That's the reason GG can't include only a selection of boys.

The reason that GG must exclude all boys is because of charity law: their founding document says they are for the benefit of girls only.

So because gender reassignment is a protected characteristic, would it be fine to have a group for transboys and transgirls together? (Not suggesting anyone wants that group).

I would actually find that a fascinating group to observe the dynamics of.

The reason Guiding can exclude boys is that it's a proportionate means to a legitimate aim, having a single sex group.

Sex is a protected characteristic, so that exclusion is perfectly legal. Gender is not a protected characteristic. Nor is Gender Identity. So you cannot exclude anyone on that basis as a proportionate means to a legitimate aim under the Equality Act.

That numpty on twitter is talking out of his arse.

Ha - I did recognise the name, just hadn't got it strongly connected to a position. Glad I checked before jumping in.

Frankly, I wish they bloody would get on with setting up their Gender-based clubs and spaces. That's what they should have been doing all along.

It's a bit bloody rich to complain about people not realising that gender isn't sex when they were the ones insisting all the single-sex stuff "really" meant gender in the first place.

And while we are at it sorting this out, they can stop using the same words for the sexes and the genders.

Because if we as a sociey truly do believe that a Gender Identity exists entirely independently sex and truly want to treat this as an organising quality, by far tge?fastest cleanest way to sort this mess out is for Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Male and Female to all go back to being sex-based. And that means all the rights and language and provisions that were set up under those names can also go back to being sex-based.

And the Gender identities can give themselves new different names that make it clear that whatever they are, they are different to these things. And if there's a case to made that Guides, or anything else, should be single Gender than make that case explicitly and transparently under that Gender's new own name, not sneakily through the back door by pretending "Girl" never meant what we all know it always did.

There certainly seems to be a mindset from some that the world should just adapt around their needs and no one else. If they honestly want something, put the legwork in and set up an organisation. I don’t think anyone would be against this. There is room for plenty of different ones to meet different needs it just means putting some effort in.

Mate I've been on here for a decade, so take a guess

gender identity makes them, literally, a man or a woman, because it is that feeling that makes someone, male or female, a man/woman.

Are you stating your belief about what makes a person a "man" or a "woman" here, or simply describing what Genderists believe makes person a a "man" or a "woman"?

If the latter, then yes, do not disagree that is their belief.

If the former, I have questions. But don't want to get into them with you if this is not something you believe yourself.

That might be true in certain circumstances, but I don't think it can be true as a general principle. What about a netball group that requires applicants to have a commitment to playing a regular netball games per season. Assuming men are much less likely to want to play regular netball than women are, they are less likely to qualify for membership.

That is not sex discrimination, because there is no detriment to men: any man who actually wants to play netball can join, regardless of the fact that men as a class are less likely to want to play it.

Similarly, an organisation for 'female gendered people' (again with the caveat: what t f is that anyway?) would be available to any man who had a female gender, regardless of the fact that men as a class are less likely to have this.

You might get into difficulties in some circumstances if the organisation was providing a wide range of benefits in addition to the performance of gender that non-female gendered people could not access elsewhere. If that were the case, then males without a female gender might conceivably be regarded as facing a detriment, on the grounds that they were more likely to lack a female gender than women

But if that were a problem for a female-gender organisation, it would equally be a problem for a sex-based group. Say, for example, Girl Guides was waaay better than Scouts at providing abseiling courses and similar. Could males sue for sex discrimination?? I doubt it

it's an admission that sex is indeed real and not at all the same as gender ID

It's hardly an admission.
The entire definition of 'transgender' relies on this distinction - "Trans: A term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth."

It's not 'people who wish to be the opposite sex'. It's people whose gender identity makes them, literally, a man or a woman, because it is that feeling that makes someone, male or female, a man/woman.

I love the way the tweet is written as though they think 'ha! Bet those feminists have never thought to question what 'gender' is!!' - bless.

This question has been done to death in the GG and WI threads.
You can have a 'gender identity' club if you want, but it would have to be open to everyone.

There's nothing that differentiates 'woman gender identity' from 'man gender identity'.

Unless, of course, they want to articulate their definition of 'woman' which they can't and won't do, because we'll all see how laughably sexist it is.

Indeed and they must not be treated different to others of their (biological) sex because of it.

Yes, both children and adults alike can hold the PC of gender reassigment.

To be clear, I couldn't give a fuck if adults who claim to have female gender ID want to hang out together.

For children, is there actually a protected characteristic related to gender at all? It would be hard to explain exactly why the adult male with the female gender ID needed to be supervising the little girls and boys in the "I like princesses not football" club, but Jimmy and Kimmy's dad Nigel wasn't allowed to.

No, it wouldn't work.

Caselaw is that a rule has to affect men and women equally to avoid being considered as discrimination on the grounds of sex. For instance in Smith vs Safeway the Court of Appeal held that to require employees all to wear lipstick and earrings and have shoulder length hair would be a rule that if applied equally to men and women would disproportionately affect men by forcing them to present themselves in an unconventional way.

So, to allow entry or membership only to people who have female "gender", "present as" female (or some other proxy) affects men very differently from women and would still be considered as discrimination on the grounds of sex, with all that flows from it.