Can't believe I'm writing this, but disappointed in JK today

It’s not about the friendliness of the woman. I mean, yes there’s no need for women to wear frills for the sake of small children. It isn’t the frills that make them safer to approach than a man.

Hormones don't change your skeleton. Your hips and shoulders and ribs and arm length don't change. Your gait doesn't change.

I've met a few "ladies" who made me think "that person looks really odd" and then the penny dropped. The things you can't alter give the game away and the mismatch between those and what you can alter cause an "uncanny valley" effect that makes you more noticable, to me at least, than if you were an unaltered man in a dress.

That study from 1993 has been confirmed by later work. Facial sexual dimorphism in humans is deemed scientific fact by everyone working in computer vision.

This thread’s descended into wittering bollox, what a shame. It started as a heated discussion about where the boundaries should be and how significant individual behaviour is. Private versus public.

Humans can tell what sex you are extremely reliably sex based on face alone. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8474840/

Other clues include:

• shoulder-to-waist ratio
• waist-to-hip ratio
• arm and leg length as a ratio of height
• gait
• voice
• adam's apple
• size and shape of hands
• brow ridges
• hair line
• shape of rib cage
• how you move when you breathe, because women's ribs are hinged differently from mens'.

Take all that together and either someone is clearly one sex, or you realise that something jars about that person and you look again to figure out what it is. There's been a few people I've been like "there's something really odd about that lady... ah, that's actually a man whose had feminising surgery" about.

"You can't tell if someone's trans" is pure copium. Cover Buck Angel's face from nose down and you can see from her isolated eyes and forehead that she's female. Brow ridges do not lie.

@logiccalls

We need to be able to tell a child to look for a lady, if they are lost. We need to look for a female, quickly discernable by appearance, if we ourselves are in trouble. All cultures at all times have differences between the clothing, hairstyle, face-paint, and so on, to enhance the ability of everyone to instantly identify the females from the males, at a glance and at a distance, for good reasons.

You believe the reason some women wear feminine clothing, style their hair long and apply make-up is so children can discern them from men when in trouble? You really can’t think of any other reasons? And what of those women who don’t do those things? Additionally, not all women are friendly.

Honestly, all you're successfully proving here is you have a bunch of deeply entrenched prejudices about trans people and some very weird assumptions about how they behave.

I don't think trans identifying people are monolithic in their beliefs or behaviour; but watching Upton swear under oath that he was a biological woman was quite an eye-opener. For me and I suspect mny others it made it very clear that some trans identifying people have some ideas so strange as definitely to call into question their individual suitability for certain kinds of employment.

If it helps - some non trans-identifying people did exactly the same: Isla Bumba is a name that comes to mind. I don't think I'd employ her to sex my chickens either.

That's a good question, isn't it? Given that she isn't trans-identifying, am I allowed to rule her out of a position because she thinks other people can change sex? Is that still disccrimination on the grounds of the PC of GR, when she doesn't hold that PC nor is thought to hold it?

If someone pitches up for a job interview and comes across as a high-maintenance personality who won't be a team player then a reason will be found for not giving them the job (unless the role requires that sort of person😉)
That will apply to anyone, trans or otherwise.

@MyAmpleSheep If you asked Dr. Upton - a man who swore in court that he was now a biological female - to tell you how many females were in a cohort of chicks, would you trust the answer he gave? Or would he just say "I can't tell, I haven't asked them how they feel"?

I imagine she would simply tell you how many females there were, and I have no idea why you'd think she would do otherwise. Honestly, all you're successfully proving here is you have a bunch of deeply entrenched prejudices about trans people and some very weird assumptions about how they behave.

I hope for your sake you're not actually an employer, though I've got to admit it would be deeply satisfying to see some of your peculiar ideas about discrimination law tested in court.

As far as the law goes, EA2010 Schedule 9 Section 1(1) lists circumstances where it's reasonable to refuse to employ someone who holds the PC of GR, or who fails to hold a particular belief (such as the immutability of sex).

Oh dear. No. No, it doesn't. Schedule 9 allows you to apply a requirement to have a particular protected characteristic if it is a genuine occupational requirement (such as requiring a vicar to be Christian); the bar for it to be a genuine occupational requirement is high, and the onus is on the employer if challenged to prove it, and it specifically states this exception cannot be used for discriminatory purposes. This schedule absolutely does not justify refusing to employ a trans person because you have weird prejudiced ideas about how they might approach sexing chickens.

I can only say again, I hope for your sake you're not an employer.

Mate, it’s all just blah blah blah and you know it. But well done on actually acknowledging what the Supreme Court said about what biological sex means, unlike virtually all of your reality-challenged peers.

As far as the law goes, EA2010 Schedule 9 Section 1(1) lists circumstances where it's reasonable to refuse to employ someone who holds the PC of GR, or who fails to hold a particular belief (such as the immutability of sex).

Oh dear. No. No, it doesn't. Schedule 9 allows you to apply a requirement to have a particular protected characteristic if it is a genuine occupational requirement (such as requiring a vicar to be Christian); the bar for it to be a genuine occupational requirement is high, and the onus is on the employer if challenged to prove it, and it specifically states this exception cannot be used for discriminatory purposes. This schedule absolutely does not justify refusing to employ a trans person because you have weird prejudiced ideas about how they might approach sexing chickens.

I can only say again, I hope for your sake you're not an employer.

You say: "the law recognises that trans people can undergo a process which reassigns their sex physiologically". It doesn't say that. It says "changing physical or other attributes" "for the purpose of" reassigning their sex. It purposefully avoids saying the sex has been actually been reassigned, and even if it did (as in the GRA) reassigning something that is immutable is merely a convenient legal fiction. Canute stood on the beach and reassigned the tide and lo, it was reassigned, and his courtiers clapped. But the water didn't actually move.

The wording is "for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex". That is a clear acknowledgement that physiological or other attributes of sex can be changed. If you said that Canute physiologically changed the attributes of the beach, then you are saying that he did change the beach. The water moved, whether you like it or not.

I wholly reject the idea that passage gives someone licence to "believe" they have actually changed sex in the meaning of the word as I (and others use it.)

You can wholly reject whatever you like, that doesn't change the law. As for the meaning of the word "sex" in this passage, FWS established in the Supreme Court that "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 always means "biological sex" so that's what it has to mean here. The law therefore acknowledges people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment can undergo processes to change physiological attributes of their biological sex.

But if you're employing a developmental biologist to conduct some experiments on chicken embryos I think it would be reasonable to avoid a person who believed that their hormone treatment and surgery made them the opposite sex to the one in which they were born if they insisted that sex in that scenario meant the same as it does when referring to male and female chicken embryos in the experiements they were employed to conduct.

Again, the law is not on your side here. Unless their belief changed the way they did their work with the chicken embryos (again, behaviour, not belief), it is irrelevant. I personally think believing in an omnipotent God is incompatible with science, but some religious people are scientists, plenty of them are perfectly good scientists, and if I refused to employ someone to a scientific role because of their religious beliefs, it would be - guess what - discrimination.

And once again you are refusing to address how an employer would even know their trans employee's precise beliefs about their sex, without engaging in intrusive questioning (likely discriminatory) or making assumptions (also likely discriminatory).

The wording is "for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex". That is a clear acknowledgement that physiological or other attributes of sex can be changed.

Tha attributes of sex can be changed is not in dispute; this law doesn't say that "sex" itself can be changed. The GRA sort-of says that, but again, as a legal fiction in certain circumstances (as FWS affirmed.)

None of that is relevant to changing biological sex and anyone who thinks they can actually change their biological sex is unhinged. Anyone who says they can is either lying or stupid.

I think it's reasonable that a creationist would never get a job as an experimental evolutionary biologist. You might feel otherwise.

As far as the law goes, EA2010 Schedule 9 Section 1(1) lists circumstances where it's reasonable to refuse to employ someone who holds the PC of GR, or who fails to hold a particular belief (such as the immutability of sex).

If a trans person is treated worse than a non trans person of the same sex.

But if any other employee tried to force others to change their beliefs or rewrite the rules of English just for them, they wouldn't be employed for long.

And everyone else is described using sex based pronouns. So they're not being treated worse than anyone if they're subject to normal English pronoun usage also.

You say: "the law recognises that trans people can undergo a process which reassigns their sex physiologically". It doesn't say that. It says "changing physical or other attributes" "for the purpose of" reassigning their sex. It purposefully avoids saying the sex has been actually been reassigned, and even if it did (as in the GRA) reassigning something that is immutable is merely a convenient legal fiction. Canute stood on the beach and reassigned the tide and lo, it was reassigned, and his courtiers clapped. But the water didn't actually move.

I wholly reject the idea that passage gives someone licence to "believe" they have actually changed sex in the meaning of the word as I (and others use it.) If a reasonable person takes from that passage they have actually "changed" to the other sex, then they and I are using the word sex in very different ways. They may however reasonably believe they have changed "legal sex" and, I see that meaning of sex is closely connected to the PC of GR.

I take your point about it likely only becomes a workplace issue as a matter of behaviour. But if you're employing a developmental biologist to conduct some experiments on chicken embryos I think it would be reasonable to avoid a person who believed that their hormone treatment and surgery made them the opposite sex to the one in which they were born if they insisted that sex in that scenario meant the same as it does when referring to male and female chicken embryos in the experiements they were employed to conduct.

If you asked Dr. Upton - a man who swore in court that he was now a biological female - to tell you how many females were in a cohort of chicks, would you trust the answer he gave? Or would he just say "I can't tell, I haven't asked them how they feel"?

You’re getting a little mixed up. The Supreme Court judgement clarified that a trans woman is considered a man under the Equality Act. But for a gender reassignment claim, the comparator is someone who doesn’t have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. If a trans person is treated worse than a non-trans person in the same situation, it’s discrimination