House Of Communions, Early Day Motion tabled - Draft Code of Practice on Services, public functions and associations

Emily Thornberry has skin in the game. She has a cousin who calls herself a transman.

They certainly are on X over the past couple of weeks.

Thornberry has always been TWAW. I think she has a close trans relative?

That’s what I thought, I mailed back a contact number and year of birth jyst so that she has no excuse not to reply. I’ll nudge her next week.

We are going to have issues where there will be men in women's changing rooms, in leisure centres, for example, and staff won't be able to do anything because they will say that their passports prove they are female.

I'm not sure that the Draft Code explains the legal position sufficiently robustly, what with all the pussy-footing around regarding whether sex is special category data.

It is not illegal sex-discrimination, and it never has been, for a provider to exclude, from a single-sex service, someone who looks like they are not the sex for which the service is provided, irrespective of what documentary or other proof they offer as proof of sex. Because Schedule 3 provides immunity from liability for perceptive sex-discrimination.

It is illegal gender reassignment discrimination to exclude a transman from a women-only service, or a transwoman from a men-only service, other than as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. I don't believe this will be hard to police, even without documentation, because a) transmen are not dicks, and b) unicorns transwomen who pass will be trying it on in the Ladies, not the Gents.

Sobel's missive shows a lack of anything at all to do with women.
Ditto Whittome, Jardine etc
We have rights too, you &@£%
Transpeople feeling 'unsafe' is something we hear all the time but in what way? How?

Again I ask- which side does the abuse, the threats, the nastiness, the shouting-down, the book 'bans', the jibes at JKR, Maya, Helen J et al come from? How can people not see this?
Was there any comment when M-AS mentioned having to move offices ir RD mentioned 'piss protests'?

Can these elected representatives think of all constituents not just the previous few?
I'm absolutely sick of all this

Thornberry occasionally mentions her female relative who identifies as trans. If she ever had a capacity for independent thought, she lost it when she decided that 'supporting' this relative in her chosen identity was more important than protecting women from predatory men.

Yes, trying to frame it as the EHRC causing issues with their guidance, when the EHRC are simply stating what the law is, is so dishonest. I know these are a particular brand of renegade activist MPs, but it is making me lose faith in politics.

I think it was Christine Jardine who said that there is no way to check someone's sex, now that we're not allowed use our eyes anymore, because people can change their legal documents. Well, yes, clearly this is an issue, but Christine Jardine seems to think that the solution is to let any man who self IDs as a woman into women's spaces.

And what is worse, these MPs are emboldening all the men who are claiming that the law is unenforceable and that they are going to carry on traversing women's boundaries.

We are going to have issues where there will be men in women's changing rooms, in leisure centres, for example, and staff won't be able to do anything because they will say that their passports prove they are female.

No Tories have signed. Kemi has them all singing from the same hymn sheet.

My feeling is that she's given up on leadership hopes, hence signing it. No serious contender could abuse parliamentary process in that way and not be expected to justify it.

Burnham doesn't understand what he's letting himself in for. I cannot imagine he'll want to add a whole new debate on women's existing legal protections to his mounting crisis list...what with the defence secretary now resigning over lack of defence spending, and pressure to deal with illegal migration as well the fall-out of the Henry Nowak murder.

I suspect he'll be under immense pressure to call a general election because he has no legitimacy in the country at large.

Not all surprised about Corbyn. Thornberry is such a disappointment. Comes across as massively egotistical with leadership ambitions. Willing to throw women under the bus to signal her progressive badge.

Most of the new ones are Lib Dems.

She may be short staffed, as it is most likely her constituency office manager who will first recieve the email and then send out an automated recognition of receipt.

There is no requirement for your date of birth, only name and full address with postcode. You may leave your phone number if you wish.

Yes, proportionate was never meant to be applied on an individual case by case basis, but in the first instance before deciding whether to create a single sex facility or category. Once the decision has been made that this is a proportionate measure then the case is closed.

I see that both Jeremy Corbyn and Emilly Thornberry have now signed.

I sent off my email to my MP (previous experience suggests that I will receive some meaningless waffle in about six months time) but I am kicking myself because there's an angle I completely forgot about:

The part of the Code that is being objected to (exclusion of opposite-sex individuals from Schedule 3 single-sex services) was already a part of the Interim Update which was unsuccessfully challenged in the High Court.

Who are these MPs, who are so arrogant that they think they know better than a High Court Judge? Swift J was very clear, that this so-called 'trans-exclusion' is not just a correct interpretation of FWS but also not a breach of the HRA.

Just mentioning, in case anyone who hasn't sent their email yet is looking for material....

I think that many MPs haven't realised the full extent of FWS. They understand that sex = bio sex but they still believe case-by-case is applicable and a trans-person can only be excluded from the opposite sex space if proportionate.

They haven't realised that Sch 3 para 28 has been clarified as applying to proportionate exclusion from a same sex space eg the option of excluding a TIF with a male presentation from a women's support group in an RCC.

My neighbour was distributing LibDem leaflets the other day. He is a retired consultant surgeon. I said I can never vote LD because they don't know what a woman is and also quoted a few choice examples from the Sandie Peggie case of gender madness in the NHS. He look a bit taken aback. As a long term LD supporter, I don't think it had ever occurred to him to consider where their policies now are. I know that his personal views are actually firmly GC.

I found it bizarre that several MPs in the WESC meeting were berating Mary-Ann Stephenson about the code being 'unworkable', when all the EHRC had done was produce guidance in accordance with the law. It didn't seem to cross their tiny little minds that it's parliament (i.e. them) which makes the law, so if the code is unworkable, then that means there's something wrong with the underlying laws, and it's up to them to change them, not the EHRC which can only produce guidance which follows the law.

They seemed to be blaming her for something that they viewed as a problem, when the problem was of their own making. MPs have made stupid, unworkable laws (like the GRA and the PC of gender reassignment in the EA), then they're blaming the EHRC for writing (in their eyes) unworkable guidance to follow their stupid, unworkable laws.

MAS said several times that the code doesn't change the law, just explains it. Some of the MPs seemed to be too stupid to understand this simple and obvious point.

I find it bizarre that none of the signatories are being publicly held to accout for it by people who understand the law.

"Can you explain why it's beneficial to anyone to not have guidance that accurately explains the existing law?" "Why are you campaigning against this guidance rather than trying to change the underlying law that the guidance is merely explaining the impact of?" "Given that the Supreme Court has ruled that women's rights simply cannot exist unless the word 'woman' has an objectively verifiable meaning, ie not something that any man can choose to claim, how would you justify obliterating all women's rights which would be a necessary consequence of changing this law?"

The answer is only 'clear' if they (and TIMs) like it. Anything other is confusing and unworkable because the starting premise is that women can't say No.

Alex Sobel is a petulant, prissy little man who is unable to see any world in which women have rights without wanting to tear it down.

For women, it's "cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them".

As Dworkin said, the only difference between men on the left and men on the right is where they put their boots on our necks.