Should gender reassignment remain a protected characteristic?

So a man turning up dressed as Little Bo Peep at work would or would not have the right not to be sacked from their job for turning up to work with his frilly knickers showing?

@StandingDeskDisco

To be honest I'm not sure, other than that there were pre-existing anti-discrimination laws in place that were consolidated into the EA 2010.

Looking at it with hindsight there don't seem to be many similarities (some are mutable, others not, some are temporary others not).

I think it should be possible to reconsider both what we protect, and if we do whether some are more important than others.

Interesting point.
Why were the nine protected characteristics chosen? What did they all have in common in 2010?

But what is unique about the gender reassignment quality that makes it worthy of specific protection where there are plenty of other characteristics subject to more real life discrimination but are not protected?

I don't have an opinion as to whether "beard growth" is a worthy enough characteristic to protect, my gut says probably not. Gender identity (or reassignment or whatever) is so nebulous and superficial I don't believe it is worthy.

It is not about whether e.g. a woman has the right to take drugs to grow a beard. She has that right.
It is about whether she has the right not to be discriminated against because of her beard, so not being sacked from her job, or refused service in a restaurant, etc.

Same for men in dresses. They have the right not to be discriminated against at work, in restaurants, and in all other situations where their sex (male) is not relevant.

The problem is that it is a pain in the wazoo to be forced to defend a nonsensical claim just as much as it is to have to defend a legitimate one. Whether the person bringing it wins or not, the employers have to devote time and money to defending themselves against it.

It wouldn't be whether it is worth defending a claim that's the decision-maker: it would be the likelihood or otherwise of the trans person being a pita who couldn't be got rid of. Very unfortunately, the behaviour of too many TRAs has caused trans people in general to be perceived by many as a monumental nuisance and possibly prone to violent expression of their feelings; this is not doing the trans people any favours whatever, and means it may well just be perceived as less trouble for the employers to go for the vanilla straight black person rather than the trans, or the satanist (a protected characteristic by religion) rather than the trans.

Yes, obviously, that is not in dispute.

How do we feel about women being hounded out of their jobs or subject to disciplinary hearings for objecting to sharing female spaces (set up for the dignity of female people) with a male person who identifies as trans but is clearly male?

Because this has been a feature of a number of employment tribunals now.

Discrimination against women who want to be able to be perfectly polite and professional at work, but object to being used to validate someone’s trans identity by having to share intimate spaces with them.

The trouble might be that a transsexual person being fired for inappropriate behaviour might decide to take the employer to court and claim it had been done on the basis of their transsexuality rather than on the grounds of their behaviour.

That's a risk employers might prefer not to take, and might in fact lead to transsexuals not being employed in the first place, not because they were transsexual but because they might turn out to be an impossible employee who could not be got rid of.

Of course, not employing a transsexual because he or she might turn out to be an impossible employee for other reasons than the transsexuality could, almost certainly would, similarly be argued to be unlawful discrimination.

Just so people know, I did not ask for toyl9876's post today at 14:16 to be deleted, and I am not at all sure why it was, unless accusing me of being a troll was pounced on in just over five minutes. It was still there when I replied to it.

Firing a male person for wearing inappropriate sexualised female clothing and hanging around in the female staff toilets despite being asked to do neither of these things might be a reason to sack someone though.

It should be about behaviour.

When someone has given birth they are no longer pregnant, just in case you are confused.

They are, however, still on maternity leave and are afforded some continuing protection (supposedly) against being sacked for not being available for work at that time. You could ask some actual women about how well that works out for some of us.

No-one is being stupid.

I have not at any point suggested that firing someone for being trans is acceptable. Nor did I suggest that employment law should be changed to make it legal to fire a woman as soon as she gave birth. Stop with the DARVO nonsense, please.

Not employing someone trans for the same reasons one would not employ anyone of either sex, such as horrendous body odour for a public facing role, or a serious stammer for a newsreader, is entirely appropriate, though.

I would rather hope that after someone has given birth she is no longer protected in law from discrimination against her on the grounds of pregnancy! Otherwise any woman who has ever had a child (living or dead – would miscarriage count?) would continue to be protected against discrimination on the grounds of something which no longer existed, which would be absurd.

Likewise if someone ceases to be a Scientologist, say, or a flat-earther, or a Branch Davidian, they certainly ought no longer to be protected in law from discrimination on the grounds of their belief in something they no longer believe in.

I reserve the right to be put off someone pregnant who swears at my children and throws litter in the street, just as I feel entirely entitled to dislike and avoid a member of any religion who sidles up to me in a public place and asks me unctuously "are you saved?" (Or come to that knocks on my door when I am cleaning the bathroom upstairs and drags me from what I am doing in order to ask me a similar question. It isn't because of their religion that I wish them to Gehenna, it is because they are a pestilential bloody awful nuisance, and unctuous with it.)

My objection to mandating special consideration for one of a nebulous group of people who are in actuality impossible to define even in the abstract, let alone in a shop, remains the same: if I don't know someone, how can I manage not to do what every human being does automatically in any meeting with another human being she doesn't know, quickly judge that person as to whether he or she may present risk to me? I'm sure you discriminate at every single encounter with everyone, quite unconsciously: it this person drunk or not? Is this person angry? Does this person have a lovely smile? Is this person in distress? Does this person look lost and in need of help? Is this person clearly very strange, and worth giving a wide berth just in case? And so on and on, all in a split second.

Discriminating, after all, is not always a negative thing to do. When I was a child and wanted something my mother recognised as utterly inappropriate (a thick jumper on a hot day, for instance) she would say "oh, for heaven's sake show some discrimination!" The ability to discriminate between safe and dangerous is a survival trait.

In a thread full of people saying that they believe gender reassignment should be removed as a protected characteristic from the Equality Act, my post gets deleted because I said that I think it should be removed as a protected characteristic...

You need to provide a coherent argument as to what 'gender reassignment' is. And why it needs any protections under the equality act. What protections and why?

I really don’t know.

I’m a little bit sick of it all. On the one hand, I think that transgender people are such a small portion of the population that it doesn’t really matter. But on the other hand, they’re such a small portion of the population so why are they trying to make society fit them?

Thank you - yes, certainly there is form for that. Ask Jaguar Land Rover.

I would have thought that if you're a recruiter, a "trans" status is a huge red flag that this person has a much higher chance than the average to be a nightmare from an HR perspective.