I just want to go back to this from LangClegsInSpace:
There should never have been any doubt that sex is important, and today's judgment only protects the belief that sex is important. It doesn't reaffirm that sex is already legally acknowledged as important, being as how it's one of the nine protected characteristics in the EA.
Imagine if you were being discriminated against on the grounds of race or disability (other protected characteristics are available) but instead of being able to rely on the EA to protect you based on those characteristics, you instead had to go to court to prove your belief that race is important, or your belief that disability is important, and furthermore that your belief is worthy of respect in a democratic society.
Imagine if you had to go to appeal because the first judge said your belief - in the importance of your own legally protected characteristics - was not worthy of respect in a democratic society.
That's how bad things have got for women and girls in the UK. We can no longer rely on the pc of sex to protect our rights. We have to use a different pc - religion or belief - instead.
I'm so pleased with today's judgment but I'm also so angry this was necessary.
My hope is that now the courts have decided to protect our belief in the importance of our own protected characteristic, that we will be much more able to campaign for recognition and strengthening of the protected characteristic of sex itself, and the rights that go along with that.
It should never have come to this though. It absolutely stinks.
Absolutely.
The whole thing is an outrage and the victory is that Maya pulled it back from totalitarian woman-crushing Gilead status to still terrible but some grounds for hope status.
This is and always has been about misogyny. The misogyny that has always been widely and deeply embedded in our society, but which many of us didn’t realise the full extent of in our modern, western world until this issue woke us up to it, as notyours commented way upthread.
There are plenty of places in the world where women and girls are still openly, tangibly, legally treated like dirt. Here in the west many of us had thought that the battle for “equality” had been won; many still do think that.
But this issue, the issue of male people being able to so effortlessly roll back women’s rights - our rights to boundaries, to speak about our own needs and experiences, to gather together in public without the presence of any male people - it brought home to me that for all the equality legislation we have, for all the fact there are some women in high office these days, there is still an unspoken collective agreement that women - biologically female people - just don’t matter as much as men - biologically male people. We just don’t have the same status in society. We are still not seen as fully human - and obviously the fact that so many places do openly treat women as second class citizens feeds into our collective (unconscious) understanding of what it is to be a woman or a man.
We have just heard that nine out of ten girls experience sexual harassment or assault while at school. We know that only 1.5% of rape reports result in a conviction these days. The ubiquity of violent, degrading porn is leading to the sexual abuse of women and girls being even more normalised and prevalent. We know that society as a whole just still tolerates these outrages when the victims are female, along with a host of other continuing inequalities and disadvantages, because harm done to females doesn’t really matter.
And in this case the harm done to female people hasn’t just been tolerated, it has been actively enabled and pushed through by society - by the institutions that are meant to serve us all. By Parliament, by the police, the courts, the BBC, MSM, schools, universities, sporting bodies, local councils, big businesses, high street chains, the voluntary sector - even groups and services set up by and for women have been complicit in this, have been active in the erasure of what it is to be a woman.
Because women too learn the message early on, so early on, that we don’t matter as much as male people. It is women who carry out FGM on young girls in some parts of the world; it is women who collude to strip their fellow women and themselves of the rights they have so recently acquired here in the western world, whether that be “conservative” women campaigning against women’s reproductive rights or “progressive” women trying to dismantle women's sex-based rights.
But it is women talking to each other that has created a new landscape too. Women sharing ideas and experiences, women questioning the accepted narrative, women working tirelessly to raise awareness of the issue, to raise funds for all these legal challenges, women supporting each other in this endeavour to claim back the rights that are legally, morally ours.
It is not for nothing that “trans rights activists” have tried their best to shut down the conversation on MN, to silence the women who have been talking about this. Those who are not regulars on Feminism Chat (formerly known as FWR) may not know that there is a specific set of talk guidelines just for this topic: while the rest of MN is famed for its robust style of posting, women who post on FWR have to be very careful how they word things because that board is constantly monitored by people who object to women having the freedom to discuss their concerns, who try incessantly to reframe women talking about our rights and needs as “transphobia”.
This is the new consciousness raising. Talking to each other on MN, Twitter, FB and in RL; identifying and challenging the misogyny which has led us to this dark place; cheering on those immensely courageous individuals who, like @MayaForstater, take on the behemoth of the captured Establishment - and who can, as we saw yesterday, win!
Because when you get right down to it, we have got justice and right on our side. We are not asking for anything other than our human rights to be respected and upheld. We are taking on an ideology that proceeds from the (often unconscious) belief that women (biologically female people) are less human than men (biologically male people). The more we drill down on this, the more it becomes apparent and the more it’s going to become apparent.
This attack on women’s rights is misogyny in action and what we are doing is exposing that misogyny, challenging it and trying to uproot it. I am proud to be part of that movement, in however small a way. And I am in awe of women like @MForstater (who I had the great pleasure of meeting, briefly, a couple of years ago!) for putting themselves on the line like this, at great personal cost, and pulling off substantial, meaningful victories that will benefit all women and girls - and benefit our society as a whole, if we really do wish it to be a genuine democracy.