Should women be awarded medals if they lost to Transwomen in UK sport since 2010?

[Willandra]

Hello,

So the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Equality Act 2010 means biological women when it refers to women's sex-based protections and women's single sex spaces including women's sport.

Does that mean that sporting organisations that allowed Transwomen to compete in women's sport were breaking the Equality Act? And have been since 2010?

Do you think women who lost out to Transwomen in UK sports since 2010 should now be awarded medals they would have otherwise won? Not necessarily stripping the Trans athletes like drug cheats, but acknowledging the sporting bodies got it wrong...?

YANBU for yes, that's not unreasonable to give the women the medals.

YABU for leave sports results unchanged

Cheers (first time starting a thread! 😋)

And I did not say it does. The law is not just the contents of this ruling.

Park Run is not an elite sport. It is an amateur running club. As long as they are clear they are trans-inclusive, they can remain so. Or they can have no records if they prefer.

When it comes to sporting bodies, it is less clear what the ruling means.

There's some good analysis on BBC Sports on this.

Whether anything will ever be done about it is another matter. But it is certainly unlawful (and always was, it’s just that it wasn’t successfully challenged at the time via legal means).

No, it is not. But lots of people in this thread and others are assuming that this ruling means X, when the ruling is very specific. It will have broader implications, but the actual specifics are likely to be ironed it through a combination of legislation and further legal cases.

Yes. Where possible, we need retrospective adjustments that give women back what they earned. This is not a change to the law. It’s a clarification of what was already the law.

Well yes, of course.
Always the problem.

Oops I mean you are being reasonable!! The votes will include my stupidly pressing unreasonable

Of course they should where it is feasible, I'm betting this won't happen though 🙄

Many female competitors are owed a big apology for the way their legitimate concerns were dismissed by the "you're a transphobic hater and need to educate yourself" brigade.

That won't happen either as that brigade appear to be doubling down

Nothing about the ruling (I agree with the ruling fully by the way) means that sporting body rules are unlawful. This is being so wildly misunderstood.

This. So much this. People are cherry picking the aspects of a ruling they want to be true and wildly applying them incorrectly everywhere.

That is not how our legislative process works, that is not how our judiciary works.

I strongly suspect most people have not read the (88 page) ruling, or even the summary conclusions. Or even the many, many articles analysing what this could/ could not mean in the British media right now.

It could be argued that female sport falls under the EA2010 though.

Female sport was set up to allow female athletes to have the same opportunity to fair competition. Therefore, why would it not be using the EA?

If they have a female category then they should make it fair competition. Their collection of timings and publishing of records for categories is discordant with their declaration that they are not a competitive sport.

But why would female sport NOT have been governed by the EA? As I said unless it was labelled as mixed sex or open, allowing any males in was a misrepresentation and indirect - at least, if not direct - sex discrimination. Subject to time limits etc why wouldn’t that in principle be vulnerable to a legal challenge on behalf of any woman who had entered based on that incorrect descriptor now?

I'm not up to date with rules from individual sports, but, if a woman was forced to compete against a male then surely she can now claim sex discrimination.

To prove that it wasn't the sporting body would have to find a male comparitor.

@Willandra

Of course they should be awarded the medals they were cheated out of. Biological men should have never been allowed to compete against women. Too many male advantages. So cheating.

If a person is to be found to have gained advantages by taking drugs then medal is removed. I see this no differently, the males cheating to win by saying they are women.

To clarify, given that the ruling has merely clarified the law, a challenge in the terms that I’ve outlined wouldn’t have been excluded prior to the ruling either… had someone had the appetite for it, which understandably might not have been the case given the climate. But obviously the ruling would make it much simpler to draft!

Then those cases would need to be argued in the courts.

Where judges could/ could not decide if it applies.

What the ruling is likely to mean is that if a group says they wish to restrict participation to women only - specifically biological women - they would not be breaking any rules under the Equality Act 2010. It does not mean that all groups, especially amateur/ non-elite level have to do that.

Let's see what happens if a legal challenge is brought then.

Of course they’d need to go to court. That goes without saying. It’s not magic!

But statements are being made on this thread to the effect that rules that allowed trans ID males to compete in the female category were not illegal and that just isn’t true. IF the category was labelled as female/women.

They could just make everything open, yes.

However I take the view that a sports group that declined to invoke the single-sex exemption going forward would be vulnerable to a challenge of at least indirect if not direct sex discrimination, given that they are essentially condemning women to never ever winning and even exposing them to an increased risk of physical injury, to name but two potential detriments, by doing so.

Alan Turning's conviction for gross indecency was overturned. He was convicted for gay sex. So has other such convictions. The execution verdicts on men shot for cowardice, because they were shell shocked, were overturned. Likewise awards have been removed, along with statues and place names. We go against the rules of the time, frequently.

But we wouldn’t be going against the rules of the time! That’s the whole point! Jeez.

The bodies that made the decisions to make these women compete against trans people should also not only reinstate medals, but compensate these women for loss of sponsorship, sporting grants, lost prize money etc.