Did you know - sex discrimination legislation

[Pratchet]

That all the sex discrimination laws that women fought for were rolled up into the Equality Act 2010.

That means if 'sex' is replaced by 'gender' in policy documents or the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010, women have lost all those rights as based on their biological sex.

That's it. Anti-discrimination according to biological sex, gone, disappeared from legislation.

The Equality Act is all we have.

Yes, I did notice that when I read the intro to the EA. There do appear to be a couple they missed, for example the one from the nineties that requires employers to provide a minimum of one lockable sex segregated loo per 25 or any part of that number employees at the place of employment for both males and females.

Alas I did.

Which is why I’m here.

Fight on, ladies, this is a generational battle for women’s rights.

Yes this is an excellent point that I think many don't realise. Just like people still think the DDA is a thing.

Yes. And there was no consultation, it all happened quickly and quietly, and we were presented with a fait accompli.

Bewilder I think that is from the Health and Safety at Work Regulations, which are still in force and not connected to the EA. There was a thread here about that the other day.

As far as I recall there aren't any protections from the old legislation (SDS 1975 and Equal Pay Act 1970) which haven't been replicated in the EA. Sex discrimination was concentrated in those two Acts so I'm not sure it makes so much difference now that it's only in the EA.

Even if there were several pieces of legislation covering sex discrimination, if the Govt. decided to replace sex with gender I would expect all those different pieces of legislation to be amended for consistency.

I'm not saying we shouldn't work to protect the EA from being changed along those lines, but I don't think the problem is really that all sex discrimination law is in that one place.

Respectfully I disagree.

That means if 'sex' is replaced by 'gender' in policy documents or the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010,

As we are seeing happening. It doesn't help that sex is now on a par with gender reassignment and gender reassignment is a positive characteristic and it is interpreted that discrimination exists by treating these people differently to others of the acquired "gender" whereas for sex there has to be a difference in treatment between sexes to make a discrimination claim. So we can exclude men in some circumstances but we have a higher bar when they have gender reassignment as a protected characteristic and higher still when they have a GRC as they share our own female protected characteristic.

Ok, I was thinking only of the legislation, not policy documents/codes of practice etc. I agree these are much more vulnerable to replacing sex with gender, particularly because, unlike the EA itself, they are not hard law that require full parliamentary procedure to be changed.

As you say, the different wording in the EA relation to the two different protected characteristics of sex and gender reassignment risks ambiguity when it comes to guidance/interpretation/codes of practice, which is a real concern.