Important - The Equality Act guidance has just changed

[WatchThePotatoesBoil]

I've just this minute been told by the EHRC that the Equality Act guidance has been changed, and the new version was published on Friday as promised to Fair Play for Woman.

It no longer states:

Where someone has a gender recognition certificate they should be treated in their acquired gender for all purposes and therefore should not be excluded from single sex services.

It now states:

Transsexual people should not be routinely asked to produce their Gender Recognition Certificate (if they have one) as evidence of their legal sex. If a business requires proof of a person’s legal sex, then their birth certificate should be sufficient confirmation.

There will of course, now be a new Twitter war on what this actually means.

www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/what-equality-law-means-for-your-business-2018.pdf

This is fucking terrifying. No one actually changes sex. You cant encode that into any meaningful law.

Ok, ignore my previous post. I saw the answer on the government website.

It's like being in a Twilight Zone episode. Sex is not assigned, it's observed. The only case in which it may have been observed and recorded incorrectly is with children who have intersex conditions, and even then that's not likely now. Organizations should not have to jump through hoops to prove that they have a really good reason not to allow males into women's spaces - those spaces are for people who are female. Males should be excluded by default, and if for some reason a particular male thinks he's an exception the burden of proof should lie on him

(He's wrong though.)

Pencils is right:
It's very obvious to me that the GRA is not so much being reformed as repurposed and I believe the purpose is to render 'sex' as a legal category meaningless, not just in the EA, but in all contexts. It just wouldn't be recorded anywhere because if anybody can change their legal sex at any time with just a statutory declaration, what's the point?

No legal sex = no sex based rights

We have been hearing the 'drip drip drip' of the erosion of women's rights for some time - now it is sounding like the pipe has burst.

None of these changes sound comforting at all, quite the opposite.

But Angry I think that may be the situation under this revised guidance.

The old guidance said that you could not exclude someone with a GRC.

It no longer says that.

• and not being a lawyer (i.e. probably being wrong so don't follow this advice) but I think:

...that I would take the new guidance to mean that at "Potato Boil Spa" (1) I could choose to exclude biomales under Equality Act Explanatory Note 734 (2), and if they believe I'm wrong then it's up to them to bring in a birth certificate. If I'm still not satisfied, I could really stand my ground and simply refuse because I believe that they are transgender. In borderline cases, I would have to give the customer the benefit of the doubt, but in other cases not ("case-by-case" right?)

The thing is, the Equality Act states it's not about a characteristic someone necessarily has (such as being male), but is a characteristic the provider perceives that they have. In this specific example, I am asserting a sex-based exception and a gender-reassignment exception.

So the burden of proof lies with the customer to prove they are not transgender.

• and if I was wrong... Well... I'd be a bit fucked, basically - but I think we're not talking about edge cases are we? We're talking about when you know that this person is going to freak the hell out of your regular customers.

Of course I would document such a policy formally and get a solicitor to give it the green-light before implementing it.

Notes:
(1) "Potato Boil Spa" does not exist
(2) 734 b.p. 5 - "a woman might object to the presence of a man"

I hope you're right but fear that you're probably wrong.

Also agree with others that birth certificates should never be changed. They're a historical record of events, not an exercise in validation.

Indeed. That certainly body-swerved due dilligence. What were they thinking? I just don't know how anyone could pass such a thing and not realise there would be a Pandora's box of problems even in good faith declarations - let alone the bad ones...

It really does feel like everyone lost their minds. Something in the water? Brain eating virus? It just doesn't make any sense that nobody at the relevant meeting went "hang on a second, I see some potential issues here".

Lots of people pointed out the issues. This twitter thread with bits of Hansard from 2003 is very informative:

twitter.com/HairyLeggdHarpy/status/1049289194370002945

I just don't know how anyone could pass such a thing and not realise there would be a Pandora's box of problems even in good faith declarations - let alone the bad ones...

Looking at the what happened at the time the original GRA was going through parliament, it seems that many people did realise there would be problems, and it only got through because there were certain checks and balances in place (diagnosis of gender dysphoria, two years living as the preferred sex), and because it was expected that only a tiny number of people would be eligible for GRCs (fewer than 5000, I think was the estimate).

It was a bad law and set of decisions in the first place, but certainly the expansion of the trans umbrella to include everyone and their uncle was the cause of the situation going from "dodgy, something is going to go wrong at some point" to "complete fucking disaster".

OMG, Pencils. That Twitter thread. The 2003 stuff. Fucking hell. People saw it, and questioned it, and it wasn't considered a big enough deal to sort it out.

And all to avoid same-sex marriage. Wow.

That twitter thread is absolutely incredible. The warning at the end perfectly sums up where we find ourselves now.

It was a bad law and set of decisions in the first place, but certainly the expansion of the trans umbrella to include everyone and their uncle was the cause of the situation going from "dodgy, something is going to go wrong at some point" to "complete fucking disaster".

And that's why it took a bad turn for the worse in 2015, when Stonewall with Ruth Hunt at the helm fully got behind trans issues, endorsed the umbrella, and the Maria Miller Trans Inquiry happened and Gendered Intelligence was given free rein to write the government guidelines for employers and service providers.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/484855/Theerecruitmentanddretentionofftransgenderstaff--guidanceforr_employers.pdf

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/484857/Providinggservicesforrtransgendercustomers-aa_guide.pdf

I hate the way MN ruins links sometimes. The second one works and the first is easy to google.

Just one point. I think the original birth certificate still exists, but is 'closed'. So it is still an intact historical document, but no one is allowed to see it.

Yes the original cert is still kept on record in the register. I don’t know if you can access this or not. Are birth certs not a matter of public record?

I thought that if a new cert was issued it had a note in the margin to indicate that it was not the original. I’d like to see if this is the case and what the note looks like.

Maybe the new certificate should have the classic trollface icon printed in the margins.

How sloppy. You don't change horses part way through a consultation - especially not right towards the end. This will be used to bin all of the responses that relied on the old wording and the new wording will be deemed acceptable as a compromise. Womyn who have put in submissions need to put in new ones. But overall I'm more just disgusted with unprofessionalism in changing the criteria.

Have any organisations suggested that they would support Repealing the GRA yet?

How sloppy. You don't change horses part way through a consultation - especially not right towards the end. This will be used to bin all of the responses that relied on the old wording and the new wording will be deemed acceptable as a compromise. Womyn who have put in submissions need to put in new ones. But overall I'm more just disgusted with unprofessionalism in changing the criteria.

This is a good point, actually. How will this affect the consultation, given a fairly important factor has changed halfway through? Will the deadline be extended?

"In other words, treat a transsexual person as belonging to the sex in which they present"

But there is no requirement to "dress as a woman" or whatever.
And what does that even mean > lots of women wear jeans and chunky boots and baggy shirts or whatever.

It is asking to guess at what people might be based on the trappings of masculinity or femininity which many people don't adhere to anyway (more women than men prob) and ignore the evidence around any physical characteristics.

I mean all of this, this whole thing, let's pretend physical sex doesn't exist and if you wear a dress you're a woman (what of women who don't wear dresses? what of men who wear dresses and don't think they're women?) and that's all that matters.

What a shallow miserable world we have when your clothes and hair say all there is to say about you and the actual physical reality of our bodies are just nothing.

And what about the people who don't adhere to stereotypes and don't ID as trans? Everyone is meant to just assume they're trying to "present" as the opposite sex, and who cares if they don't like it or it offends them?

What a shallow miserable world we have when your clothes and hair say all there is to say about you and the actual physical reality of our bodies are just nothing.

And all to make a bunch of whiny males, who insist on being treated as true women, happy.