I urge you all towards an excellent article arguing for single sex clarification and spelling out the letter of the law here: fairplayforwomen.com/single-sex/
Single sex services & the Equality Act: A new statutory Code of Practice must help everyone get clear what “single sex” means.
Extracts:
The EHRC have previously promoted the idea of ‘trans inclusive single sex spaces’, but this is a logical impossibility, and its guidance to date is inconsistent with the Equality Act.
There are eight specific provisions allowing single sex facilities in the Equality Act.
In addition the public sector duty (Section 149) makes it a legal obligation for local authorities, NHS Trusts and other public bodies to assess how their policies impact on people with protected characteristics, including women and girls.
The Equality Act is clear that ‘single sex services’, and the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ relate to the protected characteristic of sex, and that this has an objective defined meaning. A woman is a ‘female of any age’. Thus, there are two sexes. Sex is observed at birth and is stated on your birth certificate. This remains biologically true throughout life.
A straightforward interpretation of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act is that males are excluded from women’s services on the basis that they do not share the protected characteristic of being female (and vice versa). Any other protected characteristics they have is not relevant.
Many politicians and influential organisations including the Equality and Human Rights Commission have argued that “single sex spaces should be trans inclusive”. This sounds nice, but is impossible (apart from, of course, in the sense that people should not be excluded from or harassed in single sex spaces of their own sex, because of non conforming gender expression).
Transgender people may value ‘gender-affirming services’ (that is services where they are treated as if they were members of the opposite sex), friendship groups and formal associations and service providers can choose to provide such services amongst consenting adults. But it is not a proportionate means to a legitimate aim under the Equality Act to compel people using or providing single sex services to pretend that they do not perceive sex, or to conscript them into sharing spaces where where they are undressing or vulnerable with people of the opposite sex in order to provide them with a gender-validating experience.
Single sex services are already justified under the Equality Act, to achieve the legitimate aim of allowing people of either sex to access services equitably, and with reasonable privacy and dignity, and to address the disadvantages and obstacles faced by women and girls. There is no quid pro quo which says that in order to access these services women and girls must submit to the demand that they provide ‘gender affirmation’ to dysphoric males (nor, indeed that they become unwilling or unwitting participants in someone else’s sexual paraphilia).
[... there is also a lot of information about certain trans advocacy groups misrepresenting the law in order to bully women into giving up their spaces...]. For example...
Stonewall tells schools that it is a “legal requirement under the Equality Act” to allow a trans young person “to use the toilets and changing rooms of their self-identified gender rather than of their assigned sex” (it isn’t).