Protected characteristics.

[Femineminism]

Under the uk law, there are currently 9 protected characteristics.

Age
Disability
Gender reassignment
Marriage and civil partnership
Pregnancy and maternity
Race
Religion and belief
Sex
Sexual orientation

But sex is being treated differently.

I can’t talk about the protected characteristics that has put me at a disadvantage most often and most seriously throughout my life. Not what I am, but even that this characteristic exists.

Even the mildest assertion that we need to be allowed to discuss sex and it’s impact and protections will, ironically, attract the worst kind of sex based abuses, insults and threats of violence.

Surely part of protecting a protected characteristic includes being able to name and discuss that characteristic, and the ways it affects people.
Telling someone that they cannot talk about, mention or work for the protection of their protected characteristic must be breach of the protections for that characteristic.

As protected characteristics go it may not be particularly interesting, it’s not stunning and brave, but it exists legally, it has rights and projections in law, and we should be legally protected to talk about it.

It shouldn’t matter if someone else thinks that the discussion isn’t kind or nice or if it conflicts with someone else’s opinion.

Surely part of the protection is the right to talk about the protected characteristic, otherwise it becomes utterly useless?

Correct. The mental gymnastics that some people are willing to engage in to appease TRAs astonishes me.

I thought we had free speech in this country and so were able to discuss whatever issues we liked unless we were encouraging violence against others. I realised quite quickly that this was an illusion. When I heard about Posie Parker being questioned by the police under caution about voicing her perfectly valid opinion on social media

Yes.

If police had to police every "hate incident" of abuse women receive daily on grounds of the protected characteristic of sex they'd have no time for anything else and a thousand year backlog.

@Antibles

Yes.

If police had to police every "hate incident" of abuse women receive daily on grounds of the protected characteristic of sex they'd have no time for anything else and a thousand year backlog.

Except that mysteriously, the hate speech legislation lists every protected characteristic except sex.

You can legally say anything you bloody well like to women. And my god, don't misogynistic men take advantage of that.

Still, I suppose they had to, otherwise at least half the content on P*hub would be illegal, and then men wouldn't be able to jerk off to videos of women's suffering. And we couldn't be having that, now, could we?

Try putting religion next to sexual orientation, and you will see that how to deal with incompatible protected characteristics has been an ongoing issue for many, many years.

Basically, the more oppressed minority tends to 'win' when they go head to head. And that was settled years ago when religious organisations had to withdraw from the provision of some services (eg adoption), and no provider of goods or services to the public could do so in accordance with their religion's teaching (assuming Jewish, Islamic or Christian) ahead of need to comply with equalities laws.

And this won't count as women v men; it's trans v non-trans. And the non-trans community will be seen as the more advantaged

Good grief. I hadn’t realised that sex was excluded from the hate speech legislation. I thought misogynistic language was just unenforced and ubiquitous, not that it wasn’t included.

Women really don’t matter I guess.

Thank you. I’ll look that up.