Life without sex discrimination law

[Cuesday]

So the Labour Party recently published information encouraging people to make use of discrimination law to protect themselves against discrimination. It listed the different grounds on which you can claim that you have been unlawfully discriminated against. Eg. when you are treated badly due to your race or your sexual orientation or for being transgender.
BIG BUT: It deliberately omitted the right to claim sex discrimination when you are treated badly due to being female (or, less commonly, male).
This has made people start to think that Labour may plan to abolish the right to claim sex discrimination, if it gets elected into government next time round, and to replace sex discrimination with gender discrimination.
If this happened, what difference would it make?

Ask your grandmothers and mother's they lived it.

I guess it’s also how sex is used intersectionally

I'm trying to get my head around this. For example, if a woman is sexually harassed at work, would that fall under gender discrimination? What about if only females are targeted, never trans women? What about if it's a trans man? If a trans man is raped by a colleague, presumably that isn't gender discrimination, as the trans man's self-identified gender, which is also the one they put across to their work colleagues, is as a man. But the colleague has raped them because they're female, with a female anatomy. Would that be transgender discrimination? Or would it not be discrimination at all?
If women at a company are refused promotion because they're female, while trans women are given promotion because they're male, does that mean that women can't claim any kind of discrimination, because they haven't been treated badly on the grounds of their gender, but only on the grounds of their sex?

Yes, I know a few Chinese women, so I get a flavour of what it's like to live without any sex discrimination protection. It's taken for granted that women are less valued at work and enjoy almost no maternity rights. Both men and women tend to have a very stereotypical way of thinking about men and women, with men being assumed to have far more personal qualities than women have, to be much better in the workplace, etc.

Sorry posted too soon! Sex is a standalone protected characteristic but also used intersectionally.

If a company fired all females aged 28-40 (the baby making years)
If a company fired all homosexuals
If a company fired Muslim women who couldn’t use mixed sex loos or give beauty treatments to male clients.
If elderly women weren’t getting the same pensions etc
Without being able to recognise sex as separate from gender identity I don’t think we can easily protect these people. But IANAL

It’s been said on here before that protected characteristics don’t cancel each other out. We have the right to gay marriage but we don’t force religious organisations to preform these. We have the right to abortion but we don’t force religious doctors to sign off on them.

I don’t know how G id has so much traction.

*If a company fired all females aged 28-40 (the baby making years)
If a company fired all homosexuals
If a company fired Muslim women who couldn’t use mixed sex loos or give beauty treatments to male clients.
If elderly women weren’t getting the same pensions etc** ( Women have already lived this)

Labour women fought like mad despite many Labour men to get rid of just this. Looks like they are going to have to fight it all over again

I heard someone say once that he didn’t like working with women who were menopausal (he wasn’t a very nice man, unsurprisingly). So presumably if he were hiring, and interviewed a transwoman, and a biological woman, both 45, he’d hire the transwoman to avoid this. That would be discrimination on the basis of sex I believe.

It is now changing but could go backwards.

Now recognised that women's health requirements different to men's, so it would not be required to recognise the difference.

Clothing at work such as PPE would not change even though recognised it is inadequate for women.

Men would be the template without any need for women to be considered

This is why I left the Labour party and won't vote for them again unless there is a substantial and explicit turnaround.
It's one thing to hold your nose and vote for a party that you don't agree with everything on, and something else entirely to vote for a party that intends to remove women's rights.
Starmer needs to grow a pair and deal with this.

There would be no justice for harms done to you because of your sex - so, a man who murdered a woman could get a lighter sentence because you "goaded" him and "he snapped" or he accidentally strangled you during "rough sex". If you were raped by a man there would not be a female forensic team to take samples from you, a female investigation team, a team to find and prosecute your attacker and proper sentencing for him.

Oh. Hang on...

@Meredithgrey1

I heard someone say once that he didn’t like working with women who were menopausal (he wasn’t a very nice man, unsurprisingly). So presumably if he were hiring, and interviewed a transwoman, and a biological woman, both 45, he’d hire the transwoman to avoid this. That would be discrimination on the basis of sex I believe.

Exactly but it wouldn’t be discrimination on the grounds of gender so that is where the problem lies.

I’m no expert but the understanding I’ve gathered more recently is that it is to do with comparators. So you compare the treatment of people with a protected characteristic against the treatment of someone without. So if someone has the pc of disability, are there unreasonable barriers that prevent them participating on similar terms to someone without a disability - like access for eg.

In the case of Gender Reassignment, the comparator for a transwoman (ie a male with the pc of GR), could be another male without the pc of GR so if you would exclude the male from a particular job role (like personal carer where a female has been requested), you can also exclude the transwoman.

So a woman could be excluded from a high profile project because she ‘may get pregnant’ (this happens a lot irl) but it wouldn’t be discrimination based on ‘gender’ because a transwoman was allocated to that project instead and they are both regarded as female for legal purposes.

Women suffer discrimination disproportionately based on our sex so it is imperative that sex is a pc, not gender.

The Feminist Current blog is run by lawyers that explain the legal stuff in more detail.

Have you got a link to this publication please @Cuesday? Or screenshots

Here is the link: labour.org.uk/latest/what-is-the-equality-act-of-2010-and-why-does-it-matter/

Thanks Cursday. This is a poor quality document that seems determined not to mention discrimination based on sex (although at least she mentioned women in relation to breastfeeding - written by Marsha de Cordova - Shadow Women & Equalities Sec. groan.