Sunak would amend the Equality Act

[achillestoes]

Rishi Sunak has been trailing Liz Truss in the Tory leadership battle, and he is now trying to re-invent himself a bit. He has strengthened his positions on sex in the Equality Act meaning biological sex, and specifically said the following about the EA:

“The worst offender in this regard is the 2010 Equality Act, conceived in the dog days of the last Labour government.
“It has been a Trojan horse that has allowed every kind of woke nonsense to permeate public life.”

There is a suggestion that he would ‘review’ the Equality Act. Not sure whether that means he would amend it or repeal it, but obviously we would still have the GRA, which without the Equality Act to alter its meaning, even if slightly, would give the TRAs a boost.

It's the GRA that needs to be repealed. Tighten up the Equality Act by all means, but repeal of the GRA would underpin that men can't turn into women.

What PrinceYakimov said.

Sunak plans to stop organisations such as Stonewall from delivering sex and relationship education, after concern that inappropriate topics have been taught to young children.

Blimey.

Reading between the lines, I don't think he. gets the extent of queer theory and how it's permeated every single organisation in the country. He says he doesn't really want to get involved in a whole culture wars thing, which makes me think he doesn't really grasp the magnitude of what's happened.

He knows enough to see that de sexing language is unpopular tho.

I never thought I'd see two politicians going head-to-head on the basis of who can support women's rights the most tho.

Cant wait to see Liz up the ante.

The EqA also makes single sex spaces an optional extra. The wording/interpretation around when a male with gender is included as a women is confusing to say the least.

And the PC of GR needs a clearer definition. There needs to be clarification about when men with the PC of GR clash with the rights of women with the PC of sex.

Reviewing the act doesn't mean women lose out. Just because some women have gained compensation because it exists doesn't mean it helps all women and girls all of the time.

This is all a lot of sunshine - let's be positive. Like pp's have stated, the gender recognition act is flawed and the EA has been somewhat hampered by that.

Now the government has realised how insidious the gender ID/Stonewall propaganda has been within so many areas of government departments/civil service/local government etc, it will enable those who support free speech, women's rights etc to have a greater voice.

Stonewall's tweet about two year olds have a gender identity certainly helped highlight their idiocy and ideology

I agree, the EA is a robust piece of legislation, in term of protections for free speech, through protected characteristic of faith or belief.

However, I imagine there may be a way of making single-sex exceptions obligatory, rather than optional, in service provision.

If that's possible, it could remove the major plank of TRAs platform.

GRA could be fixed with a 2 amendments - define 'gender' as clearly separate to 'sex' + 'replace sex with gender' throughout.

What do others think?

Yeah - you're right. I would amend what I said upthread to say that the one thing the EA framers didn't anticipate was that service providers would ever as a matter of political ideology not want to make single sex provision, particularly for women. They drafted it to accommodate normal practice at the time, which was that everyone understood people want separate facilities in situations where sex matters. So I agree it's worth looking at how you can strengthen the single sex provisions part of it so it's not optional, at least for public bodies.

‘Stonewall's tweet about two year olds have a gender identity certainly helped highlight their idiocy and ideology.’

It did, but the big split was from Johnson when he sacrificed Safe to be Me and the support of Stonewall in order to protect kids from gender conversion. He has many flaws but we wouldn’t be where we are if he hadn’t done that.

Whoever gets to be the new PM I hope Kemi is the new Minister for Women. She gets it.

The problem with the GRA is that it is designed to conflate gender and sex. If the process is to recognise a person's gender, why does it enable them to receive a new birth certificate with the opposite sex? Why does it allow those with a recognised gender be in the opposite sex facilities 'sometimes'?

As far as I can see, the PC of GR is, in large part, to help those who want a GRC go through the process while working and using services. But TRA have stated that they get all of the protection they need from GR and don't need the GRC, so it's a form of self id for those with no intention of going through the GRC process.

Organisations (including government) do interpret the PC of GR as 'almost having a GRC'.

Completely agree with @Datun . Sunak is just not interested in this kind of thing - he's a finance/economy guy. I have no idea why he wants to be PM, as he has never shown any interest in social or foreign policy.

He won't understand the extent and strength of the capture because his wife and children are cushioned from it by their wealth. I think he's understood vaguely that this is an issue lots of people are exercised about, but doesn't get the detail.

I know Liz Truss won't be popular with a lot of people on here, but I think she at least understands the legislation, how the levers of govt have been captured, and has been taking political risks to try to unpick what she can of it (she has not had all of the relevant policy areas under her control).

Liz Truss knows. Hundreds of women wrote to her, to thank her for kicking the reform to the GRA into the long grass. I was one of them. Now I don’t believe that she personally read every message but her team would have summed it up for her.

I wrote about the dangers of allowing Mermaids and Stonewall to influence policies in schools and public life in my thank you note. I’m 100% positive that I was not the only one.

I’d love to see Kemi as the minister for women and for Caroline Noakes be pushed to the back benches and away from anything to do with women.

As far as I'm concerned it's all mostly soundbites until the cabinet's chosen and the manifestos come out. Nevertheless it's interesting to see Sunak choosing it as a soundbite.

Plus (because sorry but I still tend to view this through a Labour Party lens) the more it gets talked about, the greater the pressure on Labour to spell out what they mean to do. Of course Labour may decide to double down - they seem to be stupid enough these days - but at least then we'll know where we are,

What I’m seeing on Twitter is best characterised as “oh shit, what did we do?”

Nobody wanted this. Most people are very happy with same sex marriage and people being able to reassign their sex if they have serious problems of dysphoria. But Stonewall and others didn’t realise most people were being tolerant already.

I don't think he really gets it but it's likely someone on his team does and is trying to give him a crash course.

Some of this is great:

"Sunak plans to stop organisations such as Stonewall from delivering sex and relationship education, after concern that inappropriate topics have been taught to young children. Schools would be given guidance about what was acceptable, while parents would be able to request to see teaching materials, including from external groups, through an amendment to the Schools Bill. However, schools would have the final say on what to release."

But the last sentence is not, and shows he's got a way to go. Someone please tell me why I can't see those materials? What's the reason?

Overall though...it's sunlight. It's discussion. It's top politicians saying no Stonewall. These are good developments and we've come some distance in the last few years. Well done us

I think he or they should be abolishing the GRC and repealing the GRA. They have done untold harm and confusion, especially to women and girls. Why make a different category when you can call yourself what you like and dress the way you want.

Getting Stonewall out of schools will be an enormous win. Whoever wins, Zahawi, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Javid are all on board with that. This is a massive shift from the Cameron/May years, where everyone was competing to look as unthreatening as possible, and they left the back door open for the wolf.

All you need to do, Rishi, is clarify the difference between sex and gender and make sure that legislation clearly and firmly protects sex, as the EA states. Remove any confusion, use people's sex in health records, stats, prisons, etc, and nobody will give two hoots what anyone wants to claim as a 'gender'. You can swap them weekly, daily, hourly, who cares! Have a GRC, have ten!

Yes. And it's perfectly obvious that he's only saying it because Liz has prioritised it, as she recognises its importance.

I want to see this issue as front and centre as it can be, but it's not particularly impressive when it comes across as a desperate bit of reed bending to curry favour.

'This includes making sure the “Trojan horse” Equality Act is clear that sex means biological sex and clarifying that gender self-identification has no legal force.'

Okay, that sounds pretty much like what I'd just posted! Fair enough, Rishi.

Have cakegender, catgender, agender, nonbinary, any gender you want in any configuration and change it at will.

Just keep men out of women's spaces.

Who is saying oh shit what did we do achillestoes?

I'm not on Twitter, so I don't get the 'flavour'.

Can you summarise?

I think this is actually a better suggestion. Stonewall et all have pinned everything on 'gender'. So if you allow them to have 'gender' in any fashion they want, including GRCs, etc, but just clarify existing laws to make it very damn clear that sex is the legislative criteria, and that single sex exemptions are exactly that and can't be over-ridden by 'gender', then gender becomes what it is - an arbitrary collection of stereotypes about how we present.

This hits the nail on the head. The choice of language 'woke nonsense' tells us this is nothing to do with rebalancing legislative approaches to sex and gender. It's clearly about winning votes from bigots and arseholes.

People need to be careful who they jump into bed with, because they risk their own rights being chucked under the bus.

Well, Labour and the Lib Dems WOULD throw women's rights under the bus, so that is the lowest bar to improve on.

Bigot and arseholes. Nice. Perhaps some of these people do care about mutilation of children and dignity of women.

I do consider racists, sexists, homophobes (and, yes, transphobes, which isn't the same as being GC) to be bigots and arseholes, yes. Don't you?