Legal rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces

[OfInvention]

This seems a good opportunity to check if you have read through the following documents, which clarify the position on the legal rights (Equality Act, 2010) of women and girls, men and boys.

On 4th July 2022, Kemi Badenoch, as Minister of State for Equalities, Local Government, Faith and Communities, made a detailed statement regarding the importance of separate male and female toilets, in municipal and private sector locations, and including sex-specific toilets for children in schools. Here is a link to the full statement:
questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2022-07-04/hlws169

On 10 August, Attorney General Suella Braverman's spoke on Policy Exchange about Equalities legislation. You can see the full speech here:

www.gov.uk/government/speeches/equalities-and-rights-conflict-and-the-need-for-clarity
Section 3.3, is about single sex spaces; followed by an interesting section on schools, e.g. (quote): “It is lawful for a mixed school to refuse to allow a biologically and legally male child, who identifies as a trans-girl, from using the girls’ toilets.”

Please always remember the clear legal definition of sex:
Legal Definition:
Part 2 (Equality Concepts), Chapter 1 (Protected Characteristics), Section 11
In relation to the protected characteristic of sex –
(a)
A reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a man or a woman
Explanation:
Sex is a protected characteristic and refers to a male or female of any age. In relation to a group of people it refers to either men and/or boys, or women and/or girls.
A comparator for the purposes of showing sex discrimination will be a person of the opposite sex. Sex does not include gender reassignment or sexual orientation.

With regard to toilets, we do need a proportionate number of gender-neutral toilets for the use of people with visible or invisible health issues, who require the assistance of a Carer of the opposite sex, which could also be used by people who do not feel comfortable using their “birth” single-sex toilet.
Please pass on the facts about sex, and do not be bullied!
Best wishes,
The Mother of Invention

Just to say thank you all so much for this thread and all the information. I have just used it to complain about inadequately designed toilet/shower facilities in a residential educational facility I have just visited.

Agree but the thing is though:

Single sex facilities were created long before anyone had any clue that some male people would ever demand to be in female spaces or this might ever be a problem, or that said male people would spend a lot of time trying to muddy up the waters on what sex meant in order to get into said spaces. They were created to be single sex and exclusionary of all men, on purpose, for good reason, and it was never thought necessary to be clearer or stronger on this because no one ever saw this degree of insanity or sheer bloody selfishness on the part of said males.

We're now in the ridiculous beginning of the swing back of the pendulum, which is well you can have single sex spaces that mean single sex if you want to, but you don't have to, you just could if you wanted....

With the muttered following of 'and actually that means we're excluding a fuckton of female people from anything at all to let some male people have all the choices all of the time and many of those female people have protected characteristics which means we are in fact breaking the law because those females are being discriminated against - largely because it's easier to try and not look at the harm to them than to stand up to a lobby of loud, aggressive, angry and quite scary political lobby. And thats before we start getting into that we're being publicly funded with stuff in the bid and contract about inclusiveness and we're actively excluding a lot of females including groups with protected characteristics, whilst pretending that 'inclusion' only means TQ+ people, and mostly almost always the male ones'.

Which means that those people are dumping responsibility back on females to raise the money, raise more money as the very rich lobby play the 'can we bankrupt you to shut you up' game, go to court, endure the stress, harassment, the death and rape threats on social media, the doxxing and all the rest of it, totally alone except for other females brave enough to help, to get a court to agree that yes, they have existing rights in law which are not being met. And when those females produce enough court findings, and the insurers start refusing to stand behind certain policy decisions because fuck they are expensive, those people in charge will find their balls to start saying apologetically to the TQ+ lobby 'sorry but you can't have it all your way, female people have rights too.... sorry, really sorry but the court says we have to let females have access and inclusion and equality too, it's out of our hands'.

The whole thing is a depressing dance of misogynistic bloody cowardice.

True @Artichokeleaves , but it is within the Government's gift to clarify/codify that, where regulations/laws already exist and mandate separate facilities, they should be segregated by sex, not gender. No doubt they would be challenged under the EA, but the EA provisions for single sex facilities should provide cover.

It would be so much easier than women needing to fight for a clarification of the Law. The Tories have clearly cottoned on to this as a wedge issue, so I am hopeful they might do it, especially after the AG's speech that @Datun quoted.

Agree. And it should also be mandated that any local or national government group, organisation or resource, or any receiving tax payer funding must provide an accessible single sex facility for female inclusion in addition to whatever mixed sex services they offer for TQ+ inclusion.

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that where the meaning of a word is not defined in legislation, it takes its ordinary, everyday meaning. On that basis, a girl is a juvenile female and a boy is a juvenile male. Furthermore, it was surely the intention of the legislation at the time it was passed to have separate facilities for the two sexes (unless there is something to the contrary in Hansard which I would hazard a guess there is not). However, given the outcome of the Fair Play for Women / Scottish Census case, who knows what a court would decide and what wording can ever be safe from Newspeak.

The trouble is that these things are always open to more than one interpretation, @AuntMunca. (A cynic might suggest that lawyers write laws this way, to keep themselves in business...)

You could equally argue that - as transgender children existed when the schools Regulations were written in 2012 - if the Regulations had intended to distinguish between girls and trans girls, they would have said so.

And, unfortunately, ' everyday' meanings don't help us much, as (1) the definitions of woman and girl have been so undermined, (2) gender/sex are frequently used interchangeably, and (3) gender tends to be used instead of sex as the default. Every frigging form uses 'gender' when they actually mean sex. I would find it pretty easy to compile evidence that the normal every day meaning of 'woman' and 'girl' is now gender, not sex.

"Toilets Matter" is a recently published "short guide to law and good practice" . It is a brief but comprehensive guide giving reliable advice to any organisation that provides toilets for use by members of the public. The guide deals with the often-misunderstood issue of single-sex toilet provision and design issues. Based firmly on the law, good practice and research carried out in 2022, the guidance is produced by Sex Matters, a not-for-profit company..
I think the information given in "Toilet Matters" will be very helpful to users of public toilets who may have concerns about their legal right to have single-sex toilet facilities. It should certainly help you to have a sensible conversation with any provider of such facilities. You can print a copy free-of-charge from this link:
sex-matters.org/posts/publications/toilets-matter-a-short-guide-to-law-and-good-practice/

Best wishes for your success
Susan, Mother of Invention

Copy of "Toilet Matters" saved.

Point is... sex segregation needs to be made part of law, with the explicit duty on organisations to mitigate against rapey spaces. I have stats from moj 2016-22 and a whole bunch of other stats (globally) and they all say one thing:
SEX SEGREGATION is a MUST.
We are RIGHT to be afraid. I have the real stats in front of me ie 2016-22 MOJ and a bunch of FOIs and I am here to tell you that EVEN with transmen bundled in (most of the ONS figure is not sex disaggregated) it is higher than male.

However, that doesnt actually help for female sex segregated spaces because the test they have to meet is AS LOW (or lower) than the sexual offending of the female population. The other thing I can hear, in responses from me to not over-inflate the statistics is "they havent listened so we have to make it look even worse than it is, in order to get them to listen.
The over-inflated calculations are unhelpful because it can lay those asserting the case for absolute sex segregation open to i) hysterical ii) transphobic and iii) not very good at Maths!
I have all the stats and am preparing a report for desks of every single MP before next election and I could sure use some help.
>Photoshop
>graphic design
> website (I have one but it needs cheering up)
> it also needs ecommerce so when the report is ready I can get it to everyone who wants one to give to people.
I am sure everyone is hard up but just in case you have any to spare I do have a crowdfunder but too busy to do much to promote it. If I dont keep my eye on the stats, it will be so hard to catch it back up.
I have spent over £1,500 from savings and I really can't afford to spend much more but I HAVE the resources to sort this mess out.

Point is... sex segregation needs to be made part of law, with the explicit duty on organisations to mitigate against rapey spaces. I have stats from moj 2016-22 and a whole bunch of other stats (globally) and they all say one thing:
SEX SEGREGATION is a MUST.
We are RIGHT to be afraid. I have the real stats in front of me ie 2016-22 MOJ and a bunch of FOIs and I am here to tell you that EVEN with transmen bundled in (most of the ONS figure is not sex disaggregated) it is higher than male.
However, that doesnt actually help for female sex segregated spaces because the test they have to meet is AS LOW (or lower) than the sexual offending of the female population. The other thing I can hear, in responses from me to not over-inflate the statistics is "they havent listened so we have to make it look even worse than it is, in order to get them to listen.
The over-inflated calculations are unhelpful because it can lay those asserting the case for absolute sex segregation open to i) hysterical ii) transphobic and iii) not very good at Maths!
I have all the stats and am preparing a report for desks of every single MP before next election and I could sure use some help.
>Photoshop
>graphic design
> website (I have one but it needs cheering up)
> it also needs ecommerce so when the report is ready I can get it to everyone who wants one to give to people.
I am sure everyone is hard up but just in case you have any to spare I do have a crowdfunder but too busy to do much to promote it. If I dont keep my eye on the stats, it will be so hard to catch it back up.
I have spent over £1,500 from savings and I really can't afford to spend much more but I HAVE the resources to sort this mess out.

Our Education Minister doesn't know what a girl is.

Thank you to the posters upthread who explained how ambiguity of "boy" and "girl" creates a loophole wrt single sex spaces.

Sadly my warning in this post from August - You could equally argue that - as transgender children existed when the schools Regulations were written in 2012 - if the Regulations had intended to distinguish between girls and trans girls, they would have said so anticipated the argument successfully made in the Scottish courts in the autumn. Lady Haldane accepted the Scottish government's argument that the Law would have defined men and women by sex if it had intended to do so and that, as it didn't, the Law did not protect single-sex spaces.

Ive just crunched stats properly & i am her to tell you Elizabeth Fry is as right about Sex Segregation in 2023 as she was in 1823.

What a mess has been made.
Thank you for those links OP, though I feel dismayed that in practice, as others are pointing out, they may not carry much weight.

To sign this petition to update the Equality Act to make clear that sex means biological sex to at least begin a process towards greater clarity,
⬇️
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/623243