Sunak intends to review the EA

[ArabellaScott]

This tucked in an article in the Telegraph on sex ed in schools:

'Mr Sunak also intends to look to review the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biological sex rather than gender.
This would mean that biological males cannot compete in women’s sport and other single-sex facilities such as changing rooms and women’s refuges will be protected.
It would also mean clarifying that self-identification for transgender people does not have legal force, meaning transgender women have no legal right to access women-only facilities.
A Downing Street source said that protecting women and girls is a priority for Mr Sunak’s administration.'

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/10/27/age-appropriate-sex-education-set-enforced-sunak-administration/

esp write to Keir and labour if they are your representatives in parliament. Even write to your councillors

This is from July:

archive.ph/vsDfq

'While Mr Sunak will insist the Conservatives have “zero interest” in inflaming controversies around contentious social issues, he is set to highlight the use of existing laws that are being “used to engage in social engineering to which no one has given consent”.
“The worst offender in this regard is the 2010 Equality Act, conceived in the dog days of the last Labour government,” he will add.
“It has been a Trojan horse that has allowed every kind of woke nonsense to permeate public life [and] it must stop. My government would review the Act to ensure we keep legitimate protections while stopping mission creep.
“Our laws must protect free speech, block biological men from competing in women’s sport and ensure that children are allowed to be children.”
Earlier this month, Mr Sunak said he hoped to reverse “recent trends to erase women” by cracking down on gender-neutral language.
He has also stressed biology is a “critically important” factor policymakers must consider when they draw up rules around participation in sports and the use of single-sex or gender-neutral toilets.'

I don't see that as a viable proposition. The GRA enshrines a right independently of the Equality Act. It cannot have primacy over it once the GRA is there. Had the Equality Act introduced the right or owned the right as it does say, the former Sex Discrimination Act now incorporated in it, it could have done something within the Act to consider the boundaries of that right, how to define and use terms and to balance it in the context of other rights. And then of course there are the Convention rights, now enshrined in the Human Rights Act, also looming over all. You cannot have primacy over that either.

Definitely worth doing. There are lots of Labour Party members who have tried contacting Starmer about this, but he just ignores them. He can't, or at least shouldn't, ignore a constituent. He needs to know just how strongly people feel about this.

So, what has to change to ensure women's rights are protected?

Hmm. Sounds great on the surface but I'm concerned it's a trojan horse to remove protections the act gives to lots of discriminated against groups so workers have less protection against unfair treatment.

The devil will be in the detail - if it's "just" strengthening the wording in the sex based section that's great

He needs to repeal the GRA. People cannot change sex so why is the government pretending some men are actually women? It's bonkers. Now that same sex marriage is legal there is no justification in handing out GRCs.

I think if your MP is the leader of a party mired in all this ideology @RosalindsAFuckingNightmare and @Davros then it is really worth while writing to them. They more than anyone else need to see the weight of public opinion on this.

The GRA should undergo post-legislative scrutiny. And be repealed.

I would be very grateful if someone would produce a draft letter, well paragraphs, to include in a letter that I can send to my mp to ask for her support in this.

Perhaps he’ll be more amenable if you talk about clarity in legal language and all the unnecessary judiciary time and public purse funds (and crowdfunds) that have been spent on the issue in the last few years?

Repealing the GRA is a larger task, though? Would it not be easier to work with what's there?

If he's going to strengthen the EA so that biological sex overrides gender identity, then what's the point of having a GRC in the first place?

In theory, changing a birth certificate won't get you anywhere. Except how are these people going to be identified by their biological sex?

We're back to the same situation where a man is obviously a man, but his paperwork says differently, so how are you going to prove it?

The GRA needs to go.

He could be tightening the criteria to get a GRC. He won't be alone in thinking that eg surgery should qualify men as women.

Well at least it would be a step forward. If it doesn't get watered down too much.

I'm wondering if we pin down the issues and spell those out then politicians might end up at the same conclusion?

Or they need to amend both the EA to strengthen it and the GRA to remove any overlap.

There is conflict. It has to be addressed, they can't pussyfoot around it forever and think fudges will be acceptable to anyone.

I'm sure there will be many and multiple attempts to continue the 'cosy cups of tea' in quiet backrooms to make anti democratic law, evade transparency and ignore things like law and safeguarding children, but Sunak and co are wise to all this, it's been tried and done so often and now look at the mess.

The Cass report is going to be very, very embarrassing for government.
The support of the utter binfire of Mermaids is very, very embarrassing for the govt, BBC and everyone else involved
The Tavistock, heavily owned and steered and backroom driven by Stonewall and Mermaids etc is very, very embarrassing.
Kemi Badenoch is openly stating in the HoC how the editor of the Pink News (Stonewall's mouthpiece) shows behaviour rather interesting and not really to be indulged.
We're going to see Sturgeon sorting out the mess of yesterday's vote for months and it may well finish her.

You can only con people for so long. And once they see through you , you've had it. The government would be nuts not at this point to be being very very careful to keep dodgy lobby groups out of policy making.

That. ^

With the framework of legislation and rights that we have, I'm not even certain you can ensure women's rights are protected. The underlying arguments are fundamentally about competing ideas about rights.

When cases came up about religion and sexuality, religious rights weren't upheld and couldn't be exercised at the expense of pre- existing legally enshrined rights not to be discriminated against on grounds of sexual orientation but that did amount to curtailing the exercise and influence of rights to exercise or practice of religious freedom.

The GRA stands and to repeal it would probably not be politically or legally viable - I can't see that happening, can you? At the least it would cause a huge bunfight politically, lengthy parliamentary proceedings and journeys through the courts here and in Strasbourg. To amend it...perhaps a way could be found but only by reviewing the GRA and Equality Act together and finding some sort of arrangement that would accommodate different needs but not be absolute protection for women and girls.

The GRA is fine so long as the EA is given primacy

I disagree. The GRA is a fundamental affront to the integrity of the Law, as it gives a lie statutory force. That is absolutely wrong and it's appalling that there was so little examination of that principle at the time, regardless of the contents of the Act.

Most 'legal fictions' aren't actually fictions - they are situations where the Law recognises the truth, but sets it to one side - for example when a court transfers parental rights from biological to adoptive parents. The Law then treats the adoptive parent as the child's parent, but it doesn't start pretending that the adoptive parent is actually the biological parent. It's not illegal to recognise the existence of the biological parent - on the contrary, open adoption is now common, and adoptive parents are encouraged to acknowledge a child's biological background.

The GRA, by contrast, forces us all to pretend to believe something that we know to be untrue - that a man has become a woman, or vice versa. It doesn't just direct institutions to behave as it this is the case, it makes it a criminal offence for institutions to acknowledge truth (the person's biological sex).

This is corrosive to the integrity of the Law. Once you start pretending that a lie is the truth, you are on a slippery slope. Once you start allowing individuals to change identity at will, you are on a slippery slope. Above all, once you start criminalising the telling of the truth, you are on a very, very slippery slope.

I'm sure most of the general public don't even have the smallest clue what the GRA does. That a man can actually change his bloody birth certificate! Without any kind of surgery, whatsoever.

I really don't think it would be difficult to repeal it. Or re-define it to such an extent that it's meaningless.

But I still suspect they won't do it. I suspect they will be thinking of tightening the criteria. And the only tightening that would be acceptable to most people is that you have to have surgery.

But then they will be accused of promoting castration.

Whatever they do, there will be emotional blackmail to undo it. Which is why the whole thing needs to go. Like ripping off a plaster.

He might be thinking that if they strengthen the EA, and that the only men who can be considered women are those with a GRC, it will be so few, that the furore will die down.

But then you will be faced with the unintended consequence, that only those men who are utterly determined to screw over women will get a GRC. Which means you're still faced with strengthening the criteria for that, otherwise it's a predators' charter.

Whichever way you look at it, the GRA has to go. It provides too many loopholes.

And I'm sure they don't want to do that. And I'm equally sure, once they go thru the whole process that we've been going through on here, they'll end up with the same conclusion.

That doesn't mean they'll do it. But they will know they should do it.

I'm sure others know far more than me about legislation and law! But fgs it is perfectly possible to change or repeal laws, it happens all the time.

once you start criminalising the telling of the truth, you are on a very, very slippery slope.

About how far down that slope are we?

The GRA, by contrast, forces us all to pretend to believe something that we know to be untrue - that a man has become a woman, or vice versa. It doesn't just direct institutions to behave as it this is the case, it makes it a criminal offence for institutions to acknowledge truth (the person's biological sex).

Can't it just be amended to change all that? <spoken with the determined optimism of a know-fuck-all>