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/

About how far down that slope are we?

Quite far. The OTT privacy clauses in the GRA which prohibit knowing what sex someone is or sharing this information are a big part of the problem. They are obsolete. Hardly any of these male people pass. No one is going "stealth" if anyone ever could. And I don't actually think people should have the right to do so.

I want 2 more things. (I know, I'm greedy.)

1. None of this wishy washy 'organisations may provide single sex facilities'. I want people to have the right to a single sex facility, where you would expect them to be provided. No more NHS hospitals gaslighting patients that wards are single sex, or covering up rapes.

2. Official documents including birth certificates, passport and driving licence to reflect a persons sex, not their gender identity.

YY, Thelnebriati

And had the question deleted by MN...

100%

All that.

It needs to move to there must be single sex facilities for the 99% of the population who need this, and organisations may provide additional gender neutral provision.

Laws can be repealed. How often or how easily is that done, though? Do you think that anyone would ever have passed a GRA or a Convention right if they didn't hold a general belief or philosophy of rights?

Would Parliament repeal the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act (and leave the European Convention on Human Rights), the GRA, even if the government wants to? Can you see the MPs voting to do that? That's where we are.

Who among MPs or the public doesn't believe, or say they believe, that people who want to, have a right to change sex? People say it all time here as well: people have a right to be who they want to be. What do they think follows from that?

I’d like to see organisations having the duty (instead of the right) to provide single-sex facilities.

I will vote Conservative, if he actually does this! It would be a huge step in the correct direction for biological Women’s rights!

The interesting thing would be whether this goes onto a Tory manifesto and raises sufficient voter support to mean there would be the support within the house to put a repeal/reorganisation through.

It will eventually. Labour et al have never had public support, and the more it is pushed (and the more mess starts to come out) the more public opinion will shift. To be honest, its going to end up more win/win if something is done about it than if parties try to hang on and keep looking anywhere but at the growing mess until there's a huge burst of public fury and the action demanded is dramatic. The quick action on the Tavistock hints strongly at how worried government are about the optics when the Cass report is finished.

The PM seems to be generally more ready to declare his views and positions and take on opposition than the last two, at least. Liz Truss held the line against the pressure for self declaration of gender identity but only just and under a barrage. Boris Johnson mostly didn't seem to care or changed his stance with the weather or his wife's and her friends' opinions and only began to make any clear statement (about importance of biology) when he saw a political opportunity opening to oppose Labour.

I am hoping that with this steer from the PM that the EHRC might be working on proposals to address the effect of the GRA on the Equality Act and women's and girls' rights. Remember how tricky it was for the EHRC to steer a line between interpreting and applying the existing two Acts and Convention rights in producing some sort of guidance as to women's rights and single-sex spaces? The actions of the SNP also lend urgency for the UK government and the EHRC to act on what is going on.

If the GRA cant be repealed, and women cannot benefit from SSE, doesnt that need to be explained clearly to the public?

If nothing can be done about it, shouldn't Parliament be able to explain and justify why they wrote such a series of Acts?

I would like to see the GRA to be amended so it becomes exactly what it says it is.
No more legal fictions - no change to legal sex or birth certificates.
But anyone, any age, who wants should be able to go online, fill in a form, select their preferred gender from a drop down box of hundreds. Then for a small fee (£10?) get a certificate, decorated with trans flags and unicorns, saying ‘HM Government recognises Name Name as Demi-neutrois Gender’.
They could stick it on their bedroom wall.

The GRA was badly made law. And it has been proven that law reliant on people not abusing and exploiting every loophole to the nth degree does not work: people are not going to be nice, well behaved good chaps about it and respect others unless they have to. Everything Hansard shows was anticipated has come to pass and a whole lot more they couldn't even imagine.

Hence why any pressure towards law that includes the whole 'quick quick hurry hurry, emergency going on, don't read it, don't look at it, just do it, millions dropping dead as we speak' hyperbole should make everyone look at it with great caution.

Yes. Perfect. With a round of recorded applause playing on a loop if it makes them happy.

Hence why any pressure towards law that includes the whole 'quick quick hurry hurry, emergency going on, don't read it, don't look at it, just do it, millions dropping dead as we speak' hyperbole should make everyone look at it with great caution.

Law can't be made in a hurry and obvioulsy needs to be refined and tweaked and sometimes rewritten. I think that's the whole point of government, isn't it?

The government and the EHRC are probably thinking of ways to go about this by coming up with options and proposals for action, rather than merely explaining to the public what happened under a Labour government all those years ago.

Maybe it could be repealed but in a particular context. Supposing it were to be replaced by a more up-to-date (substitute for GRA) Act? Or instead it were to be incorporated in the Equality Act as a result of this review? The EA might be a different beast and the GRA-replacement provisions very different also. Or we were doing something to alter our relationship with the Convention rights, which Liz Truss was said to be doing rather than repealing the Human Rights Act or leaving the Convention which had previously been proposed?

The government - and EHRC - must be working on ideas now that the PM is keen to do something.

I certainly think the hyperactive legislating and 'gesture' legislating and 'send a message' legislating that is the legacy of the Blair government have all demonstrated what an utter mess of unintended exploitation they lead to. Hate crime and the GRA among them.

Yes, exactly. We need slow, very carefully researched, planned law thought out and nothing should go into law unless it's beyond doubt that it is needed, and that leaving things as they are is no longer possible.

Yes very badly considered and written. I remember reading a bit in Hansard in which Lord Tebbit and Baroness O'Cathain clearly foresaw and articulated with reasoned argument some of the problems with it. But the most shocking thing was the poor quality of the argument the government lawyer - I forget the name - was coming out with. It just seemed like a determination to push it through regardless.

The civil service is captured by Stonewall and their ilk. It's the undermining of government aims from within that Sunak et al need to be on high alert for.

I would suggest repealing the GRA and getting rid of the GRC. There will be no pint in having them if lines are drawn so that sneaking around, with or without surgery is forbidden. By all means a certificate like children get re any of the 1000 genders , but the law would not need to accommodate any of it. Third spaces could be provided by businesses etc but single sex facilities compulsory.

It is the GRA which is the problem. For example the part about not disclosing information and being subject to an unlimited fine if you do. Surely that would weigh on the mind of a probation officer.

Then there's the part about "gender-specific" offences, by which they mean sex-specific and the sexual offences act.

And the peerages exemption. And rewriting a public record (birth certificate).

It's mad. We have same-sex marriage so the need it was sold on has fallen away. It should go.

Have just seen this article in UnHerd by Mary Harrington about the implications of the Scottish government's actions for the UK.

'Holyrood's vote puts Scotland on a collision course with Westminster'

unherd.com/thepost/scotlands-new-gender-bill-imperils-the-union/?mc_cid=f1e000a812&mc_eid=31e133b3a4

[In part]
"Away from the corridors of power, the policy has prompted fierce opposition by campaign groups. But still more than the SNP’s apparent disregard for the voices of ordinary women, what should concern us is Westminster’s myopia in allowing this legislation to proceed.

The history of ‘gender identity’ legislation is one of political short-sightedness about its far-reaching implications. When the Gender Recognition Act was debated in 2004, many at the time viewed it as a trivial and politically cost-free step on the golden path of social progress. Little regard was given to (for example) the ways in which it would interact with the Equality Act, or with safeguarding measures across bodies such as schools, hospitals and prisons. As a result, feminists have spent the best part of two decades in an uphill battle over the legal fiction that someone can change sex."

The rest of the article spells out what could be the implications, and her gloomy conclusion:

"This is a far-reaching and fundamental legal and political question. Our Conservative and Unionist Party leaders have abdicated leadership duty to hand-wave it as a devolved matter. This is beyond foolish: an ominous sign for their conservatism, and also for the Union."

Exactly.

If we have to accept Transwoman in our spaces, then we need a publicity campaign to explain who can use female spaces, including the fact that they can be an intact male who has not done anything to become a 'woman'.

We need to be clear how many women/ girls will be raped / murdered each year to enable us to be 'inclusive'.

We need to know how the risks to female inmates.

We need to know how many domestic abuse / sexual abuse victims are self excluding from shelters / groups set up to help them.

We need to understand how many women are self excluding from sport centres/ swimming pools because they no longer have access to female only sessions (for some this was their only chance to escape male domination).

We need to know what chance there will be of being on a hospital ward with a male.

It might be that it is decided that these are all risks we need to take for the sake of inclusion.

But females need to know that they do not have the same rights as males.

Because what we have now is not equality. Not for females anyway. And for any organisation/ government to claim women are equal are lying plain and simple.

All of that ^^

And by 'inclusive' they mean many female people can be excluded from any space so that male people can have their preferred personal choice of all the spaces.

People pushing this need to own it: that this is male supremacism in law. Female type women, you are voting to be a subordinate, second class human in the UK with penalties for failing to serve male interests above your own.

Such as speaking the truth or failing to lie on command. Or failing to applaud and celebrate males making fun of you and your sex. Or failing to support other women being placed in harm's way and raped in prisons, denied health care and excluded from needed service for the better happiness of males. You get to pay equal taxes though for these services you have limited access to.