Equality Act - what next?

[ArabellaScott]

The petition to look at this seems sadly to have virtually ground to a halt:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/petitions_noticeboard/4722618-petition-to-update-the-equality-act-thread-2

Government have responded with a dismissive:

'providers are already able to restrict the use of spaces/services on the basis of sex and/or gender reassignment where justified. Further clarification is not necessary.'

What next?

We know that providers, while technically able to exclude males, just do not and will not. Nobody seems to agree on or understand the law fully. Legal experts get in huge tangles arguing about it.

The current situation means women are excluded from many women's spaces, there is no provision for single sex services apart from Beira's Place in Scotland, there are still males in women's prisons, and in hospitals.

What do we do if the government and EHRC won't listen? Whatever the law says, this situation is untenable.

I just had a look at the map and it seems that it is still Scotland which is overwhelmingly the concentration of signature - you can see Sussex too - so it seems that the more virtue signalling ‘woke’ those in power, the more angry and wanting to push back, the citizens.

I'm not hopeful about the petition but I'm not prepared to give up on it yet. Although, even if we get a debate I'm also prepared for it to be a damp squib. Sign it, share it, post it anywhere you can that's remotely relevant.

Also, the wording of it, is quite legal/technical, so people who haven’t had this nonsense crammed down their throats enough, probably won’t really get what they are signing up to, because they haven’t really been keeping up with the arguments.

I wonder if it would be possible to have a simple explanation which links to it. Like a meme, to make it easier to grasps.

’Clarify the law so that businesses can choose to keep penises out of places where women are vulnerable’

MN is the only sm I'm on, so I've been posting links on threads that are relevant to the petition that I can link to the thread subject so I hope that it's not a derail. Or not much of one.

I've notice a number of those threads either get shunted to FWR or deleted. There was an incel one today (that I scoped out but didn't post on), it seems to have gone.

There could be a little bullet-point thing explaining.

”currently there is confusion in the Equality Act over whether providers of sports, hospitals, changing rooms, shared hostels and over-night sleeper trains, are allowed to keep men out of women’s provision”
”this means many services for women are scared to protect women from male predators, because they are worried they will be breaking the law”
”right now, women and girls have no guarantee that ‘single sex’ means truly single sex”
”Women and girls have already been sexually assaulted and raped in single sex hospital wards, prisons and toilets by men”
”Sign this petition to update the equality act to make it clear that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex and not ‘any man who calls himself a woman”.

@scrollingleaves has been doing an amazing job. Not just posting a link with a brief preamble, which is often all I do, but setting it all out.

I suspect it will be women bringing court cases to push that it is not enough to say vaguely that people can provide single sex services (and good luck with that as the activist mob will unleash hell if you dare to try) - this merely abandons women and closes its eyes to the exclusion and discrimination in fear of making difficult activists kick off with unwanted behaviours.

There needs to be a shift in the Equality Act that single sex provision must exist alongside accessible provisions for others. And it means single sex, irrespective of the circumstances or beliefs of anyone not of that sex, with those places able to call the police if those spaces are invaded by male people who believe that female access and equality should come second to male domination.

Yes, I mean getting it up to this number is extremely impressive.

I am wondering whether it would be possible to get it onto twitter, trying to get it to trend in England/wales/Northern Ireland for a moment.

im not on twitter myself. I am a mn user only right now, so I am not the one to do it.

Another thing about ‘scrollingleaves’ is that she has made me laugh out loud and made me hurt recently, the understated sarcasm :)

I have a sinking feeling the entire shitshow of genderism is going to have to be fought for one distinct area at a time. It's going to be like rebuilding everything women have achieved over the past centurey virtually from the ground up, all over again.

I am curious as to whether fewer women are accessing all the Spaces Previously Known as Single Sex.

Is someone counting? Does anyone care?

We need an 18 year old on Tik Tok…

To post something if that wasn’t clear!

I imagine a lot of people are afraid to put their names to it. I work at a university so daren’t sign.

It's a Government petition, it's totally anonymous.

petition.parliament.uk/privacy

'If you’ve signed a petition, we won’t publish any personal information about you. We’ll use your postcode to work out how many people in each parliamentary constituency have signed a petition.'

I was thinking about this today. There is less than 2 months to go and we need about another 16,500 signatures.

Has RK Rowling tweeted about this?

We just need a little more publicity. There are still so many women who haven't a clue what is going on.

Bumping

Please do sign it. Your name will not be made public so no one will know. There are 51 days to go before the deadline and 100,000 is well within sight. The Governments response misunderstands the point of it which is the definition of sex itself. A debate would be excellent. Please don’t let fear of having your name made public deter you - it won’t be.

Not unrelated..!

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11802555/TikTok-protests-rock-Britains-schools-Pupils-scale-gates-trash-classrooms-rules.html

It needs JKR or the Mail. A person or outlet with a wide reach.

International Women's Day is coming up a week tomorrow.

Pearmain
I imagine a lot of people are afraid to put their names to it. I work at a university so daren’t sign.

I've started a couple of dotgov petitions and I'd like to reassure anyone who feels nervous about signing. No one else will know you've signed unless you tell them, not even the person who started the petition.

You fill in your name, postcode, and an email address. They send you an email to confirm, and you click the link. The person who started the petition and other signatories cannot see your name, address or email.
My name was visible to everyone who signed while the petition was active. To get it started I needed 5 people to sponsor it, and I received an email confirming their names, but not their address or email.

bum

ping

Ooh a thread that I have handy screenshots for

Sex matters did explain why that Government response did not address what they’d asked.
Here is the first section of what they said:

“The government has provided an initial response to our petition. It is over six weeks late and answers a different question from the one that we are asking. Its response focuses on single-sex services”.

“Under the Equality Act 2010, providers are already able to restrict the use of spaces/services on the basis of sex and/or gender reassignment where justified. Further clarification is not necessary…..”

Our petition does not specifically mention the operation of single-sex spaces or services but concerns the broader question of the definition of sex in the Equality Act.

The government has stated separately – in the reasons for its Section 35 order to stop the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill – that the impacts of the GRA on the Equality Act go beyond single-sex services.

The government has said that it thinks that a gender-recognition certificate has the effect of changing a person’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. This relies on the judgment by Lady Haldane in the For Women Scotland (2) case. We think there are powerful reasons why this ought to be overturned on appeal. This blog post sets out ten reasons.

Our petition calls on the government to enact a simple amendment to the Equality Act, using powers provided for in the Gender Recognition Act. This amendment would clarify the Equality Act and protect everyone’s rights.

*We are not asking the government to change the law, but to make it clear^.

The next stage is to get to 100,000 signatures so that we can have a debate in parliament.
sex-matters.org/posts/updates/sex-in-the-equality-act/

What is the answer? It looks like it will miss the target after being so nearly there.

On the Sex-Matters site they have campaign resources including leaflets. Should we send for them and put them through people’s doors? England, Wales and Northern Ireland remain determinedly not-red on the petitions map, so most people have not registered the issues.

I was warned by Mumsnet about a couple of weeks ago not to put the petition on any thread but the petitions thread or it could get reported, though several if us had been trying that for a while.

Previously I’d tried starting a thread on FWR but it just got moved to petitions.

Just now I bumped the one on the petitions thread and then checked in “Active” but couldn’t see it anywhere so I think that thread is probably hardly making a difference if it is no where to be seen.

Please would anyone who hasn’t signed go to petitions to find it and do so?