EA petition EHRC are in favour of reviewing the definition of sex

[ChazsBrilliantAttitude]

Sex Matters update

The petition worked. The full letter from the EHRC is worth reading.

Oh no I messed that up 🙄

It looks the ok to me - it is saying that atm a TW with a GRC can bring a claim in the same way as a woman. But a TM can't in the same way as a man can't.

At least that is what I see.

A trans woman is a “woman” for equal pay purposes at the moment so their pay should be equal to men ie a male comparator. On the other hand a trans man is a “man” so their comparator is female.

The proposed change would reverse the position so a trans woman is classed as biologically male and so their pay comparator is female and vice versa for trans men.

This makes more sense to me.

Does it need a long parliamentary process? This section looks like a change could be made by a minister using the affirmative procedure, which doesn't seem to be very time-consuming?:

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/part/16/crossheading/subordinate-legislation

www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/affirmative-procedure/

I don't understand some of their examples, and some of the confusion seem to be caused by the fact that the GRA allows companies to hide their sexism.
A trans man with a GRC might be paid less because the company perceives them as a woman, but they are unable to bring a case for discrimination because they are legally a man.

In any case, why are companies still insisting women offer a guarantor for a loan, or paying women less for a comparable job? Surely they've had enough time to get used to the law?

It was poorly written as the Labour government knew that they were going to be beaten and were rushing it out before then. I worked in legislation at the time, and after this was produced I remember my colleagues and I talking about how sloppily it had been written and that it was going to come back to bite them one day.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/04/biological-women-protected-equality-law-change/

"A source close to the Prime Minister said on Tuesday night that he remained committed to his leadership election pledge to ensure the facts of biology are written into the Act.
During 2022’s Tory leadership campaign, Mr Sunak said: “I think biology is critically important as we think about some of the very practical functions, like toilets or sports.”
The source said he remained committed to this, and that he had askedKemi Badenoch, the Equalities Minister, to take this work forward.
“The Prime Minister remains committed to his campaign pledge,” the source said. “This is a sensitive and complicated issue but the Secretary of State is taking that work forward and he supports her in doing so.”"

Also:

"Dr Jane Hamlin, president emeritus of the Beaumont Society, a charity that supports trans people, said: “The correspondence from Kemi Badenoch to the Equality and Human Rights Commission is very dispiriting.
“It seems like another sledgehammer to bludgeon the trans community which already lacks confidence in the EHRC to value the rights of trans people equally with those of others.
“Since the Scottish Parliament approved the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in December, Spain, German and Finland have all approved similar legislation yet, in contrast, the UK Government seems to want to divide people. This is very sad."
Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Tory backbench common sense group, said: “Sex is a biological fact – it’s not a fashion or a fad.
“The fact that some people find that unfathomable is at best curious and at worst weird.”"

Very interesting. It really is a case that better no law than bad law such as this is.

@StellaAndCrow

• Equal pay provisions. At present, a trans woman with a GRC can bring an equal pay claim by citing a legally male comparator who was paid more. A trans man with a GRC could not. The proposed biological definition would reverse this situation. The effect would be to transfer this right from some trans women to some trans men.

What they're saying is - in their opinion...

At present a man who had exercised his right to apply for and obtain a gender recognition certificate could use the protected characteristic of sex to fight discrimination e.g. to fight a claim for equal pay using a man or men who worked at the company in an equivalent position as a comparator.

By contrast a woman who had exercised her right to apply for and obtain a gender recognition certificate couldn't use the protected characteristic of sex to fight a claim for equal pay by showing that she was underpaid compared to men.

I think the energy they're aiming for (and achieving to my mind) is that the requested clarification would not in fact take rights away from "trans people" but
given that the current situation is that some people with a grc have this right and some people with a grc do not have this right it would clarify / reverse which trans people had this right (and which trans people did not).

Just woken up to see this so trying to put together first thoughts. OK. Great this is a Tory intention, if it’s worthwhile all parties should be pressed to campaign on this platform. Hopefully it will help women to hold Labour, Lib Dem’s and greens etc to the same commitment to serve women’s rights while protecting trans people’s rights.

I thought the Sex Matters petition was excellent. Si if sex is going to be reclarified as ‘biological sex’ to avoid the obfuscation promoted by TRAs, firstly, doesn’t Gender have to be reckarified as ‘Gender Identity’ or better ‘ gender identity beliefs’ in order to do the job properly? It’s a bit like a religious belief isn’t it?

Secondly How does it all work with the existing unreformed GRA? Surely GRA still isn’t workable and should be reviewed before it is repealed?

Review needed to protect existing GRC holders, GRC holders who don’t want to have their GRC any more but who are not legally allowed to get rid of it without declaring themselves a fraudster (which would be their only current get-out, a highly discriminatory requirement).

Then look at needs of anyone else affected like spouses and civil partners of people with a GRC and then after dealing with all of their situations legally as needed, we all rely on the reformed EQA?

GRA reform must go hand in hand with EqA reform surely, EqA reform isn’t an alternative to GRA reform.

If EqA becomes genuinely anti-sexist by recognising sex as a real biological fact distinct from gender identity beliefs, then that is a great thing, but in that context the whole premise of GRA seems to fall down. So if it’s not a ‘legal sex change’, then what is GRA’s purpose in a changed EqA context? is that purpose something the state needs to officially validate? If found yes to be so, are there other personal beliefs that might need to be officially validated etc?

I see Fawcett have their finger on the pulse

https://twitter.com/fawcettsociety/status/1643507322101067776?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

I saw India Willoughby said this in response.

^In light of this 50s-style move by the
disgusting @EHRC we are heading to civil
disobedience from the trans communitv. Black and Gay were forced to break laws - So will we. Let them arrest us, take us to court. Trans will NOT be segregated or accept 2nd Class status.^
https://twitter.com/phoebe2403/status/1643311203848953872/photo/1

Just out of interest, has India Willoughby ever been seen at an event?

Nope. IW doesn’t get out much, seems to be more mouth than trousers to be honest….

Willoughby is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Re the parliamentary question. It looks like the Sex Matters petition proposed it as secondary legislation, which as I understand things, means it can be administered by a government minister. I can't link a screenshot but the thread is here, including a link to the Sex Matters document explaining the petition:
[[//://twitter.com/HJoyceGender/status/1643305654340182044?cxt=HHwWuICzhafymM4tAAAA

Of course that will be hotly contested and blocked at every turn. But if it does end up going to parliamentary debate, or if gets delayed so long that it becomes an election issue, then Labour will have to explain to Stevenage Woman exactly where they stand. So positives either way.

So if it is a Statutory Instrument, it'll be affirmative or negative procedure, or have no procedure at all, from reading the Parliament A-Z? These pages have some information:

www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/affirmative-procedure/

www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/negative-procedure/

www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/statutory-instruments-sis/

"Statutory instruments are the most common form of secondary (or delegated) legislation.
The power to make a statutory instrument is set out in an Act of Parliament and nearly always conferred on a Minister of the Crown. The Minister is then able to make law on the matters identified in the Act, and using the parliamentary procedure set out in the Act. SIs may follow affirmative or negative procedure, or have no procedure at all, but which to use is fixed by the Act."

In contrast, in the 1800s Elizabeth Fry saw the horrors of conditions for women and campaigned to get better lives for them. In 1823, 200 years ago, The Gaols Act saw women prisoners being separated from men and women given female guards.

So it’s not 50’s India, we’re going back to early 1800s with mixed-sex prisons.

I’m so grateful to Sex Matters- and to scrolling leaves who has kept the equality act reform thread bumped on MN- still time to sign that one. I’m grateful to the Tories and Kemi Badenoch for putting this forward.

i wonder about whether it would be a Y/N vote or just put in with no vote at all? I wonder who is allowed to decide which is used? and the timescale of any parliamentary vote or ministerial decision without vote will of course be hugely political in all senses of the word.

I think definitely this is more likely to be years in the making if it can happen, this isn’t happening before the general election next year and that will be the whole point of it.

It’s a pre-election signal of intent from this government who have a big majority and could have done positive reforming stuff like this sooner if they hadn’t spent the last year infighting and having three different prime ministers or the pre-pandemic period since 2010 not listening to women and proposing self ID.

The Tories won’t use ministerial powers to make it happen before the general election but the great thing is that they are acknowledging that women’s votes are important (good) and they want to compete to have them (good) and that people who believe TWAW wouldn’t have voted for them anyway, so no loss. So it’s an excellent starter gun for the 2024 general election race for women’s votes.

This announcement is a good move for women in general because now Labour (and other parties) definitely, right now, do already have to explain where they stand or at least commit to an equivalent review of how the current law is working if they won the election.

This intention to move to give proper legal protections deserves cross- party support if parties want to be able to say that they care about women.

Ah yes. This would be the I Willoughby who tweeted gleefully about being at an airport where the main women's toilets had been made gender neutral for inclusiveness, and a female only toilet was signposted a long way off for females who can only access female only spaces. So Willoughby deliberately and intentionally went to use the female only room to make the point: that it is all about Willoughby and validating womanness regardless of impact and exclusion of natal women.

Willoughby's answer to this is the one of the extremist TQ+ lobby: excluding women does not matter, because if they don't put men first they are scum who should be punished.

We've had ten years of this experiment. It has failed because men are dicks. They will not permit the needs of natal women to be met, and they will not permit women to have equality of consideration to them.

Therefore we've reached the end of the road. The needs of natal women and transwomen cannot be met in one and the same space at all times. And that this upsets transwomen that there is a part of womanhood that cannot be captured and owned? Well there in a nutshell is the unkindness of supporting a belief that someone can change sex. Because sooner or later reality has to be faced.

• Failed because SOME men are dicks. Obviously.

I know many who are lovely and would not dream of intentionally excluding women, smashing their skulls, things like that.

Jo Maugham says that making the equality act refer to biological females is harming one of the most vulnerable populations in the uk, and people in his comments seem to believe that clarifying that it will lead to attacks and violence against trans people.

I would really like to know how clarifying that it is biological women who get equality law protection will end up physically hurting trans people.

other comments are even weirder. A solid chunk of his followers seem to think the law is unworkable as there’s no such thing as biological sex or it’s too complicated to be legislated about. Even though the equality act clarifies that a woman is an adult female, apparently “female” refers to trans women and has no relation to biological sex … so what on earth do they think the current law is protecting?

In fact it all demonstrates the significance of the problem faced by government and law.

Female people as a group are wholly lost and the argument is that they don't matter, and that female people who have a problem presented by mixed sex spaces are evil, Nazis, don't exist, are only saying it because genocide, should die in a grease fire and rape the PM.

Additional resources and facilities will be needed, but the half of the human race who are biologically female have been trampled under all this and it's time to straighten this mess out. Good will and co operation/compromise is just not possible against this belief.

The fox botherer is muttering about a legal challenge. Mind you, given his current success rate, that may actually be a good thing. If he loses spectacularly then it makes further challenges more difficult.

Good. Yes.

The 'fifty percent of the population who are biologically female should not have equality of access to the rights mentioned by the EHRC, and their equality and needs don't matter cos scum, and the country should prioritise half a million men and any other male chancers who want it' is an argument that absolutely should be heard in court. In as much detail as possible. It's an interestingly binary sex based argument too, but JM's a lawyer, I'm sure he knows what he's doing.