Probably.
The thought process politically is if it involves women they can just put up and shut up.
Every single issue that affects women more, no matter how serious, is a low political priority.
I don't necessarily agree that the Act is that difficult to understand. The problem is the willful and deliberate attempts to get around it. A clarification about biological sex would be useful to reduce these problems and actually is only a minor point to amend.
The public isn't engaged with what the law says, they just go along with what they heard the law says on twitter. They don't understand how rights need to be balanced.
Thus the populism of Stonewall has managed to gain traction in so many places.
It's about the spread of deliberate misinformation and a lack of general knowledge from the public.
Why do I say this? Well let's take a look at the intro blurb for the Equality Act reads as follows:
An Act to make provision to require Ministers of the Crown and others when making strategic decisions about the exercise of their functions to have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities; to reform and harmonise equality law and restate the greater part of the enactments relating to discrimination and harassment related to certain personal characteristics; to enable certain employers to be required to publish information about the differences in pay between male and female employees; to prohibit victimisation in certain circumstances; to require the exercise of certain functions to be with regard to the need to eliminate discrimination and other prohibited conduct; to enable duties to be imposed in relation to the exercise of public procurement functions; to increase equality of opportunity; to amend the law relating to rights and responsibilities in family relationships; and for connected purposes.
If the point of the act is to reduce victimisation in certain circumstances, how come men are being allowed into women's changing rooms?
This isn't a difficult question.
This is a numbers game. And a deliberate blindness to how it affects women and minorities.
And if the issue is about harm to transpeople, the default solution is surely third spaces, not to increase the number of victims to include transwomen.
The evidence is already there with regards to changing villages and how women are at risk from males.
We are having public conversations which makes no sense, if you put that single point written in the intro to the Equality Act front and central.
Then look at this point:
to enable certain employers to be required to publish information about the differences in pay between male and female employees
This is actually explicit. Male and female. Not a woolly discussion about the word woman. It's using the words male and female. Not gender. Why?
Because the issue of pay difference relates to biology over and above any other reason. And everyone knew and understood this when the act was written. We still know this now - but there's a deliberate act to try and sweep this under the carpet with the manipulation of data because it suits political purposes and corporate purposes. It's economically inconvenient for authority to admit this so instead women will pay the price. Our social conversations are being directed in a particular way and certain topics are being deliberately silenced so the public can't redress this. Top down power.
(Note here that human rights are all about rebalancing power from power, authority and the state to individual citizens - and this was well understood but isn't so much now)
And yet we have a serious discussion going on at the minute about changing how this is measured from sex to gender identity.
We know there will be an economic impact on this.
And surely this is absolutely definitely undisputably against what the Equality Act is about?
This is why the word sex - in addition to gender identity - being written into the act is so important. Why is the word sex there at all if sex = gender? You don't need to use both words if they mean the same personal characteristic.
That's why gender idealists don't want to talk about the word sex.
The problem ISN'T the Equality Act. The problem is the willful and deliberate conflation of sex with gender and attempting to replace sex with gender by those in positions of power who know that it's very difficult for individuals to actually use the law to enforce their rights. By creating confusion, Stonewall created an entire market for themselves on this, which they could cash in on. This confusion was deliberately created and did not exist even a few years ago.
Lawyers have only got involved after the fact when brave individuals have picked up on how this is all a load of bollocks. It's bollocks for bollocks. And time and again rulings are going one way because of one word: sex.
Every form you have that asks you your gender not sex because they are too prudish to use the word sex mattered. Now gender is just accepted as a substitute even though it means something completely different.
So I don't agree the problem is the Equality Act itself and that it's unworkable. I think the problem is outright good old fashioned sexism combined with a growing poverty and growing power from authorities and organisations over individuals.
This is powerful men's rights movement combined with corporate power which wants to hide the issues women have - for sexually motivated reasons, for pure power reasons and for economic reasons.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
It's about exploitation of women. And the power of males over females.
The only thing that needs to change here in terms of the Equality Act is to state and reinforce that the word sex matters and it relates to biological sex. That's just to remove deliberate attempts to conflate language. This is about deliberate attempts to change language to undermine the law, not a problem with the law in and of itself.