The Charity Commission must step up to protect single-sex charities

[IwantToRetire]

Single-sex charities play an important role in meeting the needs of one sex or the other in many areas, including healthcare, mental health, social issues, sport and education.

Although charities are a form of voluntary action, the state requires that charity trustees pursue the charity’s objects, including when those objects are limited to supporting just women or just men. The legal framework for charities exists to protect charities’ beneficiaries against charities being captured by interlopers or incompetents who divert the resources to some other purpose.

Charities can change their mission and their beneficiary group by changing their objects. The Scout Association, for example, allowed girls to join in 1976. This was undertaken through an open process of consultation and decision among members, and then agreed with the Charity Commission.

But in recent years some long-established charities set up for the benefit of women and girls, such as Girlguiding UK and the Women’s Institute, have simply reinterpreted the word “women” in their governing documents to claim that it includes men who identify as women. Other charities such as the Girls’ Day School Trust have stuck to their original mission and have not reinterpreted the words women and girls to include men and boys.

To date, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Charity Commission have not intervened either way, but have allowed charities to make their own choice. The EHRC said about Girlguiding in 2019:

... “We have written to @girlguiding about their website but not to say they are a mixed sex organisation. Like any membership organisation, the Equality Act allows Girl Guides UK to restrict membership on the basis of sex. We support their choice to have a trans inclusive policy.” ...

When the regulator takes this laissez-faire approach, trustees are left without the support they need to do their job and comply with the law. Does the law require women’s charities to accept men who identify as women as being part of their beneficiary group, while pretending that nothing has changed? Or, to the contrary, would that be a dereliction of their duty to focus on their purpose?

When some of a charity’s trustees think that the word “women” in its charitable objects means one thing, and some think it means another, what should happen?

Article continues (ie there is a lot more to this article than the opening paragraphs!) at https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/charity-commission-must-protect-single-sex-charities/

The Charity Commission appears unable to deal with Mermaids - a children's sex change charity - that has had a succession of porn / paedophile / confidentiality and data breach issues. Given their lack of action in response to these child safeguarding issues, I'm sceptical that they'll he bothered about women's rights in any shape or form.

I have seen a formal complaint response from the Charity Commission about exactly this issue, after a woman was turned away and another then self excluded, from a 'by women for women' charity, as they requested single sex group support (not mixed sex to include trans identified men).

The CC said they would not intervene as it was up to the trustees to decide if a charity set up to support 'women and girls after sexual abuse', as in this case, wants to decide 'women' are a gender not a sex, even if females- who the charity was set up for- then can't access the service. The charity concerned continue to lie to victims all their services are 'women only'.

This is just one locally based organisation- must just be the tip the the iceberg nationally.

They also seemed to find nothing wrong with the NSPCC over the James Makings incident. Worse than useless

The CC said they would not intervene as it was up to the trustees to decide if a charity set up to support 'women and girls after sexual abuse'

I think that is and has always been the case.

I think what Sex Matters are asking in fact isn't it their remit. ie if a charity decides to reinterpret the word that Charity Commission cant tell they they cant.

Unless and until the EA is clarfied to say that the word women means biological females.

So we need to blame the politicians for side stepping the issue. They set the law.

'
I think what Sex Matters are asking in fact isn't it their remit. ie if a charity decides to reinterpret the word that Charity Commission cant tell they they cant.'

The word that springs to mind here is DAMAGE, the damage the genderists/TRAs have done - in this case to charities and to the English language, but also to the real rainbow, to body positivity, to scientific rigour, to the safety of women and girls, to children's aspirations, to the body politic, to logic, to academic life, to publishing...

Wrecking ball.