Keep Prison Single Sex closing

[TinselAngel]

Just announced on Twitter.

x.com/noxyinxxprisons/status/1798973161276412028?s=46&t=PSGltfjrMyZmBtYq2-AVIQ

"After considerable thought we have decided to close KPSS down. Our last day of operation will be 30th June 2024.

We have agreed that Kate will continue to support and work with the individual prisoners, former offenders, and CJS whistleblowers with whom we have relationships. Kate is contacting everyone individually to advise them of this.

We have some materials still available and can post these out to whomever wants them: our email address will remain live, so please use this to contact us. All reports and leaflets are also available on our website which, together with our Vimeo, we will maintain as a resource, although content will not be updated.

It is no longer possible to make a donation to KPSS and all regular donations have been cancelled - however, please do check your own accounts. Our PayPal account is now closed. Both KPSS shops have been closed.

KPSS USA is unaffected by this decision. Their work will continue. Please give them a follow @NoXY_USA Any funds remaining after closing down KPSS will be transferred to them.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us. Between us we achieved some truly great things, including two Ministry of Justice policy changes that centre the safety and rights of women in prison. Be proud of what you have done, because none of what KPSS achieved would have been possible without you."

If you think about it as a parallel universe in which sexism still prevails as a defining norm it becomes a little clearer.

The architects of the GRA and surgical modification were ultra sexist men that couldn't tolerate their own sexuality, gay or straight cross dressers, and the sexist world agreed with them that it was intolerable to consider them men.

They all seem extraordinarily old fashioned now stuck in their time warp.

And now we have a gamer generation of boys sucked into their sexist slipstream, and girls affected by the social contagion.

There's a lot of damage to people as a result of the gullible public sector in this parallel universe but it's increasingly visible that they are a public bad, not good.

What the old sexist men didn't realise was that the world had passed them by and women and men that understand equality properly, who have lived through the transition to mutual respect, can see this all as a sad legacy of times that are well past.

That's my take on it.

Absolutely!

would turn that upside down. Codifying in law is what the lady tickets is.

A theme of this thread is removing that codifying law.

More codifying simply creates more arbitrage of the code.

It's not helpful. It's a TRA demand that female has to be codified down to the last cell if we want it to exclude male.

Yes I do take your point, and as I said I do agree it would be helpful for people to feel able to say no to any of these men in women's spaces. Whether service providers will is another matter but it would be a start.

Also great summary @Hepwo

I came face to face with all the bullshit bafflers during the ludicrous Future of Legal gender project a few years back whilst working in the HE sector. That expensive blether fell apart after spending 750,000 on nonsense.

Haha yes I remember, fuck me that was awful.

Feck off Fred

A whole book by and about woman and Fred can only see the man!

For various reasons I haven't been able to keep up with this thread in real time, but have now caught up.

And without any disrespect to any of the contributions, we are having the same discussions over and over again.

This doesn't mean I have a solution but as I see it there is the mess that has been created by the GRA impacting on the EA.

And then there is what we feel, know about our experiences as women, and unfortunately the overarching patriachal power in society which means whether it is TRAs or funders or even law makers, women are always disregarded or on the back foot.

In terms of the law Haldane didn't change anything. She just confirmed that as written (irrespective of whether it is a good law) someone with a GRC becomes "legally" the other sex, and so can on occassion whether Boards or whatever be taken to be that opposite sex. But in the instance when the law recognises that sex is real, same sex (ie biological reality) is desirable (but must be proportionate!). So a biological male with a GRC can be excluded from a same sex service for biological females. (which more people could use but dont)

I am not sure, even though it is a Judicial Review, that a court can change a law passed in Parliament, and what its intentions are. I would think the best outcome possible is a judgement saying the law isn't clearly enough written. re FWS

Which brings us back to the social pressure, which as we know has been totally dominated by TRAs and all the MRAs who dont think women should have rights anyway.

The fact that the Labour Party doesn't think there is a problem shows just how entrenched the lack of concern about women's rights exists in society as a whole.

What seems so simple to us and straightforward, ie sex is a biological fact, and is important and needs to be respected, is just put on the back burner until politicians think they can score points.

You can see that politicians who are the ones who can make the change, prefer to treat it as a poltical football rather than the issue itself. It is such an amazing daily reminder that to the patriarchy women are not a priority.

So yes I know she's a Tory, but KB seems to have been the only politician who has over the past few months plodded through the stupid Parliamentary system to try and help clarify, improve the EA. But gets little support.

And this is where we are now.

About to lose the MP from a position in Government that she could push through changes to the EA. And who will Labour put in her place?

Cant even remember when it was that there was the consultation in amending the GRA, but however many years it is, this is as far as we have got now.

Unfortunately politicians are far more likely to make change if they think the public wants it. And clearly many MPs dont think the public wants it.

Whether the publicity from having PoW candidates in the election will make a difference I dont know.

But more and more it is feeling like women are being told, yes of course we care, but you need to take your turn in the queue.

And as we know women are always at the end of the queue.

Yes when was the consultation on amending the GRA? seems years ago-women started raising awareness that most (85%) of TW retain their male genitalia, we have the shitshow of male sex offenders in womens prisons yet still here we are ....when will politicians wake up?

I am not sure, even though it is a Judicial Review, that a court can change a law passed in Parliament, and what its intentions are. I would think the best outcome possible is a judgement saying the law isn't clearly enough written. re FWS

Judicial reviews don’t amend the law they say what the law is, or maybe declare it is incompatible with other laws (eg ECHR) which take precedence. What the law is depends precisely on the wording right down to commas and apostrophes, not on what people think it says or what they think its intentions are.

Teresa May anounced she was intending to change it in 2017, they had the consultation in 2018, but didnt publish the findings until late 2020. I'm guessing the responses werent as anticipated.

In the end, nothing really changed other than the fee.

I wonder if politicians would have a public consultation again, or just a debate in parliament?

With Teresa May gone and Penny Mordaunt no longer Women and Equalities minister the Tory attitude to the GRA changed.

The responses to the consultation were numerically in the TRAs' favour, but the whole thing was loaded from the start and it wasn't widely advertised which was probably deliberate, so only GC supporters and TRA supporters completed it.

A lot of the TRA responses were ready made forms that Stonewall etc put out to their followers, which didn't really offer any useful input. It wasn't a vote and it wasn't a representative sample of the population. TRA organisations were even encouraging schoolchildren to fill in their online forms.

Judicial reviews don’t amend the law they say what the law is, or maybe declare it is incompatible with other laws (eg ECHR) which take precedence. What the law is depends precisely on the wording right down to commas and apostrophes, not on what people think it says or what they think its intentions are.

That's what I was saying.

Lady Haldane read through the law as written, and said based on that this is what the law is.

So not sure what a Judicial Review can do. Either tell Lady Haldane you didn't read it properly or say her understanding is correct.

Unless it is possible for the court to say the law is so badly written there isn't a definite interpretation, so law makers need to redraft.

In one way this last is true, because even on this thread, let alone out in the real world, any number of claims are made as to what the words as contained in the law means or could be said to mean.

Shame the politicians didn't take the cheaper option of just clarifying that sex means sex (biological) in the EA, instead of money being donated to cover a court case, when money is needed for so many struggling groups.

With Teresa May gone and Penny Mordaunt no longer Women and Equalities minister the Tory attitude to the GRA changed.

But also changed I think because so many contributions based on women's sex based rights made (some) politicians think, we didn't factor in the unintended consequences.

Although what they didn't take into account and then went into over drive after the GRA consultation so that self id did not happen, was the total onslaught by TRAs on any aspect of daily life, services and public perception that TWAW.

It may not have been pleasant before, but it became, is, totally vicious now.

I think this is not just because the self id objective was derailed, but the sheet outrage by the TRAs and the MRAs that women dared to challenge their right to say what should or shouldn't happen.

@Hepwo "What the old sexist men didn't realise was that the world had passed them by and women and men that understand equality properly, who have lived through the transition to mutual respect, can see this all as a sad legacy of times that are well past."
This, I think I no longer believe it. I wish it were true, I thought it was true twenty years ago (but the irony there is that is exactly when all this was being put into legislation, and Yogyakarta, and human rights case law in Australia and Europe, &c. &c. - so it was my pipe dream all the while, while I was fannying about in a Dianic wiccan coven, loving my femaleness and thinking I was taking back power by refusing shame, the men's rights activists were getting with the actual, unmystical power and shifting the ground beneath my feet so my words about proud womanhood couldn't even be mine).

Those two positions aren't mutually contradictory. Michael Foran isn't saying you can't exclude men with a GRC from women's services, just that it's more difficult because the test of whether it's a lawful type of discrimination is different.

Foran discusses this issue here:

https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2022/12/21/michael-foran-sex-gender-and-the-scotland-act/

Quote (emphasis added):

...a person in possession of a GRC stating that they are a woman may still be excluded from a female-only space if it is objectively justified precisely because there is no sex-based right to have access to female-only spaces. The sex- and gender-based rights under the Equality Act are rights not to be subject to wrongful treatment in the form of discrimination, victimisation, and harassment. They do not include rights of access to services where duty-bearers have been given discretion to decide to exclude, subject to tests of objective justification. If a GRC holder is legally a woman, then her exclusion from a women’s support group cannot be on the ground of sex, it would be on the ground of gender reassignment, which permits such exclusion in certain circumstances.

The issue is that possession of a GRC will make that test harder to meet and a dramatic expansion of GRC holders might in practice affect the ability of single-sex spaces to exclude.

(End Quote)

Foran is saying that a biological male without a GRC can be excluded from a female space for objective reasons related to his maleness but that if he has a GRC he can only be excluded for objective reasons related to his transness and that this would be 'more difficult'. I do not understand why. The very thing that defines a 'woman' as trans is that 'she' belongs to a class of humans that is a threat to women, in Nature if not in Law.

Saying "more difficult" isn't very helpful.

The reason for exclusion is identical, not biologically female. Part of the "in addition" group with GRCs. The GR PC is the reason they have a slot in the in addition group.. which can also be subtracted.

Look he's a nice person but he's a law lecturer, in his 20s who is.writing mountains of papers as they do. The whole commentary industry on this subject has exploded.

The exemptions can and do work, were intended to work. The legal profession have to take some blame for generating so much confusion here..

I agree that the left and libdem and green plan to sell tickets to anyone that wants one will massively increase the number of holders, but that only increases the number of potentially disappointed men, not the complexity. A sound objective justification and legitimate aim can stand up to volume exactly the same way each time someone moans about it.

So yes, that's a problem of volume that can be intimidating in it's own right.

Which is why it's a stupid idea. We don't need to encourage more men to act like arseholes.

I really do not think Foran gets it. He talks a good game but even things like this:

"gender-based rights under the Equality Act"

are questionable. There is no such thing under the EQA. We have to hold the line and not allow ourselves to be talked into things that were never there to be begin with.

Foran is also completely disregarding safeguarding and safeguarding law.

There are safeguarding reasons for excluding men from women's spaces - namely that 98% of sexual offenders are male. Therefore keeping a space single sex (female) is a hugely successful safeguarding measure. Regardless of any 'rights' to not be discriminated.

There is a safeguarding duty of care of many public services which should take precedence over 'rights' legislation. Just as in schools it is explicitly written into Keeping Children Safe in Education that safeguarding law trumps data protection law. I.e. it's not justifiable to accept a safeguarding risk / failure / harm to a child because sharing data about safeguarding (which could prevent that harm) breaches the GDPR.

The problem is there's not much case law because the people affected are vulnerable and disenfranchised.

The vast majority of the population would be much better off if these discussions centred safeguarding rather than rights.

If you can't keep the most vulnerable people in society safe then what's the point of having theoretical rights?

To get a GRC a man needs a diagnosis of GD and two years worth of id in their new name.

If a women's group, service, or opportunity is legally allowed to exclude men, then what is in the Gender recognition process that gives that man with GRC the body, needs and experiences of a woman? I suppose I'm asking what in the GR process makes him different to any other man especially to the women in the group he wants to join? Shouldnt there be a burden of proof that there are significant differences between men with GRC and men without?

If it can be demonstrated that women exclude themselves from situations where these men are to be included, would that change anything? Could this be used as a reason to exclude these men - because the purpose of the group isnt being met?

If it can be demonstrated that women exclude themselves from situations where these men are to be included, would that change anything? Could this be used as a reason to exclude these men - because the purpose of the group isnt being met?

It's specifically spelt out in the notes to the Equality Act more than once that this can constitute a legitimate aim to exclude males regardless of gender identity.

Can we please stop quoting Foran - as said up thread he "just doesn't get it".

Even Nicola Sturgeon understood how the SSE work.

There are a number of people who for what ever reason or motive seem to be getting an ego boast by imagining they have something to contribute.

The facts are the SSE means men with a GRC saying he is "legally" a woman can be excluded from women (biological sex) only provision. The problem has been (and as far as I know no group or service provider has been legally challenged to say their service does not quality to be SSE) is too many people whether for financial reasons, or because it is just easier do not bother to set up SSE services. Including the friend of SS who didn't realise she could have invoked them and SS as someone who presumes to commentate didn't know and didn't help her do it.

The problem is that because the law says that "for all purposes" those with a GRC are the opposite sex, it means those wanting single sex provision have to justify it. ie the act has been written to prioritise the rights of a minority, over the rights of the majority. It would be like saying because x religions says we should all be vegetarians everyone is compelled to be vegetarian unless they can say there is a justifiable reason for them to be a carnivore.

Added which (and I know I am repeating myself) even if the EA was changed to clarify that sex meant biology, there is no reason to believe that single sex provision would increase. In the intervening period the prevailing narrative has been if not TWAW, about being "gender neutral".

So the issues here and now are not just can the law be clarified but can those who believe in women's sex based rights turn the tide of the relentless dominance of the pro trans narrative in the media, in politics, and perhaps even more influential popular culture.