For Women Scotland heading for Supreme Court

[Imnobody4]

You can read the reasons etc in For Women Scotlands crowdfunder. They are launching this review
UK Supreme Court: The Definition of Sex in the Equality Act

The Inner House of the Court of Session Judgment

We believe the Equality Act was drafted on the basis of the ordinary, common law understanding of the biological differences between the two sexes. The protected characteristic of “sex” in the Equality Act is defined as a reference to a man or a woman, where man means “a male of any age” and woman means “a female of any age”. We think it is quite clear that these are distinct and separate groups and that “woman” is not a mixed-sex category.

However, in our recent judicial review, For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers [2023] CSIH 37, the Inner House took the opposite view and decided there is a relationship between the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) and Equality Act 2010 and held that the meaning of sex in the Equality Act incorporated the GRA framework.

The court decision stated that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) in their acquired gender has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. Separately, they also possess the protected characteristic of sex according to the terms of their GRC and have a presumptive right to access the single-sex services of their acquired gender.

The Supreme Court will consider a request brought by For Women Scotland (FWS) who argue there are “strong grounds” for its challenge, which will almost certainly overturn contentious Scottish government legislation if successful.Campaigners for women’s “sex-based” rights reacted with delight to the news, including Magi Gibson, the poet, who posted on X/Twitter, that it was “game on” on in the “fight for the protection of women’s rights within the UK legal system”.Dennis Noel Kavanagh, a lawyer and the director of Gay Men’s Network, said: “Getting permission to go to the Supreme Court is really hard and very rare but FWS have it. The question ‘what is a woman’ in law will now be heard by our highest court. Massive news.”

www.thetimes.com/article/088ae0ce-fba9-4b97-8331-01a32195bef5?shareToken=3ada340957f5d2af2e20b01a7c15da3b

After shave scented.

So frustrating listening to the travails these hoards of passing trans-identified males suffer. And that having your penis removed is both rare and irrelevant. I appreciate they need to be covered but it's so irritating.

"Have found lesbian submissions very useful"

Is this a positive?

They probably are losing the will to living. Viewed the proceedings on and off. There were a few faces being pulled in the gallery when the lawyer was losing his chain of thought.

I quite like the one where they just look confused!

Transmen's vulvas have enough to worry about without being subject to scented sanitary towels 😨😅 (I finished Elaine Miller's interview on Gender A Wider Lens last night - someone should tell the judges to listen to all the episodes before they make a judgement..!)

Thanks for everyone's commentary, what a day!

I wasn't able to watch live, so many thanks to you all for your live commentary.

It all seems so reasonable when laid bare, eh?

Lord reed usually thanks for submissions, but I have seen him very rarely say “your submissions weren’t helpful at all”!

Given how the standard version of Always reeks, I wouldn't put it past them.

Does anyone else find it perturbing that the good folk of Mumsnet FWR seem to know more about the law relating to sex and gender than the judges in the highest court in the land?

I've had a lot of pottering to do today, so didn't watch, thanks all for the updates. It's been very instructive, not least because I have finally learned that gender fluid means tap water.

Remember that judges have to refer to points made in court when making judgements and if those points aren't made, they can't be considered. So they do often ask very obvious questions to get the point made, clearly, and nuances properly teased out. They also can't show any bias or prejudice during proceedings.

This knowledge comforts me less than it used to because we all know what utter insanity the current situation is and people you couldn't imagine wouldn't know better come out with the most absurd bullshit all the time on this subject. So I'm not as confident in it as I would once have been. But still, it does remain the case.

We’ve made ourselves the experts. We’ve had to.

I missed this afternoon, walking the dogs. Does it go up on YouTube so I can catch up on the SexMatters submission. I'd much rather spend the evening watching Terf TV than I'm a Celebrity. Thank you for all the comments.

Yes I do. I know they have to clarify things, but the way they stumbled over the language and didn't seem to understand basic concepts was worrying. I can only hope that the illogical arguments of the other side tomorrow will help them see the insanity of it. But we will see...

I'm not sure that the UK Supreme Court uploads proceedings onto youtube. But it does upload decisions.

I am pretty sure I saw it written somewhere that it would be uploaded here soon. But these all seem to be judgements - is it just the judgement that will go up? That will be a damn shame!

https://www.youtube.com/uksupremecourt

This might be useful.

I thought Ben Cooper did well - the calm, emollient style was more appreciated by the judges, even though Aidan O'Neill was correct and made great points, too. I also think that the judges would have approved of BC's terminology - transwomen/transmen - and using wrong sex pronouns. They were antagonised a bit by AO'N calling a spade a spade but I think it was something he had to do. It was a bit like a good cop/bad cop routine. O'Neill was like a righteous battering ram, Cooper took some of the emotion out of it. I think it worked.

I was desperate for one of them to say - "I, just as I am, a beardy, fully intact male, could get a GRC and then it would supposedly be unreasonable of women not to want to share a hospital ward with me, or be intimately searched by me if I were a police officer."
We almost got that with Ben, I hope the judges got it.

As to tomorrow, I may not watch for the sake of my blood pressure. But I hope the judges will bear in mind the thrust of BC's and AO'N's arguments - that nobody loses by the bio sex interpretation. Our side have shown care for the interests of people with identities as well as those without. But women in particular do lose by a s9(1) interpretation.

Once a hearing is finished it goes into their 'finished cases' page, and if you go onto the case page and scroll down there are links to all of the live stream recordings. So it will eventually go up there.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCxYqx9O-C_/?igsh=MWQ0OTF4NzY0aGlkdQ==

Suffragette cat has blessed my timeline. Coincidence? No way.

This is the Sex Matters submission published on their web site
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/sex-matters-intervention-to-the-supreme-court/

We’ve made ourselves the experts. We’ve had to.

Indeed.

Sex Matters link has on their page link to the lesbian submissions.
https://scottishlesbians.org.uk/resources