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

Is that this page?
Decided cases - The Supreme Court

If so, it won't be up until after the judgment.

Tribunal Tweets confirming that it was the Sex Matters submissions the judges had found helpful, they misheard and wrote "lesbians".

x.com/tribunaltweets/status/1861473458485354553

@ArabellaScott
Oh, very good

On R4 news now.

That's what happens when you're told to go educate yourself.

We did!

A decent if brief summary including a clip of Aidan O'Neill addressing the court.

Don't we have the lesbians interveners' barrister tomorrow? Or are they just making written submissions?

Whoop!!! I want to make a gif out of the judge's raising eyebrows.

Oh God, please do it!

They went so high that if he'd been wearing a wig they would have disappeared.

Couldn't watch / listen today due to meetings, so thanks all for the updates and explanatory comments. It will be interesting to see what arguments are presented tomorrow, and how, without sounding ridiculous.

I know about the Cab Rank system of barristers, but would the Scottish Gov KC have been able to reject if she vehemently disagreed? I just can't imagine that there are any KCs out there wanting to step forward to argue this at the Supreme Court...

We need a court artist with a quick on the draw pastel.

I'm not sure, but would also like to know.

I had the impression the lesbian intervenes submission was very thorough and the judges would just read it? May be wrong.

Dorothy Bain, meanwhile, was appointed by Nicola Sturgeon and fought hard for the GRR Bill.

One of the criticisms of Scottish politics is that the Lord Advocate shouldn't be a political appointment. But hey ho.

www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19375933.dorothy-bain-confirmed-choice-next-lord-advocate/

You can't really object, and generally if it's in your area you want to be instructed. However anecdotally if, say, one were approached to act for people complaining of botched gender reassignment ops, someone's hypothetical clerks might suggest that X who is prepared to use preferred pronouns might be a better choice than Y who might struggle with that. And Y might not then be instructed.

Thanks to all for the commentary and special thanks to TT for their phenomenal tweeting skills. No idea how they manage to capture so much detail but it’s much appreciated.

This is an astonishingly good account, certainly of the afternoon's proceedings which I was able to watch. I kept falling asleep during the part of the morning I managed to watch.

Thanks all for the updates. Working, so catching up now.

Aha. Thanks. 😀

Going back a bit, I do wish a case would come up that applied the Grainger test to GI belief. I think it's on decidedly shaky ground on criteria 4 & 5.

They'd have to explain exactly what they do believe, and try to make it coherent.

That would be fascinating!

A good summary here by Black belt barrister

Another point really well made by AO'N:
GRA is held by some as some high constitutional legislation on a par with the Human Rights Act. When GRA says for all purposes, it must mean all purposes for means of that act, and is not anti-discrimination legislation.

This has really bugged me, the way Haldane and the Inner House seemed to be mesmerised by s9(1) of the GRA and treated it as it was some master law.

Could someone help (sorry if I'm being slow). I've read the thread and followed most links posted - I started reading Tribunal Tweets, which is how I've followed a few other cases, then decided I'd rather watch the recorded live feed on the Supreme Court website... but this doesn't seem to be available. All I get is this and this. What am I missing? Is there another source I can access this? Or has the option to watch expired for now, now that the session's well over, only to (hopefully?) be made available later?

the way Haldane and the Inner House seemed to be mesmerised by s9(1) of the GRA and treated it as it was some master law.

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but the problem is the way the EA treated it in relation to sex is what has created the legal concept of "for all purposes".

As if it wasn't for all purposes there would have been no need to have the SSEs.

Its not about common sense thinking. It is about wording.

Court examines the biological reality of defining a woman www.thetimes.com/article/9d139f5d-bc37-44cb-8a65-1fe599734d0e?shareToken=3cead3e2239e83ef23901c91e9465fb2 Times article

Good comments from Naomi Cunningham