For Women Scotland in Supreme Court - thread 3

[nauticant]

The proceedings in the Supreme Court took place on 26 and 27 November 2024.

Previous threads discussing the proceedings:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5182666-for-women-scotland-heading-for-supreme-court

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5218934-for-women-scotland-in-supreme-court-thread-2

The video of the proceedings over 2 days in 4 sessions can be found here:

https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042.html

the thing that has been obvious during all this is that the judges and all the lawyers are talking as though we can't tell that the 6'4" beardy unit in front of us, with their GRC and birth certificate with an F was actually born as a baby boy.

I do understand that the men involved in the key trans-rights-related cases, such as Goodwin, never actually turned up in court so the judges could see who they were talking about.

Historically the MTF transsexual until very recently - late 2000s? - has always been played in media by a woman, so that fictional construct is what people tended to think of. Something quite distinct from a cross-dresser.

I don't know that the arguments rest entirely on a 'passing' transwoman. I think it's more about portraying the transwoman as marginalised, vulnerable, and deserving of pity.

Well yes, @ArabellaScott but i do feel that if the judges had someone like that "Alex-reframing what a woman is beardy bloke", and others in front of them, they might just see the utter ridiculousness of - if one of them had a GRC - honestly looking them in the eye and saying "can i see your birth certificate"? Blaire White is really tall compared to most women, i don't feel that Laverne Cox passes anywhere except with a lot of photo retouching and no cervix-havers in shot. Alexis Blake is another one - I'm not sure if passing happens there IRL (first glance at photos or reels says - possiby if you're not really paying attention)

FtM have a slightly better go at passing in a lot of cases, i think. But they are often titchy compared to penis-havers. So that does show up.

And of course there are all the blue haired shouty ones whose faces are often covered. No idea if any of them are trans or just TRAs

But surely they were dead at that time? The name they were given is their deadname, after all. Only when they changed to their new name can they have been "reborn" as the opposite sex ...

It would be fabulous if the naivety or unworldliness of the judges over what exactly is included when someone says "trans" was addressed while they were deliberating-- by reality.

Like the man I see fairly regularly in a nearby town. He is about 75 ish, 6' 4" but a bit hunched over through age, with a tiny Hello Kitty back pack, tutu, fish nets, greasy hair and mangy short beard. Always the same outfit.

Walking into the loo behind one of the female judges would just be a plus. I am not saying he is a predator or has ill intent: I do not know. For him to be in a woman's space is intimidating and wrong and the judge would very quickly get that.

The judges are in a privilege bubble that needs bursting. They will never be face to face with the seedy side of this movement but their decisions will change the lives of the women who are.

I am not saying he is a predator or has ill intent: I do not know. For him to be in a woman's space is intimidating and wrong and the judge would very quickly get that.

That would require focus shifting from the man's desires and intents to women's desires and intents.

As AON said, women's views/rights/wishes have been ignored so far. Not discounted - entirely ignored.

I don't think judges necessarily live in some sort of ivory tower where they never encounter 'real life'.

But I do wonder if their only personal experience of transwomen is professional or social encounters with Master Mcloud and RMW in modest black suits appropriate for work. I doubt they have had the fishnets and a micro mini experience in the loos at court.

I have one of those in my town. Probably in his 60s. Micro kilt, barely covering his privates, torn fishnets, thigh high boots, cutesy pink glittery accessories. Greasy dreadlocks so long they drag on the ground. He's so obviously mentally ill and/or an alcoholic. But supposedly a laydee according to gender ideology.

This is where we get the 'transwomen can't countenance sharing with men, so they must go in the ladies' argument from.

Because of course women who can't countenance sharing with men get told to die in a grease fire.

Agree so wholeheartedly with this. Well said.

What would be even better is if they have a young female child whose safety they're responsible for with them and are followed in by this dude.

The law is for out of touch elites who don't care about safeguarding children or women is my takeaway from the court videos. With some honourable exceptions.

Gah quote fail! Meant to quote @ILikeDungs excellent post above. Hope this works.....

I'd be interested to know if there was a single person speaking in that court room who's been responsible over a long period of time for child care / safety / safeguarding.

KJKs reason for getting involved was her daughter having to put up with dudes in porn type attire (and their cock on display) in the "women's".

Belated thanks to @prh47bridge and @NoBinturongsHereMate for so carefully spelling out the premises of anti-discrimination legislation.
It hasn't ever really twigged for me, the way that the liberal project is a double edged sword when it comes to sex segregation. It flattens out our differences, which means women are able to attend university, be called to the bar, enter parliament &c. &c. but it also means every sex segregated space or association needs to justify itself. I'm frustrated with the tendency (which I share) to appeal to women's weakness, vulnerability, lack in order to provide this justification. Why can't we say, "no men, because we want it that way" ?
Female desire, the last taboo.

I really thought that once this played out to its inevitable conclusion - men storming women's sports, men who commit acts of unspeakable violence and depravity being housed in women's prisons and referred to as "she" and women punished for speaking out, men charging into changing rooms etc, things would finally start to get corrected, even though it's a crime and a tragedy that women had to endure these things for that to happen.

But I'm now worried that people actually truly don't give a shit and think women should have to suffer literally anything, even when entirely avoidable through reasonable safeguarding and equality measures, to appease these men's self image. Because that's the price of freedom, they say. Safeguarding spaces is akin to everyone being under permanent house arrest, they say. Freedom has a price, they say, and the price is women and it's more than worth it.

I know women have rarely if ever been prioritised, but can it be that we really matter this little?

Wokring my way through the recordings. Not paying close attention to all of it but learning a lot and it's very interesting!

I liked Ben Cooper's bit. Though I did worry that sometimes he and the judges were at cross purposes about which sex they were talking about(!) By the end I thought he'd made a pretty solid case that "sex means biological sex" still left good equality protections for trans people, with or without GRCs. We'd be onto a loser if a biolgical definition of "woman" left transgender people unprotected by the Equality Act.

In Ben Cooper's version, individual transwomen who are discriminated against either for the same general reasons as biological women (e.g. discrimination at work because a transwoman was doing all the childcare at home) or because other people believed they were women, are still covered by sex discrimination in the Equality Act. I like that because (at least in my head) a large chunk of "living as the other sex" is exactly "being treated by others as if you are the other sex" and getting the same grief associated with being that sex.

What I like is that even with this protection transwomen wouldn't get to redfine what it means in general to be a woman, and they wouldn't covered by single-sex exceptions (so no jobs just for "women and transwomen" even with a GRC). Transwomen couldn't redefine what it meant to be discriminated against as a women, that would still be determined by what happens to biological women. Anything special about transwomen would be covered by gender reassignment protections (instead of bending the definition of women out of shape) And women would keep their single-sex rights by biology. So all good really!

And even the EHRC didn't seem all that positive about the SG position. The EHRC position seems to be - yes it's a total fuckup, but it's Parliament's fuckup and Parliament needs to sort it out. So at least the EHRC do admit there is a conflict of rights. No more pretending a GRC is just a piece of paper and women have nothing to lose.

I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court went with EHRC's idea of throwing it back to Parliament to sort out. For a start, Parliament is supreme so the EHRC cannot order Parliament to do anything. Also, it has always been the function of the courts to sort out what the law means when Parliament introduces legislation that is unclear or contradictory. I can't see any justification for abandoning that function in this case.

I hope the Supreme Court agrees with FWS. I think there is a straightforward justification for that in that, if Parliament had intended the GRA to take away women's rights, it needed to say so explicitly. The fact the GRA doesn't say that means, in my view, that it and the EA must be interpreted in a way that does not take away women's rights. They only interpretation I can see that achieves that aim is for sex in the EA to mean biological sex.

I was glad about O'Neill's finale. I'd been rather taken aback earlier in the recording when the EHRC guy was saying "Parliament can limit people's rights, but they need to do it while looking the issue square in the eye with full democratic accountability, rather than incidentally or under cover". And he was saying that about the EA restricting trans rights by limiting the scope of the GRC.

I thought that was a bit of a fucking cheek, considering, but O'Neill did take the opportunity at the end to replay exactly the same argument w.r.t women's rights - that Parliament couldn't just screw those up with something like the GRC that was snuck through as apparently affecting an "insignificant" number of people.

Perhaps the way that it will pan out eventually will be similar to how it ultimately turns out in many many cases in which individual women are stalked, harassed, controlled, etc by individual men in their lives.
All through the long period of these women's individual persecution, the authorities fail to really see it, fail to do anything, regard it all as just white noise. But then there is a tipping point (usually something really very terrible happening to the woman) and all of a sudden there is action - too late - and investigations into What Went Wrong and Netflix drama documentaries about Her Terrible Victimisation That Was Ignored. And at that point everyone always regards themselves as having known and accepted all along what was required in situations such as hers. And they are baffled, outraged, that nothing was done earlier.

The difference here is just that it isn't simply individual women who are being harassed and controlled. It is the very idea of womanhood, it is us as a group.

It used to be men - back in the 80s and early 90s (see Crocodile Dundee and Priscilla). Then switched to women as the pressure groups got involved in the late 90s/early 2000s. Then actual trans people as the representaton/appropriation/taking our jobs arguments took hold in wider casting discussions.

Many of the original ones did. A massive part of the justification for the GRA and being allowed to change things like passports was that passing transwomen would be outed by their documentation, and this was a breach of privacy.

I've just watched KJK's video (all 28 mins of it: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1LyxBgyOyjrKN) and I think this is what @SisterFrancis was referring to, @BonfireLady . Honestly it comes across as incredibly sour grapes about this court case. Her arguments are all over the place with some very odd conclusions (saying that if we win this case then we'll all go home and say the battle is won?? Literally no one is saying that!)

It would be nice if she acknowledged that it was a win/win scenario as outlined by @Datun above but she doesn't - she is explicitly insulting about the case, about the women who have brought it, that it's a waste of time, angels dancing on the head of a pin, and insults "the women going to court with their nice suits and their little trolley suitcases" and says it drives her mad that people applaud their work and say they're brave. Then she goes through a lot of situations that are also brave and courageous, which of course they are as well, but why does she make out that it's an either/or situation? It can be terrifying going to court, terrifying going to an employment tribunal and having to face the people who have ruined your career, terrifying spending years and oodles of other people's cash to try and challenge this garbage.

She also explictly says that legal challenges, articles, books, etc and being gender critical has become a professionalised industry in and of itself and women don't actually have any desire to win this fight as it would then be over too soon and they would be out of a job. (This argument could easily be turned against KJK herself.)

The video appears to be a direct attack on this court case, the work of FWS and by extension all the other women who have gone to court and tribunal over this, written articles and books and moving the ball down the field to root out this mad legislation that is at the root of all these problems. But why? What is the point of the attack? Why not keep pressing foward on ALL fronts??

All she needed to say was - this case is not the beginning of the end, it's the end of the beginning and it's not enough, we should not take our eye off the ball, we need to get the GRA repealed entirely after we win this case, and we need to change culture up and down the land and allow people (men AND women, why fall foul of the first rule of misogyny and blame women alone?) to assert reality and common sense when applying law and policy.

Instead it smacks of a rather childish "my way is the only brave and true way, no one else is as brave as me, everyone else is a corporatist grifter or a posh bitch or a coward if they take any other approach other than mine".

I really don't understand the point of such a video and it definitely doesn't seem in any way productive to getting the GRA repealed.

@Xiaoxiong
I think her point is that huge amounts of time and energy and money, that could have been used to do the one thing that really will end this battle ( repeal the GRA), are being wasted (as she see's it) on fighting over (as she see's it) smaller details. Plus if the court case does not go our way it reinforces our opponents case. I think this is her case, and she is frustrated by what she see's as misdirected energy.

You always get this from people who take an absolutist approach in a movement. As I posted previously, you got this in the scottish independence movement too. Huge bitterness and acrimony between those who wanted to hold out for full independence and those who wanted the gradualist approach of devolution. I used to be active in animals rights and you get the same there. Those who take an abolitionist approach being full of scorn for organisations they sniffily referred to as ' animal welfarists' like Compassion in World Farming who seek to improve the live of farm animals rather than working to abolish farming animals.

I'm a gradualist myself and I'm hoping if FWS win that this will fatally undermine the GRA.

Like you, I don't think its either or. Even slavery abolitionists like William Wilberforce also campaigned for improved conditions on slave ships. Do what you can today, do more tomorrow, as it were. But I do see the arguments of abolitionists, I think there are idealistic rather than realistic but I am still glad there are people making the case they do. They keep the end game in focus.

I agree with you. I post this essay every chance I get:

https://4w.pub/you-meet-more-perverts-when-poor/

Thanks. I was trying to google that without being able to remember who wrote it or what the exact title was!

Absolutely brilliant article. Thanks for sharing.

One of the, many, things that has angered me about GI proponents is their complete lack of class analysis. They just don't give one shit about how what they are campaigning for will disproportionately affect women with low incomes and from disadvantaged backgrounds.