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

Well said. I'm aghast that safeguarding in schools has been demoted in favour of ideology about sex change for children. I don't believe it's ever been properly legally tested. Practically teachers know on a daily basis that safeguarding is always a priority in a school. Unfortunately the creepy lawyers, the captured CPS along with the dodgy charities have pushed for safeguarding children to be deprioritised in favour of promoting sexual offences like indecent exposure, threatening children with hate crimes if they dare to protest at mixed sex showers, changing rooms, dormitories etc with the Unions being useful idiots and cheerleading all this. Along with the shameful "pubertal angst can be cured with drugs, surgery & a sex change - no problems"

I know my language will be uncomfortable for some to read but this is the reality of what we've allowed to happen to children.

Well said right back at you! 😜

And part of my frustration with these court cases is here's a legal issue bloody crying out to be solved with precedent in terms of the fact GDPR is incompatible with safeguarding so needed a carve out exception to protect children at risk.

With GI there is a clear clash with safeguarding that can harm children. You couldn't get plainer real life failures and harms.They should be desperate to have this intellectual deep dive into how safeguarding laws and implementation of these laws intersect with the EA / GRA.

Compelling wrong sex pronouns from other children meets the definition of emotional abuse in KCSIE as it currently is. And it's been happening, there is evidence. Mixed sex toilets over 8 actually break existing laws.

Yet crickets from the great legal minds. Why is EA2010 so endlessly appealing and protecting the safety and rights of CHILDREN so unimportant? It's letting the genderists set the playing field, with their focus on individualism and rights law. It's like obsessing over whether the car had slightly illegal emissions that might slightly affect air quality (and having endless discussions about this) in order to distract from the much more illegal and dangerous going 80 in a 20 zone.

I'm hopeful that Kemi B will eventually get on to this, she seems brighter and more switched on than most in this area.

I note that when ordinary women (albeit with some experience in education/ safeguarding) say all of the above about safeguarding to quite a lot of the GC people in the public eye (Forlan springs to mind), it's common that they get defensive and take it as a personal attack. Which just serves to reinforce the observation they don't understand safeguarding.

IMO Helen Joyce is better than the rest and more willing to listen to real life experience on this but she doesn't really get it fully.

The main thing I think is by focusing on the TRAs (and Labour's) favourite law they're ignoring a hell of a lot of other (arguably more important for children) legislation entirely.

Creating a legal fiction that a man is legally a woman immediately causes a swathe of safeguarding problems in school if that man works there.

A birth certificate has a date of issue on it.
Yes.
However should you need a copy of your birth certificate for any reason - which is perfectly acceptable - then that would have a new date of issue on it.

In certain situations you may need a new birth certificate legitimately. Say for example you'd been forced to flee an abusive relationship. Occasionally a birth certificate will be supplemented with the addition of a father or for an adoption.

So this is also not without issue.

On a practical level, say the GRA is repealed. What happens to all those already altered birth certificates? They would have to be reverted, but a) can they be identified? and b) given those birth certificates have already been issued, of someone wanted to just ignore the issue and continue using the certificate they could. Someone at a leisure centre would have to accept that as proof on entry still. Bouncing someone on the basis of accurate paperwork would still remain too high risk. But they'd remain liable should the person turn out to be the wrong sex biologically.

So I don't see the repeal of the GRA as without problem and will allow men to access female facilities if challenged if they decided to be difficult because it would be extremely difficult for even an organisation that WANTED to be rigorous and enforce it in cases where individuals wanted to continue to flout a reversal. Particularly if they'd had surgery.

I do think immediately halting the issue of more changes has merit, but I also think we are stuck with all those altered passports, driving licences and birth certificates permanently.

And it's only where a criminal act that's carried out that women will have any recourse. A man with a GRC doing intimate examinations? No one can do anything unless this is somehow disclosed.

So yeah repealing the GRA isn't a magic bullet anyway.

I guess it's not a massive surprise if/when the absolutists get annoyed with the gradualists.

It's not a one way thing. You've only got to look at Jane Clare Jones' Twitter feed, for example, but lots of prominent women in the movement are scathing and rude about the more grassroots stuff and women they perceive as extremist. It's part of the reason WPUK is disliked.

This is true.

@MrsOvertonsWindow not everyone is allowing it - I spent much of last year organising parents to get policies withdrawn/amended at my kids' school that were introduced without consultation over the summer. The policy said that a disclosure of being trans to a teacher was not a safeguarding issue in and of itself and parents didn't need to be told - apparently a line lifted straight from KCSIE, but which is not legislation that can be challenged in court.

I do think we need to get this issue into one of the parties' platforms (though why not all!?), and I support Liberal Voice For Women, Labour Women's Declaration and Conservative Women on this. Surely one of them must be able to cut through the nonsense and push for the repeal of this legislation to be included in a party platform. Having been kicked out of the Lib Dems over this issue in 2018 I would quite like it to be them so I rejoin!

It's not a one way thing.

Very true. There are several big personalities (for which I'm thankful) stepping forward, many of whom profess to be doing it better than the others (for which I'm not thankful at all. FFS).

I really enjoyed watching KJK and Stella O'Malley discuss dressgate on Benjamin Boyce's YouTube channel. That's what it should be about IMO - time isn't wasted in-fighting and the value of a healthy tension of differing views is that it leads to further conversation. Both women were strong in their opinions but there was a Venn middle that they could agree on. It was such a productive conversation, regardless of style differences (Stella waffled, KJK was direct) and the issue that floated to the top was a shared agreement that it's vital to raise awareness of autogynophilia in a similar way to previous awareness campaigns about a different paraphilia (paedophilia) in the 80s. This is a safeguarding issue. It's worth watching to see how it unfolds.... and as much as I like BB's empathetic and exploratory interview style in his other videos it was quite satisfying to see how much of a spare wheel he was after all his posturing prior to it going live (discovering how backwards his views are on women's role in society was one of the big disappointments for me when I finally joined X):

The Venn middle in the Supreme Court case is that sex means biological sex and that the law should reflect this. KJK, JCJ, Sex Matters, Michael Foran and FWS all agree on this. Sex Matters and FWS are focused on incremental gains, KJK and JCJ are more "all or nothing" but from different angles. Michael Foran seems to be a blend of both. I sometimes find JCJ's angle difficult to follow but when I do follow it, I generally agree (with some exceptions). KJK's and Michael Foran's angles are much clearer and I also generally agree (with some exceptions).

Edited to add.... I have no idea how/why that video image has appeared three times! There is only one link on there.

Well done. I know that increasingly parents are getting involved. The government are still prevaricating over the new guidelines for gender questioning children while the impact of Cass highlighting the dangers of unqualified schools socially transitioning children is I think a game changer.
You likely know all this but this is a useful summary of the current position from an education lawyer:

www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/education-law/343-education-features/59145-schools-and-gender-questioning

What I would like to see is a clear legal opinion and policy position by DfE and downing street, reflected in next year's KCSIE, that safeguarding takes precedence over EA 2010 and GRA in law. That would be a political lobbying point I can get behind

Sharing information (including with parents) is a key foundational principle of safeguarding and some of the worst safeguarding failures where children died were due to lack of sharing information.

Not to share info with parents would only be where there is a risk of harm to the child so great that steps are being taken to remove them from their home by social services. Not using a pronoun the child doesn't like.

What next, teachers keeping secrets about children doing other things they want like going to a rave or a fight just in case the parent says words the child doesn't like?

.

The problem with individual action, great though it is (and I've done it myself), is it leaves schools doing very different things.

So you have some schools where children are safeguarded appropriately in line with the law, and others where they're not. Where some ideological zealot teachers have been able to push things through that simply should not happen.

E.g. emotional abuse of children via compelled speech. Which also goes against proper grammar so is undermining their education in English.

You have whole schools where all the girls (and for that matter boys) have been discriminated against as there are no single sex toilets. Whereas others retain single sex spaces as they should in law and have third space solutions where needed for the tiny numbers of children involved.

It should not be down to individual parents to sort out what is a clear mess that is harming children and resulting in highly unequal treatment.

Social workers’ version of safeguarding already includes the (graphic) suggestion that children need affirmation of their ‘gender identity’ as part of the social worker ascertaining their characteristics.

At what point does it not also mean affirming a child’s symptom of something being wrong as an actual fixed part of their identity?

The image below is from. Cafcass page.

Fathers4Justice kind of got it right.

They had the loony fringe dressing up as batman climbing on Buckingham Palace drawing attention to them,
but you also had completely rational, informed and sensible people having meetings with politicians and lawyers and pressure groups, making reasonable arguments about how to move forward for fathers, keeping the best interests of the chidren at the centre.

I didn't continue following them, but i think they may have done some good, for the edge cases at least.

So maybe that is the way to go - a two (or many) pronged approach: loud absolutists, and the generalists plugging away case by case, piece by piece. One lot are certaininly raising attention and the others are slowly getting precedent put in place.

Never thought I'd be agreeing that F4J "kind of got it right" but yes, we need all these approaches.

What I would like to see is a clear legal opinion and policy position by DfE and downing street, reflected in next year's KCSIE, that safeguarding takes precedence over EA 2010 and GRA in law. That would be a political lobbying point I can get behind.

Me too. Until you said it above, I hadn't fully considered how KCSIE sat alongside the EA and GRA - the GRA is easier for children, given they are under 18, but staff with a GRC is a gamechanger because it magically turns biological male teachers in to women in law. Women who can supervise girls changing etc. Yes, I was aware that they intersected in a messy way but I hadn't thought about the order of precedence in the legislation e.g. where there is clarity that KCSIE supersedes GDPR but with the EA (and its relationship to the GRA) there is a void of... meh.

I'm at an interesting and challenging point on how KCSIE and the local school/county safeguarding approach work (or don't work) at the moment with my daughter's school and I'm considering my next steps at the moment. I can see what the steps would be (I've gone as far as I can within the school, unless they have an epiphany about how unsafe their safeguarding is .. unlikely, given where things have got to) and I'm just working out how loudly I want to shout, as it were, when balancing out risk to my family and moving forward in a productive way: the increasing risk of public exposure, given the conversations I'm already having and will need to have next, versus the risk that my daughter may be pulled towards making a decision about her body that is permanent and based on a flawed model of informed consent. I shouldn't have to work this hard to safeguard my daughter but here we are. I've referred to being in choppy waters ATM on other threads. As I've said previously, from the moment I started liaising with the school (initially just on my daughter's EHCP, then more widely) I always knew I would bump in to a blocker - and that it would be a precarious place to be. On a positive note, my children are unaware of any of this so far, there are staff at the school (and beyond, via the EHCP etc discussions to date) who really do see the risk, or enough of it to listen, and my autistic daughter seems to be gradually starting to approach the topic of sex and gender identity from a critical thinking perspective.

Bringing it back to the thread, from my perspective this court case will help with IRL conversations regardless of its outcome. It already is doing. Explaining the nonsense of the Ruth Crawford's explaination of how pieces of paper change someone's sexual orientation was very useful.

As Mrs O says, there are lots of parents now speaking up. Some of us are doing it on our own, some in groups. I have no doubt that it's all making a difference and that this court case will help significantly.

In terms of the gap between where schools are now and what is needed to help them know how to support gender questioning children, this consultation response from Transgender Trend is a good anchor point:

https://www.transgendertrend.com/gender-questioning-children-consultation-response/

Well done for everything you have done and everything you are continuing to do. As a previously lifelong Lib Dems voter I would quite like it to be them too.
I wonder what the protocol is for persuading a local Lib Dems MP to drop the Be Kind approach, join in with common sense conversations and help push this forward. Sadly, I suspect it's written in treacle and impossible to push up the hill.

Are there any GC LibDem MPs?

So maybe that is the way to go - a two (or many) pronged approach: loud absolutists, and the generalists plugging away case by case, piece by piece. One lot are certaininly raising attention and the others are slowly getting precedent put in place.

I think this is absolutely the way to go, and the absolutists and the generalists need to see each other as mutually supportive and heading towards the same goal, rather than sniping at and undermining each other.

The court cases and draft guidance were absolutely essential for our group when challenging our school's policies. The PSHE teacher was a nice lady (very "be kind") who had been completely indoctrinated at conferences and by PSHE Association materials, and had basically carried the rest of the school along with her until we were able to say no, look, this is not settled law and policy. That made the head and deputy head sit up and take notice - before that they had just trusted that they'd hired an expert who was well trained and qualified.

For schools, the inspectorate needs to get involved. Schools are terrified of Ofsted/ISI and their policies not being in line with what the inspectors want to see, so they're the ones that need to scrutinise policies and safeguarding to make sure schools have not gone far beyond their remit. I would like to see an immediate safeguarding flag on any Ofsted inspection if the school has a policy saying they won't tell parents if a child requests a new name or pronouns at school, for example.

Not that I can recall. Lords yes. MPs - they seem to either be silent or full on panlids.

Is this on a public facing URL?

I had a look on an image search via Google but couldn't spot it.

@BonfireLady I was on this site (99% sure)
https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-09/Childrens-resistance-or-refusal-to-spending-time-a-parent-guide%20%282%29.pdf

But I was going down rabbit holes within the links. I took the screenshot of the section of a graphic related to ‘gender identity’ for my own interest, not thinking if this thread at the time, but forgot to check the page.

It was to do with a Cafcass officer getting to know a child and showed all sorts of characteristic, this being one. I’ll get back when I find it again.

Here @BonfireLady
It is on the page, “Our Resources for Professionals” and is called

Our Diversity Wheel if you scroll down.
www.cafcass.gov.uk/professionals/our-resources-professionals

Yes to Ofsted finally doing their job and becoming Cass compliant.

Ofsted were totally captured by the trans extremist groups. Then the Telegraph outed Stonewall for complaining that Inspectors weren't talking to primary children about trans issues and exposed Ofsted as using trans ideology as a factor in downgrading schools.

Ofsted did a quiet reverse ferret and dumped being a Stonewall champion. But like all the regulatory bodies who threw away their impartiality, they're now compromised in trying to return to be an ethical organisation and centring children's safety without anyone noticing.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/04/stonewall-raised-concerns-ofsted-inspectors-dont-always-discuss/

@ScrollingLeaves thank you. That's really useful and much appreciated.

@MrsOvertonsWindow you've just helped me decide my next steps.

@themostspecialelfintheworkshop what safeguarding law are we talking about here?

There's a story in today's Times about Maggie the penguin failing to produce a chick for 8 years, because Maggie is actually Magnus. It would appear that Maggie was acquired from Denmark so presumably had paperwork identifying Maggie as female in order to be granted residency in the Cotswolds.

It also seems that Zookeepers suspicions were raised because not only did Maggie fail to provide a chick, but Maggie kept trying to mount Maggie's designated partner Frank. Even in penguin colonies, behaviour will out it seems.

Amusing as this tale may be, unlike birds, humans aren't difficult to sex. And for humans and animals alike, the sex on one's passport should be accurate.