Naomi Cunningham; interview in Holyrood magazine

[IDareSay]

Fascinating stuff:

“When the Gender Recognition Act passed in 2004, I was already kind of 10 years into being an employment lawyer, and I was aware of it. It vaguely clipped my radar. I kind of thought, very niche, that’s not going to cross my desk, and shrugged it off. So, I didn’t wake up until about 2017, 2018 and what woke me up was Anya Palmer, who is a barrister at Old Square. She was Maya Forstater’s barrister, and she was one of the group of people I was talking to. I was following her on Twitter and she was tweeting about this subject, and it started to educate me on it. She was the person who had the brilliant idea of running a case on religion or belief discrimination, on what’s now called gender critical belief. And I remember pulling some very sceptical faces about that when she was first discussing it, even before she found Maya, before she found a client."

www.holyrood.com/inside-politics/view,naomi-cunningham-im-fuelled-by-rage-and-ive-been-lucky

I remember when I was a teenager back in the early 70's someone mentioned that their dad flew into apoplectic rage and threw her boyfriend out of the house because he had an earring in one ear.
Later on, after being introduced to the gay scene I wondered if her dad had his own experiences, and assumed the lad was flaunting his sexual orientation. When really the young chap was just getting a bit too far ahead of fashion to rural Lancashire.

Nuns being women who decided not to centre their lives on men and marriage, but to go for careers, whether in teaching or social work or nursing, possibly had a mindset different from secular teachers. Hard to think of them as radicals, but in a way they were - particularly ones in the non-posh tradition - Mercy, Pres, etc.

What a lovely article, thank you for sharing! And in the course of it, it settles the profound discussion we had somewhere in the SP threads, about whether she was unaware of Rainbow because she was too old or because she was too middle-class - as some of us suggested there, she's too old, like me ;-)

Thanks to whoever mentioned Alexandra Asteriti. I'm not up on the pros and cons of the path chosen in Maya Forstater's case so that's more reading for me. I did find this video of AA talking about the genealogy of gender identity in international law. She's impressive.

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Very interesting interview.

If we didn't have 'protected belief' then I think it would be very, very much harder to do so many of the things that women are now doing.

It was a corrective to the idea that questioning or criticising 'gender' was bigotry, beyond the pale. And while 'gender identity' beliefs haven't been tested or properly defined, one can point to 'gender critical' beliefs and that in itself creates the opposite views (sex is mutable, a spectrum, and immaterial, roughly).

Thanks, this is invisible to me. It does remind me of the Wimsey book which is not really about him but goes to Harriet Vane's old college. Gaudy Night.

Thanks, Curious, this is exactly what I meant. I had plenty of this stuff said to me as a kid in inner London in the '80s so it's difficult to believe others hadn't experienced it. To a large extent, if these superficial stereotypes and distinctions weren't pervasive there would be no need for feminism.

I think the Forstster judgement was an important step in the right direction, but I too am sceptical of the reliance on "belief" as though gender critical and sex realist positions are equal to other opinions that don't benefit from mountains of facts underpinning them.

Once we see some "comparative" cases, those balancing one belief against another, maybe my view will change.

If we didn't have 'protected belief' then I think it would be very, very much harder to do so many of the things that women are now doing.

It was a corrective to the idea that questioning or criticising 'gender' was bigotry, beyond the pale.

This is my view too.

I think my order was probably in the posh tradition - founded by Mary Ward in the 17th century “Women in time will come to do much” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ward_(nun)

Went renegade at one stage.

I don't think you can legislate for 'reality'. The battle is about words. That the word woman means adult, human female. That the word female means the sex arranged to produce large gametes. The 'GC belief' is that this is what those words mean and that sex is therefore immutable because you cannot change what type of gamete producer you are.

Thanks for sharing that. She's really interesting.

I've never heard any of those from an actual living human being.

Me neither, and I think I must be the same age as you. Born in England, Irish (mostly) parents, medicine was supposed to be my calling, but in the event I chose Maths. My convent school, though awful in many other ways, didn’t hold girls back academically.
(It was a very posh order, and generally preferred girls from old-established English Catholic families over the hoi polloi of Irish background.)

Great article, thanks for posting.

Name changed in honour of the magnificent Naomi.

Surely Asteriti is missing the point that the “GC belief” protected by the Forstater EAT wasn’t only that humans can’t change sex - which, as Asteriti says is simple fact / reality? The “GC belief” protected by the Forstater EAT was that: humans can’t change sex + there are circumstances in which biological sex is relevant/ important in public policy-making + gender identity is not more important / relevant than biological sex.

So a person who agrees that humans can’t change sex, but doesn’t believe that sex is a relevant consideration in any circumstance, and instead believes that how people “express their gender” is more important than the biological sex which they agree they cannot change, would not be a holder of “gender critical belief” despite understanding that humans can’t change sex.

No.

It’s employers directing discriminatory, harassing and victimising behaviour against employees who questioned gender identity ideology that caused the employment tribunals. Forstater’s EAT afforded those employees protection.

The “GC belief” protected by the Forstater EAT was that: humans can’t change sex + there are circumstances in which biological sex is relevant/ important in public policy-making + gender identity is not more important / relevant than biological sex.

The protected characteristic of sex already established this. Theres no legislation that says policy should or even can prioritise gender over sex.

If we were protected and better off as a result of “belief”, the Sandie case would not have happened.

The protected characteristic of sex already established this.

Not in every scenario. The GRA complicates things.

While I can understand why AP went down the route she did for Maya’s case, I think in the long term it’s been a bad move, because sex realism (aka gender critical) is a fact, not a belief, and now we are having to unpick that.

This is why I don’t support Sex Matters’ line cementing the false concept of “legal sex” as opposed to just sex any further in law. Our daughters and granddaughters will have to deal with the ramifications of that.

I like Alessandra. She talks a lot of sense.

Great read! I think stereotypes and I suppose gender essentialism rose a lot due to social media and the internet. It seems it narrowed the range of what it means to be a man or woman girl /boy. I see it in real life but I think it is dwindling

Except that Stonewall was telling employers that the GRA did have that effect.

And employers are still operating as if not “outing” as male a male employee who wants access to female facilities is more important than the female employees’ legal entitlement to single sex spaces.

The Forstater EAT provided protection to women talking about the problems that causes in the workplace.

Employees can now say that they disagree that TWAW, and their disagreement with their employer’s policy is now protected.

This is why I don’t support Sex Matters’ line cementing the false concept of “legal sex” as opposed to just sex any further in law

No, nor do I.

Same here.

The Forstater EAT provided protection to women talking about the problems that causes in the workplace.

Employees can now say that they disagree that TWAW, and their disagreement with their employer’s policy is now protected.

Exactly. Before that they could literally be sacked just for objecting, and as we can see many organisations still work on that basis. It takes time to filter through.