If Self id isn't law then why?

[XXylophonic]

If Self ID isn't law (not in England anyway) then why are councils and the NHS treating it as though it is law?
I'm hoping you wise women can help me out here because I'm getting increasingly muddled.
For example, Manchester City Council state that anyone who self ID's as a woman can use single sex facilities such as women's homeless shelters and women's swimming sessions. Note they say single sex, not single gender. The same applies to single sex wards in hospitals.
Now I understand that someone with a GRC becomes the legal opposite sex, if not biological because that's impossible, and could therefore legally enter women's spaces because they are legally female. But Self ID? That isn't law, they are neither legally nor biologically female.
So why are they allowing Self ID trans identified males the same access as those with a GRC? What need is there for a GRC now? How can they legally do this?
I've googled but I'm just getting the usual TWAW waffle.
Thanks for any insights that would help confused me out?

Short answer is Stonewall. Stonewall trained pretty much every local authority, NHS trust, media outlet & a whole bunch of sports bodies and private companies on the equality act….

and completely lied about what was in it with regards to gender reassignment or gender identity as they inaccurately called it. They told them that if someone identified as a particular gender they needed to be treated as that gender fjr all purposes. They described it as “getting ahead of the law”

anyone else would call it wilful misrepresentation or lying

It is on the premise that you cannot do less than the law requires, but you can do more. So, under the pressure of transactivist organisations, they go all out, after being fed the line of course that it is the law.

So why are they allowing Self ID trans identified males the same access as those with a GRC? What need is there for a GRC now? How can they legally do this?

Legally, they can't. But they think they can, and they do. Women who push back have a hell of a time of it (see Sandie Peggie vs Fife NHS - self-id is not law in Scotland either, despite the best efforts of the lunatics at Holyrood).

"Self-ID did not become law in Scotland, yet the confusion on the issue has led to public bodies acting as though it has. It emerged Police Scotland had allowed, in principle, for rapists to self-ID as women to foster ‘a strong sense of belonging’."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-scotland-still-tying-itself-in-knots-over-gender/

My point is though that it's not the law - yet.
So how can they act as though it is?
Aren't they breaking the law by allowing Self ID?
I forgot to mention the recording of sex data in crimes. It's bad enough with a GRC but I don't understand how anyone upon arrest can just say the magic words 'im a woman!' and they are recorded as such. I thought at the very least this required a GRC.
If all the rapists catch on, rape will eventually become a female crime. Surely this can't continue.

Hopefully enough court cases in which employers are humiliated for following Stonewall Law will do a bit of pour encourager les outres (haven’t the foggiest idea about French so apologies for messing that up). That said, neither social work nor the NHS seem to be learning from their losses. The ideas are entrenched

Stonewall et al encouraged every organisation to 'get ahead of law' assuming their lobbying would lead to self ID becoming law.

They get away with it because women are largely ignored and so only change position when they are sued, which is very very expensive

So theoretically, if a woman was assaulted in a single-sex facility by a Self ID TIM, would she have a case against that organisation (council, NHS) for allowing a biological male into the facility when Self ID isn't law?
Edit- I mean if they call them single gender facilities then there would be no case. But single sex, clearly states sex

Interesting question about whether it’s illegal. I think it probably is. It wouldn’t, I think, be illegal to offer mixed-sex spaces, but I think it may be illegal to offer a space that is available only to women and some men.

They believed Stonewall and all the consultants and lawyers believed them too. They were told that you could be sued by trans people, who could claim there was no reason to exclude them. They forgot that actually, women could sue them too!

It is because franchising out official "equality advice" to unelected lobby groups with potentially their own agendas opened the door to serious abuses. Formerly respected lobbyists Stonewall decided, with their new funding from wealthy trans lobby groups, to "get ahead of the law" in the UK - and were given the means and access do so, attempting to change UK law under the radar,with no scrutiny (or democratic process) whatsoever.

As Ruth Hunt said, "Stonewall is not about democracy". Rather, it was about getting its own agenda and campaigning carried out on the ground.

The regulatory capture side of this whole sorry debacle is one of the most alarming aspects of it. Lobby groups should not be able to change the law "on the ground" to whatever it is they desire if it has not gone through the same scrutiny as all other laws.They were hoping that doing so in workplaces across the country would make it a done deal. But crucially, they were advising local councils, companies and businesses that what they were saying WAS actually the law when it wasn't - as many places have now discovered.

The seriousness of what they did here takes my breath away. It is wholly anti-democratic, wholly authoritarian and not at all "egalitarian". Much of the "guidance" and training actively removed women's sex-based legal rights from any discussion, for example, and replaced them with "gender identity" based rights. This,as we know, is not in fact equality law.

Interesting too that it was ONLY women's rights that were actively being dismantled in this way. All the other protected characteristics remained intact.
Almost as it was entirely based on anti-woman MRA activism. Just appalling.

Indeed.

And only discovered when women did that what they'd been told was incorrect.

But just how many women did not have the stomach or the means to take their employers to tribunal over this? Knowing that even the unions who were meant to protect them had been infiltrated by anti-woman Stonewall propaganda. How many women had their lives, mental health, livelihoods ,friendships destroyed because of it? It disgusts me. It was entirely abusive.

But the EA states you can legally exclude trans from single sex facilities so they would be safe from litigation.
Does no one bother to read these things?
It's mind boggling that they would all just take Stonewalls word for it. What about the lawyers? Do they not know the law?

My feeling is that they are scared of transactivists. Or maybe they want to be progressive, but primarily they are scared of them and they aren't scared of us.

I suppose the companies concerned could try to sue Stonewall for the misinformation and for the losses they incurred as a result. A great many are doubling down though. See the Open University. They're not getting it.

As others have said, it's the ideology that's entrenched among the people now which needs unpicking. Getting sued for not knowing the law is one thing, but it only goes so far in changing minds and understanding.

Does anyone think that in light of all this, the Government will pass a Self ID law?
I know that Labour said they wouldn't and blocked it.
But given that councils, NHS, police etc are already allowing it... It would be easier to make self ID legal and therefore put a stop to all the tribunals and court cases we are starting to see.

Er, no.

Why on earth would we do that?

We need equality law as it relates to women's rights to be upheld. Rolling over and making self ID into law is the precise opposite of what we want.

We are now winning, and fighting back for our rights. Fucked if I'm gonna give in to misogynist activists now.

Only if it's a "proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim". This is open to question - my understanding is that business have been scared to being accused of restricting access to same sex as not being proportionate and being sued. No company wanted to risk it - the costs, the bad publicity - so they took what they thought was the safe route.

Meanwhile the focus was on "inclusion" anyway, so many businesses positioned themselves as inclusive tovtrans people as a marketing ploy.

Look at the FA for example. It's submission re the EqualityAct, like just about every other sporting org, was that single sex exemptions were crucial for the safety and fairness and develop the women's game. The Gov granted the exemptions but the FA decided later on to prioritise inclusion even though they don't have to.

No, I didn't mean that WE should aspire to that. I meant that if NHS, police and councils etc are going to be sued, the government might think that legalising Self ID would be a way to put a halt to the cases and stop their own organisations from losing huge sums of money

XXylophonic · Today 20:14

My point is though that it's not the law - yet.
So how can they act as though it is?
Aren't they breaking the law by allowing Self ID?

Yes, they have been breeching the law as it stands currently, in the hope that they could bulldoze it into law. For some reason, they seem to have assumed that, if the law changed in future, that they would have a free pass for breaching it at present.

In historic cases, guilty offenders are punished to the standard of the law at the time of the offence. They probably hoped for some sort of pardon, or amnesty, such in the case of Alan Turing.

I’ve been trying to find info about how the GRC was introduced relating to same sex marriage. Does anyone know? It might help explain the use of the GRC and why most don’t have one.

There's a Twitter thread here that discusses this

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4137159-Should-the-GRA-be-repealed?reply=103688321&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

But anyone can look up what the law is - it's all on the Net, and everyone has a smartphone/laptop/pc etc. Nobody needed Stonewall to tell them the law - least of all solicitors.

I think law relating to equality is complex. The EA covers a lot of different characteristics and sometimes discrimination is allowed, in certain circumstances.

For example, the single sex exemptions allow discrimination on the grounds of sex in some circumstances, but what those circumstances are is not clearly stated, but relies on the description that discrimination can only be applied on a case by case basis, as well as being a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”.

My understanding is that the intention was that men and women should usually be using mixed sex facilities, or not discriminate between male and female for jobs (for example) in the majority of cases. But where a case could be made (case by case) for services to be single sex (where people were undressing or sleeping in the same room, for example) discrimination on the basis of sex was allowed.

Stonewall’s master stroke was based on the idea that the gender identify meant that “trans people” must be considered to be the sex they weren’t. They then pushed the line that “case by case” meant that you could only decide which individual man you could exclude from women’s spaces on a case by case basis.

Companies and public bodies were then left with an impossible task of deciding which men to exclude from women’s spaces, which required drawing impossible lines as presumably that meant you could exclude some men, but not all, and then you’d have to defend your actions if challenged. Obviously that’s much more difficult than making a case for excluding all male people.

It was a massive help to them that single sex was allowed, but not required. Therefore if it was too complicated to defend on a case by case basis which particular men to exclude, it was easier (and not illegal) to let them in as they wished and hope for the best.

They must have decided on this plan at a time when the EA was not fully embedded or understood, and it was pushed, I suspect on companies through HR and ever expanding DEI departments, which paid Stonewall a lot to teach them about this rather complex law and how the intersection between sex and gender reassignment was handled.

Those taught by Stonewall naively assumed Stonewall were experts on DEI. Companies and organizations which were afraid of being sued covered themselves by employing Stonewall…. Who then sold them all a massive lie. It’s shocking to see how successful this has been as many educated people now seem to believe Stonewall’s version is true as it has become so embedded.

I think that it might ultimately need some massive legal changes to the law to clarify what was originally meant, but it will be a huge job to disentangle it.

In the Sandie Peggie case though, the law the hospital can (hopefully) use is the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which are generally much clearer and do actually require single sex provisions. Unfortunately transactivism is ahead of that too, in some ways, as it uses “men” and “women” as the divider rather than “male” and “females” and Stonewall et al have been pushing the idea that male and female could retain their original meanings (sex) but man and woman referred instead to “gender identity”, to the point where some of those things have even been changed in dictionaries.

It truly is a shitshow and is going to take a huge effort to untangle, by politicians who (broadly) are not really invested in doing so.

Itbtr

But the law isn't clear. It says "proportionate means to a legitimate aim" and that is massively open to interpretation. Is it proportionate to restrict rape crisis centres to biological women only? Edinburgh rape crisis centre thought not - JKRowling's place thinks yes. Both could be challenged on the policy.

Then there is the issue of who counts as a woman.

Thanks. That was a trip down memory lane.