FWS v Scottish Ministers will be handed down Weds 16th April at 9.45am

[IDareSay]

The Ruling in FWS v Scottish Ministers will be handed down next Weds 16th April at 9.45am It will also be streamed via the UKSC website, so you can watch live.

https://x.com/ForWomenScot/status/1910272949350695371

Not at all - if you advertise a service or toilets for women it will then automatically mean biological females because the Act will say that sex means biology.

It will be about reclaiming words and starting to refuse to let TRAs colonise our words.

ie we will be back to the future.

In the past everyone knew and accepted that anything saying female or woman means biological sex. We have to erase the weasel words of the trans narrative.

Anyone who wants to continue to follow the gender woo (ie about something inside someone's head as opposed to fact), can advertise gender neutral services. We have to make words mean what they are meant to be.

Maybe, then instead of SSE, Parliment might have to create the opposite ie TWE (trans women exceptions) meaning the occasions when TW with a GRC can be treated as a "woman" for instance .... ?? marriage certificate or ??

If the word sex is categorically defined in law as only being about biology, then the only way to make it work is to ensure everyone understands that. And for instance use the phrase gender identity for anyone that says they identify as the opposite sex to the one they were born.

eg Women's Toilets, Mens Toilets, Gender Toilets

If TRAs can persuade society to change the idea of what a word means, why cant women persuade society that words mean what they always once did.

I wasn't talking about Labour.

I was talking about a potential court ruling that aligned with the EHRC comments that Sex Matters said could be one of the outcomes.

Can whichever Government it is say to the Supreme Court, sorry we cant be bothered to do what you have told us to do.

If they dont do it, then they will be underming the Supreme Court and the function of Judicial Reviews.

The point is that without SSEs you can’t advertise a service or toilets for women.

Well that's a mute point isn't it at this point.

What is the point of having the word sex defined as biology if you are then going to say it cant be use to define that a service is only for biological women.

Are you saying public toilets are going to have to get SSE.

It would come down to what happens now, ie if a club, or toilet or whatever is single sex because that facilitates or validates the service, it can only be challenged as being sex discrimination if someone of the opposite sex is in some way discriminated against. eg if say free training for career advancement was only offered to one sex.

Sports is another example. If a sport event is run for women only (with sex in the EA defined as biological) why would there need to be any justification to make it have to apply for single sex exemptions.

A man with a GRC can still compete in the male category. He isn't discriminated against by being excluded on the basis of his sex, as he can compete in the male category.

So rather than needing to have SSE, it would be up to anyone to proof that it is discriminatory to exclude someone from a services or sport, set up for biological women.

Which could be dealt with by having the opposite of SSE. When if ever someone with a GRC can acess services etc., actually intended for the opposite sex.

I think arguing that we will still need the SSE shows how far the trans brainwashing has gone. All it will do is return how things have always been run in the past.

We need to get away from feeling the need to justify our rights as being valid.

And yes I know the TRAs will create an emotional drama, but that will happen any way because as we know they want women to validate their identity, but it isn't women's role to constantly be the enablers of men's rights.

I understood the point of the SSE was to allow there to be “discrimination” on grounds of sex in order to provide single sex services.

Without the SSE, the basic premise of the Act is that you can’t treat people differently on grounds of (among other things) sex (which, at the time, all sane people - and probably many insane ones - understood to mean biological sex). So the SSE was included to allow (for example) the provision of single sex toilets, wards, DV shelters etc because it was recognised that some things would still need to be provided differentially on grounds of sex.

Without the SSE, the rest of the Act would make it “unlawful discrimination” to have single sex provision. And since there are circumstances where single sex provision is important in the interests of safety/dignity/privacy, the SSE allows them to happen without it breaching the core non-discrimination provision of the Act.

These are the Explanatory Notes for the relevant part of the Act, which I think reinforce the purpose of the SSE. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/16/20/7

i don’t think the SSE is a problem. It’s institutions’ flawed interpretation of it and the madness of thinking that “women” is a mixed sex category that is the problem.

Sorry if I have not put that very well. Insomnia isn’t always conducive to clarity.

Oh, and institutions don’t have to “apply” to have an exception approved (you’re right - that would be crazy to have a SSE Approvals Monitor rubber stamping all toilet applications). They just say they are using (applying) the SSE because it is appropriate to provide the service/sports category/whatever on a single sex basis because it meets the relevant criteria under the Act.

Edited to add: there was a similar SSE in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (& equivalent legislation in NI) to ensure single sex provision could continue.

I understood the point of the SSE was to allow there to be “discrimination” on grounds of sex in order to provide single sex services.

That's correct.

Whenever IWantToRetire writes at length about the "SSE", it's not about the basic single-sex exemption of the EA, which says "despite the general no sex discrimination rule of the EA, you can sex discriminate to provide single-sex spaces in some cases".

There is some text in the EA related to gender reassignment and single-sex spaces - which I understand is what IWTR always refers to as the "SSE" (confusingly and contrary to everybody else).

I don't recall seeing IWTR ever acknowledge the primary exemptions, and the comments above makes me think they're still missing the fundamental logic that an general anti-discrimination act needs exemptions to permit female-only things at all, and hence they're missing that's they're the SSE that everyone else is referring to.

Right! You can't have a men-only bar, or a women-only train, or a men-only construction site because those things would be discriminatory on the basis of sex.

You can have female-only changing rooms, or male-only toilets, or women-only refuges, or men-only counselling sessions because of the single-sex exceptions.

Whether people with a GRC get to be treated as the sex they are, or the sex they would prefer to be is the issue.

Public toilets already have SSE @IwantToRetire

Yes, exactly.

I have read all the thread but I don't remember whether this point has been made: their needs to be clarification as to what "gender" means, and that gender is not the same as Sex.

Most of us don't regard ourselves as having a gender and when we meet the word gender on e.g. forms, we just tended to think it was a polite (prudish/twee) way of avoiding the word sex.

So any Acts passed need to say Sex, when they mean Sex. Any organisations e.g. GMC, schools, hospitals etc. need to record Sex and not gender, and keep gender as optional if kept at all.

There, not their in the above.

I'm trying to reduce this to some basic principles, in order to work out what the desired end point is, and it just falls apart. (Evidence perhaps that people who make laws are no cleverer than the rest of us.)

Women need concessions from the general rule against sex-discrimination, because of their physiology, historic disadvantage, and the instinctive privacy needs of both sexes.

Men have never objected (apart from a bit of grumbling about affirmative action) because they benefit too.

The GRA threw a spanner in the works by making some men legally female. But, because marriage, tax and pensions have all been equalised, and sex-discrimination outlawed, men and women are now exactly the same under the law, except for the concessions referred to above.

Transwomen are physiologically male and therefore women should be allowed to discriminate against them. Not allowing this is sex discrimination (because women are more disadvantaged by mixed-sex anything than men are). So TW should be treated as men when the concessions are applied, whether they have a GRC or not.

This makes the GRA otiose, because the only area in which the sexes differ in law is precisely that in which birth sex has an overriding practical effect.

( I do think there's scope for giving trans people concessions around privacy and proportionate representation in public life: these should be designed specifically for trans people and not by subsuming them into another disadvantaged group.)

(Also, the fact that concessions from the general rule against sex-discrimination exist in law, is proof that birth sex must not be concealed, for otherwise the concessions cannot be applied, so why do they even exist?)

TLDR: Repeal the GRA. Because humans can't change sex.

Logically and realistically when you privilege men as women and say that they have rights to inflict themselves on women that women have no right to say no to.... and that those women owe those men access to their undressed bodies as that man's legal right, and providing him with this experience is a required condition for that woman's continued access to services and spaces provided for their sex? Indeed under threat of legal punishment if she attempts to argue and to view herself as an equal to him in the situation, with a right to equal consideration?

You have created very clear sex based discrimination in quite a horrific way. That entire mixed sex group may be something that must be referred to as 'legally' women, but the fact remains that men with the certificates have a great deal of power over the women, in a way that subordinates women as a sex class, to those who can only have such a legal certificate if they come from the opposite sex class. There is no difficulty at all separating these two groups, and the one defining feature of each group is their binary sex. Fiddling with language does nothing to hide this.

Yes, it's a complete mindfuck that you've got LAPA on top of LAPA (using it here to refer to any compelling public good that can transform illegal into legal discrimination).

You've got the 'protect women' LAPA that gives you single-sex spaces (sex discrimination against men)

Then the 'trans inclusion' LAPA that inserts the transwomen (sex discrimination against women)

Then the 'we still need to protect women FFS' LAPA that gets rid of the transwomen again (discrimination against people with the PC of GR)

Stonewall think the first two are fine and dandy but the last is a massive hurdle that will almost never be surmounted.

That has to be tack. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think they are looking at it from any perspective of harm to women. Irrespective of how brutally women’s human rights are being trodden into the ground. Just the law of whether a man with a GRC has to be treated as if he were a woman. Oddly this seems to have the effect that person in the street has to go along with that fantasy, as it is claimed to be harassment and hate if you refuse to go along with the lie.

If there was a bit of a plan B, or beginnings of a road map towards defending women’s rights, that would make a decision which hurts women less of a blow. Obviously, if men are deemed to be women, women as a sex aren’t protected. If that were the case, I think real sex (sans gender) should have to be added as a separate and an immutable characteristic. What would you call it? Real women/men, actual human females/males?

Obviously I hope women’s rights are not dealt yet another cruel blow.

I find it amazing this Gender reassignment protection was put into an Act. Who ever said, that man has a right to everyone pretending he is a woman. With any care or concern of the mostly detrimental effects on the rights and safety of women, and children.

Of course, men’s entitlements and privileges were demanded and given. And it is a lie about biological reality. Plain and simple.

Where is the disability reassignment protection, age reassignment protection based on feelings alone?

There was actual discrimination. As recently as the 90s, people got sacked from the civil service for transitioning.

No-one dreamt that asking male sportsmen to compete in an open category would one day be described as 'insulting and unpleasant'.

I cannot see why being a “transsexual” should be a protected characteristic under the EA. Being “trans” is either a delusion or a lifestyle choice so why should employers (& everyone else) be forced to pander to those with a delusion or fetish?

I suppose it depends on whether you think not being fired = being pandered to.

Well, I know for certain nobody was fired for transitioning into another sex, because that is a false, and anti scientific claim. Sex is immutable. I’m surprised in this day and age when people seem to so easily believe anti scientific notions generally. Eg, flat earth, illness being devil/demon possession etc.

Don’t get me wrong, people can claim anything false they like. However, they don’t have the right to cross the self regarding line, and starts to force anti scientific beliefs and encroach on others. Men could easily have demanded to wear all sorts of clothes and make up. Like women, and girls with uniforms had to do.

Appropriating girl and womanhood is not any man’s right, just because men demand it. Trampling over the rights of girls and women is not any man’s right. and yet they have done so. Damaging the rights of women and girls all over the world.

I’m just wondering if that would stand in all circumstances.

Let’s take a reductio ad absurdum. If I was working in a bank, do you think they’d fire me if I rocked up one day saying I was three, and dressed and acted accordingly. Would people be saying how horrendous it was if the bank fired (i.e didn’t indulge or pander to) little old me with my dummy, and lickle girl clothes? Would it be against my human rights, and so a law would have to be made to make everyone include ‘age transitioners’. Of course, I don’t believe in anti scientific nonsense, so may be surprised that others might say it is a ‘right’.

Do I have the right to force others to indulge me in any fantastical claim whatsoever when it encroaches on the rights of others. It is the same principle. Is there any limit at all? Or is this one and only thing enforced, as it is to satisfy the demands of male entitlement? And, it is mainly women and children who are subjected to the sharp end of it.

In the midst of all the compIexity, I keep coming back to the fact that the GRA is based on a legal fiction i.e. that a man 'becomes' a woman.

I understand that a few legal fictions survived past 'tidying-up' of the law - particularly English Common Law - but it seems odd to create a new one in the 21st century. It seems to be against the general direction of travel of legislation towards greater clarity, simplicity, and, as far as possible, user-friendliness.

To the outsider, legal fictions are a bit dodgy, because they appear to the layperson to subvert the truth, which isn't what we expect of the law, is it?
If they also appear to turn existing law on its head, and have an obviously negative effect on 50% of the population, that can't be a good thing for the public perception of the law.

I can't think of anything as obviously undermining of trust as telling people that a man is considered in law to be a woman, since no expert knowledge is required to see how blatantly counterfactual that is, and direct personal experience is sufficient to prove that it impacts negatively on people who don't need a law to be 'considered women'.

@MarieDeGournay

It's unique(?) in that it's a metaphysical belief that's been widely accepted as true. I don't think we can hope to deprogramme everybody, but it would still be a leap forward to relegate it to the status of other metaphysical beliefs. So that there would be no compulsion to believe, no proselytising to minors, no special privileges for believers etc.

@Cailleach1

Anti-discrimination law for believers exists, and to some extent 'panders' to them. You can illegally discriminate against religious people by being awkward about their dress, diet, worship etc, even though they're all artificial self-imposed rules. As a GC person/libertarian I find it hard to object to a man wearing a dress and calling himself Susan as long as no-one is harmed (🖐 John Stuart Mill). Which is the tricky bit...

I just saw this in the Times, I can't read it right now but thought others might like to read it:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/9f253df2-99ee-4b2f-87a1-3b30c584cc98?shareToken=d6cfb6a861eacc91132186cf7f55409d