Women’s rights to be prioritised in equality law revamp .

[Feministwoman]

Women’s rights to be prioritised in equality law revamp
Radical overhaul follows concerns about trans people using single-sex spaces.

Hopefully this will actually happen!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/bb5759c652081aa3

I agree with you on no one liking this.

If at some point politicians say it’s fine if they show a GRC I can see it bumping up the question who thought a certificate was a good idea and how can we change that.

I don't think @IwantToRetire is wrong exactly, so much as eliding two different things. When she says 'SSEs' she really means 'the SSEs under sex-discrimination law, in combination with the statutory and non-statutory guidance that makes it possible to exclude transwomen (with or without a GRC) from certain thus-legalised women-only spaces, in the interests of safety, fairness, or decency, without breaching gender reassignment-discrimination law'.

You've got to admit it's a bit of a mouthful!

Wednesday's decision is about the women-only spaces that aren't subject to the guidance, like lesbian clubs and all-women shortlists.

The upcoming revamp by EHRC is about encouraging people to use the guidance, particularly because if they don't, they could be discriminating against women (as in the Fife and Darlington cases and the Blackball Pool case).

ETA I don't understand the suggestion for people to 'show their GRCs ', because it's perfectly legal to exclude a 'legal female' from refuges, changing rooms etc, under the existing guidance.

Also, don't agree Foran is a moron.

For the #BeKind people whose sustained ignorance (substantially attributable to poor reporting and institutional capture) has helped to bring us to this point.

The absolute misogyny and despising of women from the group of men wanting access to women and women's spaces regardless of their impact or anyone else's needs and equalities has also pushed things to this point. I have no sympathy with them.

But for me it will be conflating sex and gender further if the Scot Gov win. It is a Gender Recognition Certificate, not a sex recognition certificate. Surely that means you don't get to access sex segregated spaces, but can be treated as your acquired gender when it does not affect the rights of women to single sex spaces and provisions. What a bloody mix up since we got coy about saying sex.

Also worth noting: whenever this bloody mix up happens, it's always to the benefit of men and the detriment of women. On a binary, sexed basis.

Victoria Smith in Unherd

https://unherd.com/newsroom/labours-embrace-of-womens-rights-is-too-little-too-late/

LangCleg talking sense in the comments 😃

Bravo LangCleg. The men in those comments however.....

The chaps scolding that until women treat them with the deference and respect they are entitled to (because no one will get anywhere unless they as white straight men decide that they should) they will support women being oppressed and harmed by other men to teach those women a lesson. So there. That's their power, submit and defer.

And there's no such thing as male entitlement and it definitely isn't what's happening when men walk into women's spaces, and it's nasty to say so because it implies that men have .... well, some kind of responsibility. And the men marching into women's spaces because men matter and women don't is absolutely different from men like them - who believe that men matter and women don't unless they're serving appropriately in a suitably humble manner.

These are the men of the type sitting in bloody parliament making the decisions, who have just about learned to cope with women wearing trousers occasionally.

If it is the case that men with GRCs will be able to access provisions utilising the single sex exceptions, alongside all the other implications, this is going to be a nightmare for service providers and will put at risk every woman working on intake or similar who has to say "you look like a bloke, have you got a GRC to show me?".

Pitiful, aren't they? Where did I put my tiny violin?

First of all please remember that many newspapers dont bother to fact check and will inadvertently, or for the sake of a good headline blur the issue.

re SSE ie single sex spaces / services - obviously as a PP said it is in reference to the EA. This means that no male person, even if they have a GRC can use these services.

As we all know particularly in Scotland but not exclusively, some funders, politicians and ever providers have said they are. But had to stop saying that once Lady Haldane specifically said that under the SSE no man with a GRC is allowed to use the service. In fact after the ruling even Nicola Sturgeon admitted this was the legal position and Labour of course said that's why we wrote them.

This thread is about a newspaper article that has attempted (because none of us have actually seen the statement) what the EHRC is now saying having been asked by this Government to provide more explicit guidelines of implementing the EA, not just in relation to the SSE but to the occassions when a man with a GRC is allowed to be admitted, included in a supposedly women's event, service or whatever. (There was a thread about this because of published guidelines on when you could or could not invoke the SSE)

Their suggestion that GRC should be shown is to make it clear that self identity is not legally recognised in the UK.

But they have also said which is propably more important than the ruling for the Supreme Court whatever it says, is that the GRA ie GRC should NOT be applied to the EA because it is in fact discrimination against the protected characteristic of sex.

No othe protected characteristic is impinged on in this way.

It is a shame really that the actual statement isn't published and that it coincides with the forth coming ruling.

It is a really, really important moment because it is the EHRC - the organisation the Government says is the final word on implementing equality in the UK - is telling the UK Government the law as written is discriminatory.

This has far more significant than clarifying the word sex.

Because if (which I think is unlikely) the EA was changed so that there was no part of it saying someone with a GRC was actually to be treated as the opposite sex to the one they were born, the issue of when TW were effectively "legal women" would never happen. (Unless in a section the direct opposite of the SSE there was a short list of when a man with a TW was a "legal woman" maybe for a marriage certificate or something.)

Worth remembering the FWS court case is about the Representation on Boards bill in Scotland. ie that boards shouldn't be able to claim they had equal representation of women on a board if in fact some of them are TW.

I assume the notion being that if the court rules that in terms of equal representation of men and women a TW doesn't count as a woman, it could (should) mean this rule should be applied to any number of occassions when TW are counted as women.

But as TW are already excluded from SSS, the court case isn't about that.

That's why the EHRC statement about what the new guidelines should say is so significant.

guidance that makes it possible to exclude transwomen (with or without a GRC) from certain thus-legalised women-only spaces, [...] without breaching gender reassignment-discrimination law

But TW aren't excluded from women-only spaces because of gender reassignment. It's not gender reassignment discrimination, any more than it's racism or disability discrimination to stop under 18s buying alcohol. It's 2 totally different protected characteristics. How we ended up with this legal nonsense of applying the wrong EA category is beyond me.

It’s because of the dubious grey area the GRC creates in law, as the men who have one are to be treated as women for “all purposes”, except there are some exemptions. The ability to discriminate on the grounds of gender reassignment for single sex spaces where it’s a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim means that if these men are in fact seen as legal “women” for most purposes they can still be excluded via SSE.

I know that's the argument, but it's a legal and logical nonsense. It's (permitted and legitimate) discrimination on the grounds of sex, however much they go round the houses to get there. That's why they're excluded.

The rule"'No men, and I know we're pretending this man isn't a man but we're still keeping him out because 'no men'." can lose everything after the comma without in any way changing either the intent or the effect. So nobody with an ounce of sense would have put it in there in the first place.

That it needs statutory guidance and supreme court judgements, rather than the first person to look at it saying 'Nah, wrong comparator.' and it going no further is nuts.

This is why the EHRC telling the Government they shouls "dis-apply" the GRA in relation to the EA is such an important step.

Having already told the Government that the wording of the SSE makes it hard to put into practice they are now going a step further and saying that in applying it, it is actively discriminatory in relation to the protected characteristic of sex.

The irony being that the EHRC is the official institution appointed to ensure that the Equality Act if followed.

And they have turned round and said to the Government the fudge of saying men with a GRC is a "legal woman" results in actual women being discriminated against.

I suspect that the Government will wait to reply to this draft amendment on Equality Guidance until after the FWS review.

But even if the court says, how the law is written means that on occassion a man is a "legal woman" the Government agency tasked with implementing it is saying it is discrimination!

To my mind legitimising the GRC as though sex could just be claimed was always and still is social engineering.

It is amazing that after all these years there is only now someone at the EHRC who has the guts to tell the truth.

Maybe the Government telling Baroness Falkner she has to step down in the autumn has made her think I've got nothing to lose, so I will just spell it out and stop all this nonsese.

Yes I completely agree.

In retrospect, it might have been wise to specify the ways in which men are legally women when the GRA and EqA were established, rather then try to establish when they are not. We shouldn't be still working this out 20/15 years later.

I think all these calculations are better described as incorporating the concept of legal sex versus birth sex (which TRAs hate because they wish to abolish birth sex).

In short, it's sex fudge. The worst flavour.

I'd always assumed it was because the idea that anyone would seriously claim that humans had changed sex fell into the 'don't be fucking stupid' category for the legislators.

Post-Dentons, I do wonder.

Has anyone mentioned Section 9, subsection 1 of the GRA?

The bit that actually says gender and sex are the same thing with regard to GRCs.

They are the same thing in law, and that doesn't present any special interpretive problems.

IRL though, people wang on about it as if it means something different. I think it's because subconsciously they think that birth sex = real sex = sex, and everything else is something different - legal sex or acquired gender, which are legal concepts, or gender identity, which isn't even that, but is claimed as a psychological phenomenon.

I just read the Victoria Smith piece on Unherd. Good stuff. Nothing we haven't all thought. Lang Cleg's comment has raced away with likes. Further down the comments I stumbled over this:

Tyler Durden
22 hours ago
This is a direct consequence of the amplified permissiveness surrounding same-sex marriage. It’s given an excuse for the Left to work through LGBT for socialist revolution and for sociopaths to bully women.

Same-sex marriage made officially second-class people in this country equal with everyone else. It was the day I, as a lesbian, felt the fight was done. Time to put down the labrys. I've lost track of the number of conversations I've had with serious, responsible adult LGB people who are worried that when the tide turns against the whole trans mess, LGB rights will suffer. I've always reassured them that our rights are secure. But if people are linking gay marriage to the inexorable public rise of predatory fetishistic men, I shudder to think what's waiting for us.

But if people are linking gay marriage to the inexorable public rise of predatory fetishistic men, I shudder to think what's waiting for us.

Yes, and it was a deliberate ploy of the trans lobby to do almost the reverse. Linking the rights of fetishistic men, with newly achieved, and largely wholly supported, rights of gay people.

Gay rights were the Trojan horse. Because lobbyists rightly identified that no one wanted to go back to the days of homophobia, and could be encouraged to think they would be if they didn't support trans 'rights'.

I understand your fear, though. However, I am seeing more people understanding that this is largely a heterosexual male movement.

I would hope gay people are now accepted as just normal members of society and that will continue. It does feel however that a significant proportion of famous gay men (Russell TD, Tom Daley for example) have chosen to sell their lesbian sisters down the river for woke bro brownie points and because they are on the side of men, just don’t see the point in women, it doesn’t affect them, so who cares. That is disappointing.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive” —
as Sir Walter Scott wrote 200 years ago.

Laws should be based on truth and reality. That should be obvious! Not just because lying is immoral, but because it doesn’t work. All this trouble stems from making laws requiring everyone to pretend to believe a lie.