Am I right in thinking having a GRC is now totally irrelevant?

[loveyouradvice]

I was one of those who wanted them abolished as the anachronism they are...but am I right in thinking that today's Supreme Court judgement makes them absolutely meaningless? So no longer aneed to abolish them as they are now irrelevant???

Wow!!!!

NAL but My understanding is that the protected characteristic protects transgender people not to be discriminated against in terms of housing, employment etc but it does not give them the right to be treated as the opposite sex. In other words a trans woman for example cannot use sex discrimination to be treated the same as a woman.
the comparator test in a scenario for a trans woman is a biological man. So a trans woman under gender reassignment cannot be treated worse than a man in the same situation. The comparator isn’t a woman.
that’s how I understand it
and vice versa for a trans man. Under gender reassignment they cannot be treated worse than a woman in a scenario. The legal comparator for trans men are women

But if an opportunity is created to encourage more women into software engineering, and this opportunity is open to women and to people identifying as women, then a man excluded from this opportunity can legitimately claim that he is being discriminated against.

I wonder if men can now claim gender reassignment discrimination if for example a job role is open to males who identity as woman but not males who don’t!

nope - a man with a GRC is a man legally and biologically. They could claim sex discrimination if someone perceived them to be a woman and discriminated due to perceived sex, but any man can claim that - just as anyone can claim racial discrimination based on perceived race. How you prove any of that I really don't know, I'd be very interested if there have been any successful court cases in this area.

The trend in GRC applications will be very interesting to watch - I predict it will fall drastically.

Gaining a GRC is still the point where one is considered to have changed sex in the eyes of the law for most purposes.

Section 9(1) of the GRA provides:
Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).
Although this is subject to any other law and the exceptions later in this the GRA.

FWS argued that section was spent and no longer had any effect, but they failed on that point. My numbering has gone wrong but it's paras 99-100 of the judgment.

1. The appellant submitted that the usefulness of section 9(1) was now spent because the problems encountered by trans men and trans women that the legislation was designed to remove have all been removed by other legislation. The pension age for men and women has now been equalised and gender distinctions in many social security benefits have been removed. Civil partnerships and marriage can now be validly entered into by same sex as well as different sex couples. Given the diminished relevance of the GRA 2004 to the rights of transgender people, the appellant argues that the rule in section 9(1) is also largely spent.

1. We do not accept that. Although many provisions of the GRA 2004 have been overtaken by other legislative developments, we consider that the Act continues to have relevance and importance in providing for legal recognition of the rights of transgender people. This recognition of their changed status has practical effects for individual rights and freedoms (including, for example, in the context of marriage, pensions, retirement and social security) but also in recognising their personal autonomy and dignity and avoiding unacceptable discordance in their sense of identity as a transgender person living in an acquired gender. We also agree with the Scottish Ministers that the GRA 2004 is concerned with relationships between private parties as well as between the transgender person and the state.

The judgment yesterday was just about whether the definitions in the Equality Act should be read as including certificated sex - and it was held that it should not. But GRCs are still likely to be relevant in other contexts.

For example, I think that they may still ask for legal sex (ie including certificated sex) when collecting census data. That issue is not an Equality Act issue on my understanding and so the definitions therein don't come into it.

This I believe is correct - so groups like the academic Athena Swan being open to 'women and people who identify as women' are discriminating against men who don't identify as women. It's reasonable in law to have an employer initiative to help women because of historical and current discrimination. Women and transwomen do not share a protected characteristic so there is no justification in including transwomen to the detriment of other men. You could have a separate scheme for trans people but I suspect you'd have to exclude non-binary people as non-binary has no legal status in the UK.

The supreme court was very clear here - legal sex cannot be changed. A GRC does not change one's legal sex.

I am not sure about this. The protected characteristic of gender reassignment only goes one way - i.e. it only applies to those who are transitioning (or have transitioned or intend to). There's no protected characteristic relevant to men who do not transition.

Have you read the judgment? What it says is that section 9(1) still applies to change legal sex and gender, but that change does not bring people who are biologically male within the definition of a "woman" for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

I am sure most of us would like it if the SC had said that GRCs have no effect and legal sex is a nonsense concept and things should always be determined in accordance with biological sex in all contexts, but that's not what it says 🤷‍♀️

I think that's right about gender reassignment. However a man dies have the protected characteristics of being male and is being disadvantaged compared to a female comparator, so I think would have a claim for discrimination here.

Or course if the scheme was single-sex then it could be justified under the EA. But given the judgement, it would not be considered so.

There's no protected characteristic relevant to men who do not transition.

There is: the protected characteristic of sex.

@loveyouradvice

the while issue here was caused by the self identifying ability . This allowed pervs to just declare they are trans .

it was a real fuck up by the trans community

in know why as the resources are so hard to access to get a proper diagnosis of gender dyphoria