What does the SC ruling mean for schools and youth organisations?

[JellySaurus]

What does the SC ruling mean for schools and youth organisations?

Both for the children and for the employees and volunteers.

Yes. In schools.

The judgment specifically considers the issue of single sex higher education institutions and comes to the same conclusion as for everything else.

I thought this until a bloke I’d been chatting to occasionally at work revealed he’d been born female. I consider myself to be GC, but I wouldn’t have known without being told. Now it seems impossible to think of him as a woman, and it would still feel odd if he came into the women’s toilets.

I agree with this. My husband and I encountered a trans man in a customer service role last summer. Taller and more muscular than my husband, no breasts (I would guess full mastectomy rather than just a binder), facial hair. Even from a distance there was something not quite right, and although even face to face at close range the presentation was undeniably and convincingly masculine, as soon as we actually exchanged words the gig was up. I was actually quite surprised that the voice gave it away, because testosterone does cause women's voices to break, which is something detransitioned women often struggle with. But as soon as we were out of earshot, my husband and I were like, "That was a woman, right?" "Yep."

The ruling does not determine the definition of ‘woman’ in all situations/ circumstances, but it does determine what it means in law when it comes to unequal treatment of males and females. So schools could promote the ‘transwomen are women’ narrative still. If teaching about or citing the law, they would need to say that the term ‘woman’ when used in uk legislation refers to females/biological women.

The EA requires people with protected characteristics to be treated equally to those without these characteristics unless there is a legitimate aim for not doing so, and the ‘unequal treatment’ is proportionate to achieving the aim.

In England, schools are required, by law, to provide single sex changing rooms and loos. The legitimate/proportionate reasoning has been applied by government. The ruling has clarified that access must be determined by sex. Schools can provide gender neutral facilities, but these must be in addition to single sex ones.

If/where schools wish to treat pupils differently / segregate them in line with any protected characteristic or combination of characteristics (e.g race, disability, sex, gender reassignment), they need to have a clear and justifiable rationale for doing so. It is highly unlikely that they can use ‘force teaming’ to group children with the protected characteristic of female with males with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment (and vice versa for males). I don’t think there is any circumstance/ situation where this could be viewed legitimate and proportionate.

And workplaces. H&S regs.

https://www.hse.gov.uk/simple-health-safety/workplace-facilities/health-safety.htm

'Employers have to provide facilities suitable for any worker...

...separate facilities for men and women, except where each toilet is in a separate room lockable from the inside'
...
'Number of toilets and washbasins for mixed use (or women only)'

And now there is absolutely no ambiguity about what is meant by 'women'.

😊

Yes, great point about the forced teaming.

"Females without the protected characteristic of gender reassignment plus males with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment" is not a coherent grouping. These two separate and distinct groups of people have no shared needs which would justify them being grouped together in a way that excludes other people not fitting either description.

Even if they both have needs which justify them having spaces free from other people not sharing their own particular characteristic, the needs of female people cannot be met in the same space as male people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. If you try to do this then you are no longer meeting the needs of the female people who make up the vast majority of the group, and can no longer justify excluding anyone.

The judgment makes that absolutely crystal clear.

Breaking...

Listen to ⁦KishwerFalkner⁩ on R4 Today interviewed by ⁦bbcnickrobinson

There will be a new statutory code on the implementation of the Equality Act hopefully by the summer, says KishwerFalkner of EHRC

Sex is real. The law says so. Pretending it doesn't exist is illegal and discriminatory.

With the school toilets though, weren't schools already breaking the law even before this ruling then, if they were letting female-identifying boys use the girls' toilets? Because it's not as if a 13yo has a GRC!

Brilliant. I recall the move on this brilliant woman to remove her. KB intervened.

It’s incredible how strong the lies, attacks and backlash continuously was. Those people should be held to account.

Exactly. This is the problem.

Yes, equality protection in NI is based on different regional legislation (unfortunately). Logically, exactly the same legal arguments should apply here (ie that the original legislation will have meant biological sex and the laws don't hang together properly if you interpret it to mean gender), but the Department of Justice is headed by the very pro-trans Alliance party, so I imagine they'll resist that as far as possible.

I'm not entirely sure how you would go about challenging it here, I wonder would the same argument apply that Rishi Sunak used against the Scottish self-ID bill, or would that only apply to new legislation being brought in?

Yes, I believe so.

You don't have to have a GRC to be covered by the PC of GR.

This rolling has made it absolutely clear I think that the PC of GR does not over-ride the PC of sex.

So now question will be for many organisations should we go mixed sex. If we do does the hall or other venue have the correct facilities to allow separate toilets. Except things like refuges hospital and school is there a risk of fewer women only spaces? I hope I’m wrong.

I think that was already established in the previous judgment though. The issue was that Lady Haldane found that "sex" meant legal sex, not biological sex, meaning that people with GRCs would be considered their acquired sex for the purposes of the single sex exemptions. That part of the previous ruling has been overturned.

I think it had already been conceded that people without a GRC would not be considered the sex with which they identify for the purposes of the single sex exemptions.

I’m hoping it means my teen & tween DDs never have to face having a boy using the same toilets and changing rooms as them. This is something my teen DD has been worrying about - luckily hasn’t happened in her school but she’s heard about it happening elsewhere

It changes everything for organizations who have been letting in boys to girls’ groups and vice versa.

If you want to have a single-sex group, you can under the single-sex exemptions in the EA. But you can’t then let in a subset of the opposite sex. You can’t let in, for example, boys who say they have trans identities. The Haldane judgement already made this clear - legal sex is legal sex whatever identity anyone feels. This judgement doubles down on that and says that even if someone has a GRC, they are still legally their biological sex. If you let in someone who is legally male, then you aren’t maintaining the single-sex exemption that lets you have a girls’ group. You would be open to legal action both from girls who were disadvantaged and boys who don’t claim trans identities.

People who are blithering about gender identity as separate from sex are just wrong. There is no concept of gender identity in UK legislation. The judgement even discusses the point that sex and gender are used interchangeably in the legislation and decides that only the concept of biological sex is intended.

There’s a lot of ‘ooo complicated’ from people who don’t want to accept this judgement. But it’s incredibly thorough, forthright, and crystal clear.

Yes. We now need legal cases to deal with this.

So what’s the point of a GRC now?

Surely anyone with any sense would be reviewing their toilet policies this weekend and follow the law from Tuesday.
Or certainly very very quickly before they end up as the next NHS Fife!

Not much. There’s a lot in the judgement about the historical legislative context which gave rise to them - mostly to do with equal marriage for homosexual couples.

Hopefully, but it sounds like plenty will try to dig down or fail to understand. The judgement is so far from what activists having been saying the law requires that it’s going to take a while for reality to reassert.

Sorry if this has already been covered, but wasn’t this already dealt with in the 2022 Haldane ruling? I thought the SC case decided yesterday only further clarified the situation by addressing the status of GRCs?