Women's Rights in the UK

[UnhappyAndYouKnowIt]

I was talking with a friend this morning about the Supreme Court case, and she perceived it as removal of trans people's rights and a denial of their existence.

I wanted to emphasise that the need for a clear definition of "woman" is needed in order to ensure that women's rights are protected.

But when she questioned what I meant by women's rights, I got stuck for a minute. The discourse has focused so much on toilets and changing rooms that I actually couldn't remember!

Eventually I said it's the right to not be discriminated against because of your biology. Is that pretty much right?

So, the right to not be fired for getting pregnant.

The right to paid time off work to recover from pregnancy.

The right to access contraception to avoid getting pregnant.

The right to end a pregnancy in some circumstances.

The right to not be prevented from voting because of biology.

The right to not be prevented from having a bank account without a husband's permission due to biology.

The right to not be prevented from owning property because of biology

The right to not be paid less for the same job because of biology.

Am I missing anything?

Is the right to single sex spaces actually a woman's right? Or is it a human right because men also have the right to single sex spaces where it's necessary for privacy and dignity?

Could trans people's rights to be free from abuse and harassment eventually lead to trans spaces being enshrined in law for their privacy and dignity?

The aim isn't to humiliate transwomen, it's to maintain the dignity and integrity of women and, often, not to obfuscate the details of the subject being talked about.

But is parroting what a lot of the media are reporting

You could point out to her that if it had gone the other way, female people literally wouldn't exist as a recognised category in law. But thanks to the Supreme Court, it has been confirmed that both female people deserve to exist and enjoy legal protection.

Well, actually, even the BBC had to publish an article regarding the prison population (because the subject came up in parliament) stating that men who identify as trans are convicted for sex crimes at a far higher rate compared to other men.....
But we're not allowed to notice that fact....

The background to the case for which the judgement was announced -

https://forwomen.scot/03/08/2021/the-status-of-women-in-scotland-gender-representation-on-public-boards-act/

MBM's analysis -

https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2024/11/19/briefing-note-for-women-scotland-vs-the-scottish-ministers-uk-supreme-court-26-27-november-2024/

The relevant single sex exemptions in the EQA 2010 relating to -

Services and spaces -

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/16/20/7

The allowance for an occupational requirement for a position if a need has been identified for that position to be filled by someone of a particular sex -

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/16/26/1?view=plain

Sports being allowed to have separate male and female sporting categories where safety is a consideration -

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/14/5

And the Supreme Court has ruled that all of these should have meant to refer to biological women all the time, contrary to what lobbying groups have claimed.

Referring to a man as a man is merely stating a fact. We don’t have compelled speech laws in this country, so I’m free to call a man a man, despite his false claim that he’s a woman.

Age is also a protected characteristic, as it’s also immutable. It would therefore be entirely appropriate to refer to an adult as an adult, even if they were claiming to be under 18.

All those ‘rights’ you’ve mentioned have surely been in existence for decades?
I believe women are also allowed to own property in their own right. Continue to work following marriage…?

In the main, 5 decades exactly since the 1975 sex discrimination act. But other rights, like married women being taxed in their own right and their earnings not regarded as the husbands, only since 1990.

Similar provisions apply to being allowed to join pension schemes.

Age isn't immutable! But it isn't something a person can identify into or has any influence over.

Says a MAN.

Why are you even part of a conversation that revolves around women? It is glaringly obvious you are solely on this thread to espouse MEN’s rights.

I think it was Sex Matters that published a study of prison inmates in the UK. It was discovered that TW are more than twice as likely as men to be in prison for Sex crimes. The statistic was something like 47% of sex crimes prisoners are TW, while only about 20% are males. These statistics stayed true even when compared to the US prison system that found similar results.

Your comment doesn’t make sense.

Can you really not understand that women want privacy and safety for ourselves and children? Men, including transwomen, commit 98% of sex crime. It makes sense to exclude them from spaces where women and children are more vulnerable than usual.

We also want our equal rights restored, not have men taking women’s sports prizes and quotas.

If men feel humiliated when they are called men, that’s a problem in their own own minds. As a woman, why would I be more eager to insult men than to protect my own and children’s physical safety?

They can use single sex spaces. Transwomen - men - can enter male spaces and transmen - women - with some caveates listed by the SC to do with appearance, can enter female spaces.
They are not excluded from single sex space only from opposite sex single sex spaces.

I agree. The fear is that by removing sex as a biological category it becomes impossible to keep check of sex discrimination because 'gender' does not indicate sex. Thus, women could lose rights or be discriminated against and it would be lawful because certificated sex = sex, not biological sex.

Confusing. You mean 47% of trans identified males committed sex crimes as opposed to 20% of non-trans identified males. They are all males but it looks as if the ones who think they are women are more dangerous to women and children!

Yes, I think it’s this way round, from Ministry of Justice statistics. Not that more sex offenders are TW than non-trans-identifying men, which would be astonishing because TW are still a tiny proportion of the population. But a TW is more likely than a non-trans-identifying man to commit sex offences.

I will endeavor to be more clear. And I was wrong about the statistic. It was around 70% of TIMs in prison are serving time for sex offenses, in comparison to the roughly 20% of nonTIMs serving sentences for sex crimes.

Another study, completed in 2019, found that
“Half of the male prisoners who declared themselves transgender in 2019 have been sentenced with one or more sexual offences.”

https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/government-figures-70-per-cent-183558245.html

If given the choice, I’d rather be in a toilet with a nonTIM. But thankfully, we don’t have to worry about sharing our single sex spaces anymore.

Because they are men. They have male sex organs, XY chromosomes and have experienced male puberty. That is a statement of scientific fact.

How we all live our lives is up to each of us as individuals, who we love, what we wear, but men cannot become women and they cannot claim to be women when it suits them.

There's going to be a degree of uncertainty about those stats though, depending on whether the MoJ are recording transwomen with a GRC as female for those purposes.

You mean they could be worse?

All those rights have existed for decades. However, by allowing some men to identify into the sex class woman and making it difficult to say what a woman is those rights were all in danger. Every one of them. Because you cannot enforce rights for a sex class that is not a sex class anymore. Put simply, if you cannot say what a woman is then you cannot enforce/monitor rights for women. (Also men, of course, equally discriminated against by trans ideology and 'certificated' sex.)

Yep, or they could be better, depending on what the transwomen with GRCs are in for, and how many of them there are in comparison. It's unlikely to be many, given there's less than 10,000 people with GRCs in total, and some of them are transmen, but the bigger the cohort the smaller the effect of any one individual on the stats.

The court could not have found any other way, it just didn’t logically work.

There case the Scottish govt were trying to make was that:

Trans people with a grc have different rights to trans people without a grc.

You are not allowed to know if someone has a grc or not.

The rights now confirmed by the Supreme Courts is that only females are entitled to call themselves women. Not men that have some inner feelings of their impression of womanhood.

I thought it was just that in terms of single sex facilities a woman is a biological female? The gov have stated they won't repeal the GRA which would suggest that transwomen can otherwise still refer to themselves as female and be considered a woman by law. Well, that's what Google is telling me.

Stonewall didnt mistakenly interpret the law- they had been lobbying behind the scenes for years to get the single sex exemptions removed (as well as sex by deception). When that failed they simply told everyone that the law worked on a self declaration basis when it never did. The only debate in FWS was whether a gender recognition certificate changes your sex for the purposes of the equality act and it does not.

your friend might also want to think about why lesbian groups intervened in the FWS case. The effect of men saying they are lesbians has had a chilling effect on lesbian groups and spaces. It was part of the reasoning for the decision - the Supreme Court justices considered whether a straight man with a GRC becomes a lesbian for all legal purposes and concluded that cannot be the case as “nobody is sexually orientated towards the possession of a certificate”

women need single sex spaces, services and sports for safety, dignity and fairness. If trans people don’t want ti use the single sex facilities for their sex they should have campaigned for third spaces, not taken women’s. Women are not human shields or validation props.

Trans do deserve rights, but those rights should never encroach a biological female’s rights.

The issue we have is a trans person believes it is their right to women’s spaces, but this is in fact going against the rights of biological women, which is a much larger percentage of the population might I add as well.

I don’t see how this is humiliating or taking their rights away. If they used women’s single sex spaces without the consent of women, that is in fact, taking away the rights of women.