Trevor Philips in the Times

[Igneococcus]

I will put this into the other threads that collect links to newspaper articles as well but I thought this comment by Sir Trevor Phillips, the first chairman of the EHRC, deserves its own thread:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/4039df92-15a2-48e8-a73f-aca8dad25d0b?shareToken=fac9197f0581a79518d1234d5ae195e5

Thanks for the share token. I enjoyed that.

Excellent article, thank you @Igneococcus

Fascinating article, thank you.
I had been wondering this weekend what the people involved in the original 2010 Act thought.
I must have known but completely forgotten that Trevor Phillips chaired the original review that led to the Equality Act 2010.

He sums it up clearly.

”We called for full protection against discrimination on the ground of gender reassignment. For the first time in the world, the 2010 act made gender reassignment ground for discrimination in a similar fashion to race and sex. Had anyone believed that “trans women are women” there would have been no need for such a provision.”

And he also says that he think the TRAs have been deliberately deceitful.

Brilliant.

Wonderful that a black man, who was involved in writing the legislation saying transwomen are not women or we'd not had to have gender reassignment, that activists deliberately and knowingly mislead and that recognising (not not believing in) sex is not akin to racism.

This man is also a very experienced expert on equalities with an impressive CV.

He is not from a 'far right' background. He was appointed by Tony Blair and is Labour through and through.

He doesn't hold back in condemning the dishonesty.

He was a man who sought not to persecute trans people - he was one of the first in the world to introduce legal protections.

He is the very opposite of what so many of these bloody activists have repeated as mantras. This makes his voice hugely important.

Oh superb. Many thanks for the article @Igneococcus I hope that my TRA friends will see some sense once their grieving is done and reading cogent and intelligent articles may help! (Didn’t before but hope springs an‘ all that!)

It's nice that he's made this clarification, but I'm still disappointed he pushed for its inclusion at all.

I see no vale in protecting gender reassignment at all, nor recognising gender in law as a concept. I don't even see it as passing the WORIAD test for belief...

Trevor shouldn't be so pleased with himself.

And he also says that he think the TRAs have been deliberately deceitful.
I think this is really important. I hope someone in the comments will mention the Denton report.

Strong words and powerful. Thank you for sharing. Let's hope in time some ardant TRAs may review this with more critical thinking skills.

Very good to read this. I do hope the many news reporters, chat show hosts etc making comments and currently listening to the likes of Peter Tatchell giving completely wrong information will read this.

I haven’t read him before. Interesting to see all the religious references and direct references to race- I haven’t heard the tar brush phrase for a very long time. It gave a truly visceral quality to what he was saying.

Excellent article, thanks.

There are of course people in the comments telling him off for some mistakes in the Latin :)

Thanks for the share token. Great article. It would be good to hear an unequivocal confirmation from Keir Starmer that the Supreme Court ruling is the start of the great rollback. Not holding my breath on that one, though.

I am also baffled that gender reassignment was considered important enough to make it into the list of nine protected characteristics, but I suppose they were stuck with it because the Gender Recognition Act had just been passed when they started work on preparing the Equality Act. It's in Hansard, I believe, that ministers reassured Parliament that experts had told them this would only ever affect a tiny number of people. No more than 5000 people would qualify to get a GRC. A number of prescient MPs tried to point out some obvious problems with allowing people to get their birth certificates re-written, but they were ignored and written off as bigots, homophobes, doomsayers, religious extremists etc. Of course we know now, because the egregious Professor Whittle has told us on the record, IIRC, that the GRA was a Trojan Horse and the activists always expected to use it as a springboard (mixed metaphor alert) for much of the stuff that's followed.

It's a really, really good article. Top work and a welcome counterblast to Melanie Field's claims.

I don't blame Trevor Phillips for introducing GR protections. It was done in a different political climate.
I do wish it hadn't been done in that way because it sits very uncomfortably alongside 7 other protected characteristics all of which are objectively verifiable physical/physiological or legal states. It's really the odd one out. As a separate PC it's basically turned sexual fetish into a PC along with mental distress. It's vague and undefinable. As a belief in transhumanism or gendered souls it should be left to the Grainger test to see if it is capable of being a protected belief and if so, fall under the PC of Religion or Belief.

ETA: So basically I am agreeing with you, in case that wasn't clear.

I was struck by this too.

Archive of this excellent and compelling piece by someone at the heart of it.

archive.ph/vyqjy

@Igneococcus thank you for sharing.
I wonder how many people will feel they have been deceived by activists and allies as he does. It might spur them to speak out once they have thought about it for a wee while.

A very good article thanks for the share token!

Gender reassignment would have been considered verifiable at the time. No one imagined Pippa Bunce. They were thinking of people who were under the care of doctors and having treatment.

Yes, this.

We know now that the definitions in the GRA (& therefore the GR protections in the EqA) were loose and capable of exploitation. Whether it will ever be possible, against the tide of public opinion, to tighten them up I think is unlikely. But in any case, I think it is good to be able to protect people from discrimination on the grounds of being trans. Just as it is good to protect against sex discrimination, and to know that those protections have not been eroded by casual redefinition of basic vocabulary.

An excellent article thank you for sharing. This is the key paragraph for me:
For the first time in the world, the 2010 act made gender reassignment ground for discrimination in a similar fashion to race and sex. Had anyone believed that “trans women are women” there would have been no need for such a provision.

So apparently Harriet Harman has been claiming that the EA always intended that ‘TWAW’ but this makes it clear that she’s a liar. A liar actively working against the interests of women. Again. I have thoughts about women like her.

And Melanie Fields. Liars, both.

Great article! I find it so disappointing the Guardian cannot get these articles commissioned. The Times have been so far ahead

Another good article. And worth pointing out I think, that same sex marriage wasn’t legal until 2013. Had the marriage act come before the EA, I wonder what the protection for gender reassignment would have looked like?

But there was no need to be.
I agree that that was the thinking at the time of the GRA about people getting GRCs, even though that statute removed the medical and surgical requirements. But the EA PC doesn't just cover people with GRCs, it's for people who think they have a transgender identity.
How do you prove that someone is thinking about taking steps to change their gender? And what are the steps? Earrings? Doc Martens? Mastectomy? It's very nebulous. I think the problem of the woolliness of the concept of GR as a PC should have been clear even at the time.

Edited for clarity