Good piece on current misreading of the SC ruling

[Nightingalenight]

From Akua Reindorf, commissioner for the EHRC. Her review of Essex University’s deplatforming of Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman was so helpful - back in 2021! - to get my thoughts straight around the Equality Act - helped me to challenge my employer at the time. She’s equally clear and incisive here.

Ill-informed challenges to Supreme Court decision help nobody

https://www.thetimes.com/article/f89ecc90-d81e-4f92-967b-8b6309cbb65f?shareToken=d4e1b4913d950de78b582ea427c8d64e

Thank you for this article. If I recall correctly, one of the many reasons for outrage when Mridul Wadhwa was appointed as the CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was that the advert said that they were using the single-sex exemption in the Equality Act so only women could apply, and yet they accepted this application from a male who didn't even have a Gender Recognition Certificate, and he got the job. I did wonder if a suitably qualified male who very properly didn't apply could have taken them to an Employment Tribunal over that.

Presumably that will be much clearer in the future.

The share token doesn’t work for me for some reason, does anyone have the archive link please?

Thank you @Nightingalenight

It has been said, for example, that competitive sex-segregated sports and single-sex facilities in workplaces, schools and services can operate on the basis of self-identified gender rather than biological sex. This was false before the Supreme Court judgment, and it is even more false now. Indeed if it were true, the appeal would not have been won.

👏🏽

https://archive.ph/goouw

See if that works…

Thank you, this is much clearer to me now and I wanted to be sure I understood it all correctly.

Thanks op, I'll be saving this article.

Thanks @Nightingalenightand @TwoLoonsAndASproutfor the links.

This is really useful, I need to raise some of these issues at work and the article puts it all very simply.

Thanks for sharing the article. It caused me to make a complaint to the BBC about today's World At One's coverage of the case with one v biased and ill-informed guest (Ben Bradshaw) who was trotting out most of the mis-interpretations Akua Reindorf writes about. Reading her opinion piece was rather soothing after listening to a man basically saying "I'm not a lawyer but I'm going to go ahead and make it all up anyway to suit my narrative" (obviously he didn't really say that (apart from IANAL).

The BBC really have been awful on this. You'd think they'd have clocked that the days of 'here's an activist bloke emotively making shit up' are over, and the receipts are starting to come in.

So this is published and shared on LinkedIn https://lnkd.in/exkhUDii is this accurate ? It seems different from what was published by Akua

I have not read it yet and IANAL but it was written by Joanne Lockwood so I am confident that it will be pure pish

Men like him need to be held responsible for spreading nonsense.

A quote from Akua Reindorf today, as a result of Andrew Sumption misreading the law and stirring things up on PM:

And for the avoidance of doubt, it is just wrong that orgs aren't obliged to exclude transwomen from women’s single-sex facilities. Once a facility is single-sex, it must be open only to biological women/men. Otherwise it no longer meets the conditions for a single-sex facility

I must say that on this point I cannot believe this was the intention of the people who voted for the legislation. The idea of perceived characteristics was supposed to prevent people from being discriminated against, not permit it.

In any case perceived characteristics must be difficult to establish. How do you show that someone genuinely perceived a female person to be male? Isn't "I thought she was a man" exactly the sort of thing an anti-woman bigot would say?

When the female has taken steps to deliberately portray themselves as a male, through the use of hormones?
It’s a whole different ball game to a normal woman who happens to be tall and thin and chooses not to wear makeup.

Its clear that it will be in limited circumstances, but yes for example some women in refuges/rape crises services may well be unable to access the help and support they need if there is someone in the room who they perceive as male and causes trauma responses. This is one of the things that people need to take responsibility for when they choose to change their appearance to a radical degree; no one wants to stop them doing it, but their impact on others is something they have to take responsibility for. Their choices can't be a reason to make a needed resource or service untenable for someone else, and for everyone's needs to be met equally the service needs to not group them together. I'd think this clause would work equally to protect men who in that awful term 'pass' so well that a group or service with men would be difficult, and who need an additional or different provision.

The guidance only says that in those situations they may need a service provided separately.

Thanks for sharing the article.

Today I have given feedback on some terrible training at work citing the new ruling and using the article as an easier read than the full ruling.

The LGBTQ group have replied and said they are updating their training to reflect the new ruling. I will be very interested in seeing what comes out if this as the training I attended included the bullshit version where a trans woman can access anything and no one has any right to check their genitals.

The trans identified male running the trans awareness training actually advised a manger that his female team members had absolutely no right to object to a TIF using the women’s toilets, nor could they ask if he was trans, and anyway, how would they know, you can’t even tell as they pass so well.

I was fuming but couldn’t say much as the local council I work for is so captured that it could have risked my job. I’ve already been marked as a trouble maker for raising issues about a mandatory gender question in the workforce data questionnaire. Apparently there are no plans to have “non” as a gender option, I must be cis or trans.

Wondering if in a few months women are going to need to start organising together to take their individual organisations to court, because legally now they do not have a leg to stand on. And if they'd rather pay up than follow the law, well the insurers and general public will eventually lose patience with that, but the clear knowledge that women will demand that the law is followed in practice as well as policy may be necessary.

But it could well be that these are still the initial tantrums, the guidance will come out, everyone will adjust - God knows they always expected women to just roll with it and suck it up so I'm sure men can - and things will settle down.

An excellent article that's lucid at the same time as being legally rigorous!

And again, the provision of a third ‘mixed/uni-sex’ space is offered as a solution. The problem is that this triggers dysphoria because it clarifies that trans people don’t actually change sex. So TRA groups won’t accept it as they claim they are a ‘real woman’ etc. It’s an impasse.

Yes. I think that's what's going to have to happen. Probably several dozen cases, which we'll have to pay for, to encourage employers and organisations to follow the law.