Were the EHRC captured?

[Dul]

The big get out for Stonewall and all the other organisations that gave the wrong advice over the years is that it was in line with EHRC guidance. But the EHRC guidance didn’t reflect the correct interpretation of the Equality Act and that was obvious (to many of us, not to them I assume). Is this because they were captured by activist staff?

Under Baroness Faulkner they pushed for clarification of the law. Did Baroness Faulkner have to take this line because she couldn’t directly contradict what her own organisation had previously said, even though it was plainly wrong?

Yes they were captured.

Melanie Field is ex EHRC www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/18/ruling-on-woman-definition-at-odds-with-uk-equality-acts-aim-says-ex-civil-servant

I believe the head of the EHRC before Baroness Faulkner was ex Stonewall - sorry can't remember his name atm.

Back in 2018 or so they were very much "getting ahead of the law", lots of stonewall lobbyists were (and are) in key government spots...

Because self id, if labour got in back in 2019 self ID was absolutely assured. It would be law.

Thankfully that was avoid, one or the rare good things about that election being won by the Tories.

The EHRC are now back in line with the law. This is one of the biggest differences in the landscape. However it's not set in stone and it could so easily be influenced again.

David Issac who was chair of stonewall 2003 - 2012. Everywhere you look you’ll find stonewall had embedded themselves

Are you talking about the EHRC saying trans people with a GRC are the opposite sex, or did they also recommend self-ID in their guidance?

Assuming we’re talking about GRC-holders only, then from the SC judgment, it comes across as the EHRC having made a genuine good-faith mistake in their misinterpretation of the way the GRA should interact with the EA in terms of the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’.

I’m not saying there weren’t GII activists working there, but that I don’t personally believe it was necessary for the EHRC to have been captured to arrive at the interpretation they did.

Realistically, although women have been arguing for years that many EA provisions could only possibly have been intended to refer to biological sex, before the SC judgment and their authoritative analysis, it would have been pretty difficult for KF or anyone to definitively come out and say “no, you’re 100% wrong” and change everything with no concrete legal basis on which to rely. I think that probably would have done far more harm than good in the long-term - there needed to be some legal trigger to change course, as the situation really wasn’t crystal clear.

Also, unless the EHRC told orgs to adopt a self-ID policy and apply that to the EA, then Stonewall has zero get out by hiding behind the EHRC’s misinterpretation of the interaction between the GRA and EA, as most trans people don’t have a GRC and Stonewall pushed self-ID for all.

I dont think Stonewall was ever in line with EHRC guidance.

And although at one time the EHRC was captured and the made Baroness Falkner's life a misery when she was appointed the guidance from the EHRC was in line with how the law had been written by Parliament (which was captured) to create 2 types of women. Actual women and "legal women".

That is why the EA included the SSE. ie the only occassion of which biological women could legally say men with a GRC could be excluded. (which TRAs tried to say wasn't the case.)

And yes long before the Court Ruling Baroness Falkner had been agitating for the GRA to be disapplied from the EA as it meant that the protected characteristic of sex was the only characteristic that has its intergrity impinged. She was was getting somewhere when KB was Minister for Women but the Labour won the election.

So what she was saying is another way of saying what the court case was about that the word sex should be biological. In fact her proposal was more radical. There is no basis on which the GRA should be in the EA at all.

So what has now happened thanks to the Court Case if the deliberate attempt by those who wrote the EA to get trans people accepted as having changed sex has been stopped.

So if you want to blame anyone blame the Labour Government who used their position as law writers to try and carry out what was social engineering.

Never forget that the inclusion of the GRA into the EA was always meant to be the trojan horse that would lead to self identification becoming legal.

And this in fact if the real threat, which many in Labour are still campaigning for. Self identitification.

Have to say I am suprised anyone on FWR would believe Stonewall's version of events.

Just shows how powerful their social engineering has been.

Didn't think this would come up again on FWR.

Next worry is that once Baroness Falkner is removed from the EHRC who Labour will slip in there to try and reverse engine what has happened.

I wish I could remember sources better, but someone either on here or on Twitter said that the very first EHRC draft when it was first created was in line with what has now been stated by the Supreme Court. Before it was published however, it was criticized and amended by transactivists into the bastardized form it ended up in for the first 15 years of the EA’s existence.

Women really have been done over. We aren’t going to get that time back and enormous damage has been done to our rights.

I really wish the mainstream media were on top of this and willing to publicise what has been done. It would stop all the current whinging and pretense that rights have been removed.

Edited to add it might have been Malcolm
@ TwisterFilm on Twitter who had done the investigation, but I don’t have access just now.

It wasn't just the CEO. There were lots of trans activists in the EHRC.

The former Legal Director of the EHRC, Grey Collier, also spent some time as a Trustee of Mermaids. Collier was non binary while working at the EHRC and spoke out against the EHRC's rebalancing of womens' rights with gender rights after leaving the EHRC. Collier now seems to identify as a trans man.

A number of trans activist staff who were at the EHRC in 2023 seem to have leaked spurious claims to Channel 4 in a bid to try and get Baroness Falkner ousted.

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-claims-of-toxic-culture-at-equality-and-human-rights-commission

Sex Matters have a timeline of recent attempts by trans activists to try and sabotage the EHRC under Baroness Falkner.

https://sex-matters.org/about-us/what-we-are-up-against/ehrc-timeline/

the very first EHRC draft when it was first created was in line with what has now been stated by the Supreme Court

It may well have been but as I said earlier the EHRC whoever was in post was stuck with what Parliament had put into law.

ie that anyone with a GRC became "legally" the other sex. And the law makers knew they were discriminating against women because they went to the bother of writing the Single Sex Exemptions.

If they hadn't intended that for "all purposes" someone with a GRC was legallly the other sex, they would have bothered writing the SSE.

Its not a question of what was said to have been said by someone.

You just need to look at the law as written and the implication of why the SSE was written.

And just to be clear, as I said earlier the Court ruling was that the EA in allowing the GRA to impinged on the protected characeristic of sex was in fact discrimination.

The court ruling that sex means biology is only in relation to the EA.

Just to stress again, this Court Ruling will only apply to equality can be used as a judgement point.

It will do nothing to stop all those who say they are trans women, which will be an increasing group taking advantage of what Stonewall has done, which is that you can "self identity".

This is going to roll on relentlessly, and most organisations, even if they put back single sex toilets will still be listening to trans voices in relation to every thing else.

This is what Stonewall have achieved. Creating a social norm and a whole generation who have grown up thinking you can just identify into a sex.

Dentons and Wpath, misinformation, confusion and under the radar.

Yes. When I spoke to them about designs for toilets in Document T ignoring those with certain disabilities they were very interested. Until they asked me why did that happen. When I told them they couldn’t get me off the phone quick enough.

I don’t understand your comment or how it pertains to what I said.

The Supreme Court ruling makes it clear what the law should always have been, which is why the EHRC are having to write new guidelines.

“as I said earlier the EHRC whoever was in post was stuck with what Parliament had put into law.” The Supreme Court disagrees with you and has stated that the law had never said what the EHRC said it did.

The Supreme Court ruling makes it clear what the law should always have been, which is why the EHRC are having to write new guidelines.

Up until it went to the Supreme Court, as the 2 preceeding cases have made clear, the intention of the law as written by Parliament was to make biological women subject to men with a GRC.

The Supreme Court decided that the result of how the law had been written was in fact discriminatory against the protected characteristic of sex.

But that is what the law makes had intended.

You and I, and eventually the Supreme Court, said this isn't right.

But that is because we see it as discrimination and luckily the Supreme Court did as well, although 2 lower courts hadn't. Not forgetting that the Court ruling was based on the act as constructed was discriminatory, not that they are saying woman or female always means sex outside of the EA.

So our opinion has been validaed by the court, but for the people who wrote the law, their opinion has been thwarted.

So for you, me, FWR and the SC it is "should".

But for Labour and all the MPs who voted through the EA changes in 2010, it wasn't should. They didn't want sex to mean biology, because they wanted the GRC to undermine the concept of sex.

And they may very well re-write it once they bring in self ID.

IWTR, for gods sake, please go and read some Michael Foran or somebody.

It seems as if you've extended from not being able to understand the Equality Act to not being able to understand the Supreme Court judgment about it.

Did the parliamentarians who wrote the law tell you their opinion was thwarted, @IwantToRetire or are you taking the word of transactivist, Melanie Field, who might well be lying.

But that is because we see it as discrimination and luckily the Supreme Court did as well, although 2 lower courts hadn't.

It wasn’t luck or a policy-based decision though - the lower courts didn’t take the time to work through the key clauses of the EA in detail, applying each permutation of the definition of woman and analysing the logical pitfalls of each to determine the only remaining logical interpretation.

Only the SC did this, and that’s why they arrived at the ruling they handed down.

taking the word of transactivist, Melanie Field, who might well be lying.

Or indeed telling the truth in that her intent was thwarted.

But her intent is not important - it's what Parliament thought they were voting on. And as the Supreme Court made clear, the only coherent overall reading is contrary to IWTR's.

There's no reason to assume text possibly inserted with an intent to help lobby a misreading out of the EHRC overrides the fundamental structure of the act as written and voted on.

He should never have got the job. He was completely conflicted, being a lawyer representing the government on a number of huge contractual deals - difficult to tell truth to power when they are giving you work. His law firm (of which he remained a very high up the food chain equity partner during his chairmanship at EHRC) was also regularly being feted by Stonewall as the country's best LGBT+ employer. Two Parliamentary committees and Harriet Harman objected to his appointment on conflict grounds.

What a lot of over angry posts.

It almost sounds like you are all Labour supporters who dont want Labour to be blame for intentionally creating a law to give the GRC power over the protected characteristic sex.

This has been discussed on many threads, by many others. So I am not saying anything knew.

And if you dont trust what has been posted on FWR I can say that I have heard one of the women who took part in writing the SSE, is exactly what they wanted to do.

Why do you think the Labour whatsapp group was so angry. They made it clear that the intention of the GRA inside the EA had been undermined.

There have been endless threads on FWR about the intention of Labour in writing that law as they did.

Why are you all so intent on defending Labour?

Why do you think they are making such a fuss?

Why do you think the WEC is whining about trans people not being considered by the EHRC.

And like it or not, the Supreme Court ruling was about the protected characteristic of sex being discriminated against, unlike any of the others.

Not to understand the history of how this happened and the intent behind it, means not taking seriously what the back lash in going to be.

I don’t know anything about him specifically, but just wanted to point out that the Stonewall board was still firmly resisting the pressure from transactivists to incorporate the T in 2011-12, much to some people at Stonewall’s frustration.

David Issac has chaired the court of governors of University of the Arts London since 2018…

It almost sounds like you are all Labour supporters who dont want Labour to be blame for intentionally creating a law to give the GRC power over the protected characteristic sex.

Some MPs and some civil servants who drafted the law intended it. However, their impact was mitigated by those that didn't and the law that eventually got passed did not have this intention.

How do I know it didn't? The Supreme Court said so on April 16th. They confirmed the intention (and correct interpretation) of the law. They said it couldn't possibly have been intended to be interpreted that way, giving plenty of reasons why e.g. same-sex attraction would become meaningless.

(I have only ever voted for Labour once in my life, when I was ~18)

(I'm not angry. I'm just rather baffled that you're dismissing the entire meaning behind the Supreme Court judgement)

“It almost sounds like you are all Labour supporters who dont want Labour to be blame for intentionally creating a law to give the GRC power over the protected characteristic sex.”

This is simply not the case. We have obviously heard conflicting histories of how the law came to be written and the intent of those who wrote it.

Labour have been absolute fools over this in recent years. Back in 2010, it appears to me that there may have been conflicts as the law was written, but as @BonfireLady says, the law that was ultimately created (in its final form) was confirmed to have been written in such a way that the only intended meaning of woman could be the original meaning.

However, this is taking the thread off topic. The discussion here is about whether the EHRC was corrupted. The interpretation of the law the EHCR finally put out was not consistent with what the Supreme Court have concluded, which is odd. How did a body created to interpret the law, get it so wrong?

It would be interesting to know whether there was an earlier draft which complied with what the Supreme Court says was the intention. If I could access Twitter I would try to find the information I saw before, but my access is limited right now and will be till next week.

If your argument is that the Supreme Court judgment has interpreted the law and the intent of its authors incorrectly, fair enough, but that isn’t what this discussion is about.

If anyone else could throw any clarity on the situation, I’d be interested to hear it.

Next worry is that once Baroness Falkner is removed from the EHRC who Labour will slip in there to try and reverse engine what has happened.

There's a few comments on this, however a couple of things to reflect on

1. the labour government knew her position and extended her contract when they came to power. They didn't replace her. This makes her a convenient scape goat to blame in the long term without Labour taking responsibility for it, but it also works to ensure sex and reality is recognised.
2. regarding any roll back, there's an issue for anyone trying this. It's called the law. And any attempt to do so is now liable to be followed by legal action to reinforce the law and liabilities of various organisations. If the EHRC start giving out bad advice that's not in lie with the law that's going to be very embarrassing especially if it's a labour appointee.
3. public opinion sits in a very particular place. Labour would be extremely unwise to ignore it. Reform are very much lurking and waiting for labour to fall flat on its face over this.

So I don't think roll back is as easy as it might sound, despite the noise trying to discredit the EHRC from MPs right now.

public opinion sits in a very particular place. Labour would be extremely unwise to ignore it

I'm not sure public opinion is a factor in their planning, look at the cuts to winter fuel allowance and the proposed changes to PIP. Even after the protest votes towards reform they are still going forward with no sign of stopping.