EHRC on Woman’s Hour 21/5/25

[SabrinaThwaite]

Kishwer Falkner from the EHRC will be interviewed about the SC judgment today.

Yes, especially when being respectful is an expectation only applied to one side.

I can’t help but feel that her optimism that people and we all know which people will be 'sensitive and respectful' is somewhat misplaced here.

'If people are respectful of other people's rights ....'

Ie if trans people don't try to use wrong sex services?

Link to the consultation:

www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/codes-practice/code-practice-services-public-functions-and-associations

'You cannot interpret what we say any which way you like and then say you followed it' !

Aim to provide new CoP to Parliament by the end of July.

I think you could take that one of two ways, she's either being a bit naive, and doesn't really grasp the extent of how far transactivists will go. Which I find a little difficult to believe, given how she has been so personally targeted.

Or the other interpretation is that she is holding the legal line and that's the end of it.

A kind of, this is the law, if you see it differently, knock yourself out, but it will still be the law.

Maybe it's a very common characteristic of people dealing with law - to be too definitive is a bit of a mistake, you have to let these things play out. Because they will.

Even if they replace Baroness Faulkner with someone more 'favourable' to the TRA position, surely they will still have to implement the law as it is. How can they do anything else?

By producing muddled and unclear guidance.

But then it will get challenged.

I think you'd have to be a lot more definitive and unequivocal than is even reasonable, to stop the pushback against this.

but the law is the law, the pushback will happen, it will be challenged, and it will decrease and then stop.

Also, she sounded a lot more tentative in person, than the written guidance.

The written guidance is fairly unequivocal.

Yes, guidance like this would be challenged. That would cost maybe £100,000 and it would take a year or two to get a clear statement from a court.

But the game of the genderists here will be to undermine, to stall, to cause fatigue in the opposition, to drag it all out in the hope things will end up unmoveably bogged down in some horribly uncertain middle ground.

I imagine that she's aware of how carefully she has to speak. She must be well used to being interviewed and speaking to the media but you could almost hear her pausing after every question, weighing her words, because she knows that any misstep or slip of the tongue will be seized upon and used as evidence of the law being contradictory or too complicated to implement ('if the EHRC don't understand it how is anyone else expected to?') etc. It seemed that she was trying to strike a balance between clarity and specificity and keeping to a more general 'look it up, take advice' line.

Dud they use the "some may find this offensive" disclaimer?

I agree. I think she is choosing her words carefully because of the backlash when she appeared on the Today programme shortly after the judgement (and was much more unequivocal).

Well, Kishwer Falkner certainly made things very clear, and in a steady, measured way. And in there the end there was nowhere left for Nuala to go to prolong the delusion that the Supreme Court ruling did not happen' or did not mean what it said.

And parliament should definitely take note too.

WI - Women’s Institute-I hope you were listening

Nuala kept the onus on the service provider ie what can the service provider do or ask and fell one step short of saying "do they get to ask to see people’s genitals" (you could imagine her wanting to trot that old chestnut out as a gotcha). I wish Baroness Falkner had included in her reply how it is up to individuals to obey the law now that it is crystal clear more so than the service provider having to enforce the law.

They were both doing a little dance around that.

Of course, but I don't think they even have that amount of strategy to be honest. They are still taking shelter in pepetuating confusion and the illusion that reality and the law is whatever you want to be.

They've had the upper hand for so long, and so many people have bought into it heart and soul - they are going to need a while, and some very firm rebuttals, before it finally sinks in.

Yeah good luck to them causing fatigue in the opposition 😁

Baronness Falkner did talk about how civil and tolerant society is built on trust and on respecting the rights of other groups......the implication being, very powerfully, that anyone who seeks to undermine or wilfully circumvent the law and the protected category of sex is a wrong un'.

She did say that it's up to individuals to respect the law. And she also said that you can ask for proof of sex, as long as you go about it in a diplomatic way.

Obviously, transactivists will target minimum wage waiters and shop workers over their hopelessly bigoted and discriminatory questioning.

But I happen to think that unpleasant though that is, it's rather spine strengthening for the authorities.

All in all, I think that interview was fine.

She managed to keep it general, the equality act, etc, discrimination applies to everybody, this has always been the law, years ago we told them that it was affecting women, this clarification has just addressed that.

because that's her job.

She wasn't about to get bogged down into the vagaries of transactivation.

but now everyone knows the law in terms of the equality act, and that she was pretty adamant that it should've been followed already.

Yes, it's an argument that we use on here, all the time.

'Are you saying that transwomen are not to be trusted, and they will violate women's boundaries willy-nilly.''

💯She was choosing her words carefully so as not to become a hostage to fortune. She didn't explicitly say that UK Parliament shouldn't wait for updated CoP but immediately ban male transexuals from female toilets just that they need to obey the law. She repeated many times that the law is in effect now & doesn't depend on the CoP.