LGBT Groups and the EHRC Guidance

[gayhistorynerd]

I've been following the SC ruling and subsequent EHRC guidance with a close eye, as this subject is particularly close to my heart as a lesbian. However, there is one thing I've been struggling to reconcile, and I know the brilliant women here are most likely to have the understanding to clarify.

Are LGBT groups now considered unlawful?

I have the feeling I'm more in denial than anything, but I'm hoping against hope that somebody will be able to tell me that these vital community spaces will be preserved. As it stands, I don't see how the guidance for associations will permit them; if everyone in a space must share the same protected characteristic, then a group for gay, bisexual and trans people surely can't be lawful unless it's exclusively for people who are gay and trans? These groups have been life-saving for me, and many others I'm sure, as I sought out community as a young adult and now, years down the line, they're an important part of my social life. I absolutely appreciate the right and need to have gay-only and lesbian-only spaces- I am part of some lesbian-only groups myself- but I didn't expect the right for those groups to exist to come at the expense of the other, broader community spaces that have been a hub for LGBT people for so long.

It casts a bittersweet light over the SC ruling if this is indeed the case, which is a sentiment I never thought I'd have. I want to be as happy as everyone else about it, and I am in 99% of contexts, but I would be lying to say that this one aspect didn't really worry me.

A GRC is irrelevant for the purposes of the EA. The protected characteristic of gender reassignment does not mean and does not require the person to have a GRC.

No this bit you wrote is wrong: “I was pointing out that under the EA having a GRC means you legally become the other sex”

The EA has nothing to do with having a GRC. That’s a separate piece of legislation.

The Scottish govt argued that a GRC changed your sex for the EA but they lost.

The SC ruled that there’s no ambiguity or confusion in the EA: sex can only mean biological sex.

Exactly.
The SC decided that in effect the GRA was disapplied from the EA.
A MCW is a man with the PC of GR.
A woman who claims to be a man is a woman with the PC of GR.

Also, just to reiterate, the EA is an anti-discrimination law. The starting premise is that you may not discriminate against anyone on the basis of any of 9 PCs unless you can rely on one of the exceptions in the Act.

So LGBTQ groups aren't "illegal", but restricting access to/membership of the group for non-trans heterosexuals is unlawful because some heterosexuals - people who claim a trans identity - are included. Nor could you lawfully exclude L, G or B people who do not claim a trans identity.

IANAL but I think you could justify restricting access/membership if the raison d'etre of the group was belief-based. That would be the PC that they shared.

I think a lot of contributors not only to this thread but to others have had a humour by pass today.

Personally not only do I think that the GRA / GRC should be disapplied to the EA, but the GRA should be repealed.

But in the meantime, the EA has gender reassignment as a protected characteristic which via a GRC, in some circumstances, means a person has a "legal sex" that is not their birth sex.

And despite Labour lying to their teeth when they wrote the EA one of the clause in the SSE was about the ONLY times a single sex service could legally exclude someone with a GRC.

ie despite the lies Labour is telling now they always intended that those with a GRC (except for a very few occassion) were legally the opposite to their birth sex.

However, finally at the Supreme Court they recognised that in including gender reassignment as a protected characteristic the protected characteristic of sex was being impinged on.

No other protected characteristic was treated in this way in the EA.

So in clarifying that the word sex in the EA could only mean biology they were undermining the attempt by Labour to socially engineer as law that somehow sex could be 2 things.

That's why the only people actually impacted by the Supreme Court ruling are those with a GRC or on the route to a GRC. What "rights" they did have in the EA have been removed.

But the Court stressed that this only applied to the EA. ie in relation to discrimination or alternatively achieving equality. (eg only biological women on a company board would be counted towards achieving equality on a board. Not allow TW to be said to have made a board equal.).

So as this thread has been about the EA, not about how society as a whole, or social events etc., organise themselves, I was in a labourioius way saying that to form a trans only group under the EA would mean it would be hard to talk about it also potentially being about sexual attraction as there would be contradition to those who are trans as to whether the EA meant they could only talk about being sexually attracted to someone of the same sex or even the opposite sex by having to out yourself to reveal your birth sex. ie you are using a protected characteristic under the EA which says sex is only biological, your group has to function on that level. But for many, if not all trans people, they want the affirmation that they are accepted as the "sex" their GRC gives them - which the Supreme Court has not invalidated (when operating within the remit of the EA).

Edited to add - the EA does not recognise self identity.

LGBT might be a protected belief. So perhaps an LGBT ideological meeting could go ahead just like, say, a Quakers meeting.

Was itching to add this, so I'll just echo!

Yes, your LGB group can include same-sex attracted people who perform a gender identity, while excluding everyone else.

What you can't have is an exclusively LGBT group where some of the T are opposite-sex attracted.

You can be lawfully exclusive if your group consists ONLY of people sharing the SAME protected characteristics.

Frankly, women who say they're lesbians and like shagging 'female penis' owners aren't lesbians. They're either straight or bi.
Bisexuals are same-sex attracted, so if their group is LGB or LB and their trans friends are also bi, it's all good.

Meanwhile, trans people can carry on having exclusively trans-only meetings where they plot how to silence women.

There really isn't a problem.

This is also how I understand it.

What is the belief?

There's a gender ideology belief, but that's just the T.

An LGBTQI+ group would be full of 'spicy straights' and people identifying as queer and furries many of whom would be straight... it would be a group of very diverse people united around only one thing: their belief in gender ideology.

In all honesty the only people such a group would wish to exclude would be those who are non compliant or heretical regarding gender ideology, which would be many LGB people.

They would not however be able to do so using the Equality Act.

Slightly tangential, but whilst a group to represent LGB and T would seem to me to be lawful, it shoud be unlawful to deny what it is to be L or G or B, which means an LGBT group would only make sense if it was careful to ensure that it was also only for gender critical people. It would make no sense if there was a group for LGB people, but who also included T people who denied what homosexuality is.