Get in there Akua, yes, transpeople have been lied to.

[Taytoface]

The guardian, yet again, and not nearly as snidey as I thought it would be.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/06/ehrc-commissioner-calls-for-trans-people-to-accept-reduced-rights-after-years-of-lies

Yes a lifelong campaign to make extreme porn legal, and to lower the age of the participants. By someone who is also calling for men to be able to access women and children in vulnerable situations.

All you need to know about the Guardian's due diligence, really.

She doesn’t think she’s been accurately represented

Actually there was a bit in the SC judgment about it sometimes being possibly proportionate (depending on the circumstances) to exclude a trans man from a single sex women’s service where the steps that person has taken to masculinise their appearance are so great and so successful that their presentation may cause a reasonable objection from others in the group. It’s paragraph 221 of the judgment, but I can’t copy paste on my phone for some reason. It’s not a general thing and the observation seems to have been made in relation to rape crisis centres, but it has been latched on to by some commentators because if it was widely applied it would leave some trans men with no adequate spaces they could use.

My personal view is that it wouldn’t be proportionate to always exclude on that basis, but that it may be so in very sensitive spaces such as counselling groups, perhaps some medical settings, refuges etc, but that ideally trans men should generally be provided with suitable alternatives wherever possible so they aren’t left entirely without.

Sorry see I cross posted with a few others on that! Got waylaid halfway through writing my post!

Misrepresentation? By the Guardian? Colour me all kinds of surprised.

Complaint sent. I'll report back.
I also retweeted Reindorf's post and included the journalist whose name is on the piece.

As an aside, when did the guardian go behind a (sort of) paywall? I thought they were a wealthy trust fund baby?
Thank you for the archive link @Helleofabore

Someone who is also somewhat economical with the truth about trans activism.

“Prior to the ruling of the supreme court in April, trans people just wanted to live their lives within the framework as it was understood. ‘Activism’ has only really come into being over the last few years in response to a never-ending campaign designed to deprive trans people of rights.”

Without activism from trans groups, we'd never have got the GRA. Christine Burns of Press for Change boasts about being responsible for the campaigning work that brought that about. And that's going back to the 90s.

Women only really started fighting against the removal of their rights about 10 years ago, when there was talk of GRA reform and self ID. Trans people never had the right to self ID, so we were hardly trying to deprive them of their rights, just trying to keep our own.

I wonder if "jane fae" thinks that the Sarah Jane Baker type of activism is a reasonable response to women trying to keep violent men out of their single sex spaces.

Yeah, I’m just not giving the guardian my email address, so I won’t be reading any of their articles anymore unless someone shares an archive link <shrug>

Quite.

Also living their life in the framework that they understood, is it's meaningless, if the framework you understand has no basis in law or reality.

A quick Google of who said 'let's get ahead of the law' has resulted in this from the solicitors regulation authority

So, right now I'm working with companies to say: "Just exceed the U.K. legislation because it will eventually change and you will have to
play catch up"

... this from Stonewall (deleted now)

For employers who wish to go above and beyond the law in creating inclusive workplaces, we suggest that internal policies could refer to ‘gender identity’ as a term that more clearly includes all trans, non-binary and gender diverse people.

... and these from umpteen people, including Nancy Kelly and Robin Moira Wright saying it's not correct that the law says school children have to use the facilities of their sex

https://sex-matters.org/posts/single-sex-services/is-it-the-attorney-general-wrong/

https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/2020/10/04/get-ahead-of-the-law/

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/4253655-Stonewall-statement-on-misinformation-about-the-Diversity-Champions-Programme

If transactivats and lawyers told trans identified people that the law is wrong when it isn't, and they can use whatever facilities they like, when they can't, who is responsible for them erroneously thinking that the law is wrong and they can use the facilities that they like??

Funnily enough, the same lawyers and transactivists who are still insisting on it.

If there are any litigiously minded people out there, I wonder whether they would have a case for being completely misled.

Same, I'd love to know the thinking behind this move. Do they actually need the revenue, off to have a dig about for info...

It wasn't just activists, governments allowed and are allowing men with and without GRC to be in womans prisons. Thats a big sign that they understood the law to be self id into women's spaces.

The government said SSE are legal, but not compulsory, allowing service providers to self define woman and female. Women didnt know if any 'women only' space was covered by SSE or not.

I think May knew that self id into womens spaces was happening, didn't see any of the early push back against it, so thought self id for GRA was an easy policy to attract the lgbt vote. Once the consultation happened, the government could see it wasnt going to be that simple, and tried to go back to before they talked about self id for a GRC. But the activists on both sides didnt shut up.

Basically, politicians, their legal advisors, government bodies and their legal departments all supported self id and didnt distinguish between men with GRC and men with the (self id) PC of GR, and didnt enforce one meaning of 'Women only' signs.

Unless Akua Reindorf was including politician and civil servants as activists, shes letting them off the hook.

So many places lied to trans people because stonewall convinced companies and government institutions that they should sign up and pay to be told what their “interpretation” of the law was and then compete to see who could best implement this interpretation.

I personally would like to know what is happening to reduce the powers of lobbying organisations and their cosy chats so this shit doesn’t happen again ten years down the road.

That headline needs changing urgently, though I doubt it will be.

Framing this as a removal of rights will provoke anger.

Stonewall and the TRA and all of the media that supported them have a lot to answer for.

Where I work a lot of young people are very angry about the SC judgement and this really is unhelpful. Time for the truth to be reported to stop fanning the flames.

If I were them id change it

its not wise to upset a lawyer who is extremely competent in this area of law and not known for backing down

upsetting fox bothering lawyers is fine for obvious reasons

The Guardian are now disingenuous spreaders of misinformation. Totally untrustworthy as a source of news. I used to be a loyal Guardian reader and I'm still just as left-wing as ever but I will not accept being lied to.

No rights have been lost. No one has ever had the right to declare a new reality that has no basis in facts. No one has ever had the right to force other people to believe something counter-factual. Everyone has the right to believe what they like about themselves, including believing that they have a soul that is the opposite sex to their body, and to make their own decisions about how to live in the context of that belief. The boundaries of that right stop at the point where they impinge on the rights of another human who doesn't share that belief system.

The Guardian is continuing to promote the illiberal and unethical concepts that the wishes of trans-identified people should overrule the rights of other people with ridiculous headlines referring to a "loss" of rights that never have actually existed and never should.

As ever with modern journalism, it’s difficult to separate what the subeditor who wrote the headline really believes from what they believe will get their readership clicking. Outrage sells and everyone has gone tabloid, as we see all the damned time!

Did you see the Readers’ Editor yesterday defending the use of “gotten” in the Guardian style guide because the Guardian is now a US publication more than a U.K. one? I thought that spoke volumes about where the TRA influence is coming from.

The headline has now been changed

Still a bit mealy mouthed!

The new headline is equally ridiculous. Why not just say "EHRC commissioner says trans people have been lied to about their rights".

The Guardian are rather late to this story. The LSE Law School video that they are talking about was put on Youtube three weeks ago and there was a thread about it here at the time:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5335911-lse-law-video-of-panel-presentations-naomi-cunningham-akua-reindorf-ben-cooper-sarah-vine

The link includes the Youtube video of the event, or it's also here:

I wondered what this 'debate' was, which appeared to have barristers Akua Reindorf KC and Naomi Cunningham on one side, and activist organisations on the other. Why were there no barristers arguing for the genderism side?

It turns out this debate wasn't a debate at all, it was actually a panel of four barristers discussing the judgment (the others were Ben Cooper KC and Sarah Vine KC), with questions from the audience.

For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers

I assume that Amnesty, Liberty and TransActual could have been at the event asking questions, but they chose not to, preferring instead to snipe from the sidelines when asked for their opinion by the Guardian. And the Guardian reported their comments as thought they were actually taking part.

This is a much better headline!

Well that's it certainly is as it's accurate @atoo

The essence is surely that Stonewall were playing a confidence trick.

They were telling companies and public bodies to "get ahead of the law", based on the idea that they knew which way the law was going.

They were telling politicians that legislating self-ID was no big deal, because all these companies and public bodies were already doing it.

They were telling the trans community that, since there was already de facto self-ID, just assume you have a right to use whatever facilities you like.

And they got away with it for a long time, until the SC ruling left them looking like Wile E Coyote when he's run out of cliff.