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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Good Law Practice launch a EHCR/Supreme Court challenge over toilets

770 replies

fromorbit · 07/06/2025 07:38

After raising over 418K it turns out the GLP's amazing legal case is all about toilets. Details:

https://archive.is/TWRTl

No doubt it will fail like most of their previous legal cases.

Previous thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5336208-good-law-project-suing-the-ehrc-and-bridget-phillipson-letter-before-action?page=1

Good Law Project suing the EHRC and Bridget Phillipson - letter before action | Mumsnet

Sorry if this has already been shared - here are the links to their letter and statement. Looking forward to the Mumsnet analysis :-) [[https://good...

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5336208-good-law-project-suing-the-ehrc-and-bridget-phillipson-letter-before-action?page=1

OP posts:
Thread gallery
50
fromorbit · 07/06/2025 07:44

Rebecca Bull
Sex Matters co founder Legal Feminist contributor and editor.
This bombardment of the EHRC with unmeritorious judicial review attempts is a campaign tactic.

Liberty just lost their JR but GLP is undeterred.

Why undeterred?

Well they have amassed a war chest to spend at their own discretion. No client taking a financial hit.

And their only goal is to make the application of the law as it relates to women’s rights to single sex services impossible

How best to do that when the FWS Judgment was so very easy to understand?

Well maybe to firehose the regulator with nonsense lawsuits.

Maybe to scare public bodies into inaction.

Maybe to fill the papers with a false narrative that women’s rights are transphobic

This is a very expensive, rich man’s propaganda tactic.

And the people who suffer are both the women whose rights are violated because of his fear mongering and also the trans people who are being misled.

OP posts:
ArabellaScott · 07/06/2025 07:49

A more prosaic explanation may be that it if you're a lawyer, it pays the bills.

Quite a lot of money, that.

Merrymouse · 07/06/2025 07:52

Many people have told us they’ve been instructed to use different changing rooms and toilets at work,

Interesting that they talk about ‘different changing rooms and toilets’ implying that this includes unisex facilities.

I think they will struggle to show that this isn’t reasonable accommodation.

Also, how does it relate to this government or the EHRC, when the regulations and legislation have been in place for so long?

akkakk · 07/06/2025 08:00

Wow, what a weak and waffly statement - grasping at straws…

The EHRC has no choice but to provide guidance against the statement of the law, which is actually their legal obligation - and as the SC judgement stated so clearly, a) biological sex is all and b) this does not disadvantage anyone…

there is a real attempt to conflate not having the cake and eating it with disadvantage… disadvantage is less than the expected norm, not a slight reduction in the excess beyond the norm which someone had taken for themselves

or put another way - disadvantaged is no car, not a reduction from a Rolls Royce to a BMW

can't see this going anywhere!

Dwimmer · 07/06/2025 08:05

So he is trying to get a lower court to overturn a Supreme Court ruling?

NecessaryScene · 07/06/2025 08:08
Season 4 Episode 21 GIF by The Simpsons

So he is trying to get a lower court to overturn a Supreme Court ruling?

If they don't do it, will just prove how corrupt the system is.

RethinkingLife · 07/06/2025 08:12

As Reindorf and so many posters here have pointed out, the’ve been facilitated in abrogating rights to themselves that they didn’t have. And they were valorised for this, heedless of what happened to the rights of others, including women.

It’s not only the relative loss of privileges but having to assume equality of consideration with other groups rather than being the apex of a pyramid that should never have existed. And being the fashionable area for philanthropic funding.

fromorbit · 07/06/2025 08:13

The legal reviews are coming in. They seem to be treating this case as a bit of a joke. I wonder why?

Dennis Noel Kavanagh
https://x.com/Jebadoo2/status/1931109712512393336

1/ Gender lawfare is an elite sport up there with Polo or owning a racehorse. They can never secure public consent for the demands of political transvestitism so they try to circumvent the public with an appeal to courts, just as they did with Goodwin v UK. It's hopeless folly.

2/ The problem with middle class anger is that it's just not very angry. The Good Laugh Project will meet the same fate as Amnesty hosed out of court today for their not very inspiring complaint that a consultation period should be a bit longer.

3/ It's hardly a call to barricades is it? So what to the the gendocrats of the Good Laugh Project offer that isn't legally hopeless? Well, in the first place, they are terribly concerned with toilets and while the rest of the world moves on they cry "you are where you piss"

4/ It's an argument so weak it would be cruel to apply to apply for strike out. As equality law expert Dr. Foran comments in this post the provision of single sex toilets and the like isn't some optional matter - were it such there would be no SC judgment
Quote

Michael Foran
[Reacting to a post from Robin White]
https://x.com/michaelpforan/status/1907333280900276704
Apr 2
To clarify in case some are persuaded by the below, the EHRC would not be enforcing the 1992 regs directly; but rather equality & human rights law based on the fact that failure to provide suitable changing rooms for female employees would breach their equality/human rights.
The second point is deeply unpersuasive because even if the obligation was only to provide single sex facilities, NHS Fife has not because it has an officially sanctioned practice of allowing the female only changing room to be used by anyone who identifies as a woman.
It would be slightly different if NHS Fife had a policy of sex separated facilities but Dr Upton was ignoring the policy. There the challenge would need to be one of failure of NHS Fife to enforce its policy to ensure the provision was effective.

But the idea that you can meet the obligations under the 1992 regs by having a self-ID policy is just not credible. Robin continues to operate on the legally unfounded belief, which has been rejected in court several times, that self-ID is the default legal position. It’s not.

5/ The second "argument" (such as it is) is well over the border into unseriousness. This fox battering windmill dwelling heterosexual appears to think the EHRC has some obligation to "be kind". He probably means the duty to promote comity between protected characteristics.

6/ If that is what he means (and who knows with this leisurewear "man from del monte" piece to camera rebrand), it is rather striking that he mentions only the subject that preoccupies him (transvestites) and has nothing to say about the PC of woman and comity therewith.

7/ In a telling moment, our mutton dressed as lamb, appropriate echo chamber acoustics, former tax silk tells us "well, if we are wrong on points one and two we will argue something else". That is a fleeting concession to reality and a rare moment of expectation management.

8/ So what will they argue? They will argue that a transvestite has article 8 rights which is the right to a private and family life. They will argue part of that right is the UK Government and the UK Supreme Court is not allowed to say what sex is in law if they disagree.

9/ That is an argument that cannot be faulted for ambition or audaciousness. If this argument is correct, no Government or Supreme Court who have signed up to the convention on human rights is allowed to say "women are biological women".

10/ That would be quite the state of affairs. The European Court permits each state to deal with things as they wish within limits called the "margin of appreciation". If del monte Windmill boy is right, no one has the right to say "women are women". Ever.

11/ So I leave this ludicrous heterosexual in his literal echo chamber wishing him the very best of British luck not just with his hopeless cases, but congratulations on his schoolboy "for SOME women Scotland" gag. May his silly poll tax on fools progress and he continue to provide the epic lolz.

https://x.com/michaelpforan/status/1907333280900276704

OP posts:
teawamutu · 07/06/2025 08:28

Love the snark from these two. Class effort.

LadyBracknellsHandbagg · 07/06/2025 08:28

Jolly boy has done another blinky, pointy finger, nonsensical video about it. Bless him, he really is one of the main contributors to ‘operation let them speak’.

Theeyeballsinthesky · 07/06/2025 08:35

LadyBracknellsHandbagg · 07/06/2025 08:28

Jolly boy has done another blinky, pointy finger, nonsensical video about it. Bless him, he really is one of the main contributors to ‘operation let them speak’.

He can’t do anything else. He must campaign for his daughters right to piss with men because he’s gone along with letting them pretend they’re men and take powerful drugs to help bolster that illusion.

he’s screaming at the world but he knows deep down he should scream at himself

fromorbit · 07/06/2025 08:37

LadyBracknellsHandbagg · 07/06/2025 08:28

Jolly boy has done another blinky, pointy finger, nonsensical video about it. Bless him, he really is one of the main contributors to ‘operation let them speak’.

He is.

Agent Jolyon not only makes the TAs look bad every time he speaks he also wastes huge sums of money which could be used in far more dangerous ways because he and his team are not great lawyers.

Furthermore his cases failing creates case law in our favour.

They alienate the legal community by pursuing doomed cases showing how absurd and weak their positions are.

His constant attacks on Labour have helped push them to become more sceptical of the Trans position and undermine the TA faction inside Labour.

More peaking achieved.

OP posts:
LittleBearPad · 07/06/2025 08:44

ArabellaScott · 07/06/2025 07:49

A more prosaic explanation may be that it if you're a lawyer, it pays the bills.

Quite a lot of money, that.

Certainly pays JM’s bills. Need to maintain that wine cellar.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 07/06/2025 08:46

Many people have told us they’ve been instructed to use different changing rooms and toilets at work, sometimes resulting in stress that has left them unfit to continue working.”

Many of these people regularly decide they are “unfit to continue working” at the drop of a hat, as I’m sure their hapless employers know.

Merrymouse · 07/06/2025 08:48

Taking Maugham at face value, he is hampered by his resistance to the reality that sex cannot be changed and sometimes matters in policy and law.

In contrast somebody like Michael Foran fully acknowledges that the PC of gender reassignment exists (along with other case law and legislation) and takes that into account when making arguments.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 07/06/2025 08:50

That’s a good point. He can’t admit that there would be any merit in women’s sex based rights or limits on “gender affirming care” at all.

Igmum · 07/06/2025 08:51

The bit I regret about this is the amount of taxpayers’ money that will be spent defending and dealing with the vexatious fox killer. That money is badly needed elsewhere.

outofdate · 07/06/2025 08:52

I would love to know how much JM is taking out of this for his fees.

BundleBoogie · 07/06/2025 09:08

Many people have told us they’ve been instructed to use different changing rooms and toilets at work, sometimes resulting in stress that has left them unfit to continue working.

If he is not lying to further his own ends, that is encouraging news if many organisations have reacted to the SC and are enforcing sensible rules. It does cast a light on what it might be like to employ such fragile people and the costs of sick leave due to not getting their own way.

As an aside, in a hugely positive development, Michael Foran appears to have reformed his previous approach of using the prescribed language ‘transwomen’ etc and is now using the far clearer ‘transvestite’ to describe the men clamouring to use women’s spaces and rejecting all reasonable accommodations.

BundleBoogie · 07/06/2025 09:13

Igmum · 07/06/2025 08:51

The bit I regret about this is the amount of taxpayers’ money that will be spent defending and dealing with the vexatious fox killer. That money is badly needed elsewhere.

The costs of all of this to taxpayers must be in the £100s of millions when you add it all up - the inappropriate surgeries and treatments on the NHS, the writing and rewriting of policies, the out of court settlements from employers who have harassed or unfairly dismissed GC people, the court ordered settlements, the costs of defending the indefensible in places like Fife, the cost to society of the police apparently caring more about men’s feelings being hurt than actual crimes. Etc etc.

PosiePerkinPootleFlump · 07/06/2025 09:25

I am not a lawyer but this bit reads oddly: “But we argue it’s either wrong in law, or it breaches the UK’s obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998”

Are they saying they are not sure which of these they think it is? Or they hope by suggesting it might be one or the other of two different that they have a better chance of something sticking? It doesn’t sound very well reasoned

RunningWhileInjured · 07/06/2025 09:32

outofdate · 07/06/2025 08:52

I would love to know how much JM is taking out of this for his fees.

I believe JM had an annual income of around £400k at the height of his success in tax law (not sure if that was just from legal work or if he has other sources of income). Then, if I recall correctly, he lowered his income to £90-£95k ish when he switched to gender law

Keeptoiletssafe · 07/06/2025 09:34

Single sex toilet design has already been compromised recently.

What is he arguing for?
That all toilets are designed as unisex or that all single sex places are unisex (therefore the existing toilets will have to change their design to be unisex)?

Either way, we will lose the safer, single sex designs.

illinivich · 07/06/2025 09:35

PosiePerkinPootleFlump · 07/06/2025 09:25

I am not a lawyer but this bit reads oddly: “But we argue it’s either wrong in law, or it breaches the UK’s obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998”

Are they saying they are not sure which of these they think it is? Or they hope by suggesting it might be one or the other of two different that they have a better chance of something sticking? It doesn’t sound very well reasoned

I think they are trying to argue that HR laws mean that changing gender/sex is a legal right, and those people have a right to privacy.

Therefore uk law must reflect this. So either UK law has been misinterpreted or UK law wrong.

WorriedMutha · 07/06/2025 09:40

Add to that the cost of the negligence claims when the harms become evident.