Rumbles suggest elements within Labour want to change the Equality Act

[ArabellaScott]

On the recent WEC hostile interrogation of the EHRC.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/12/politicians-regulators-supreme-court-gender-ruling

'Though Falkner suggested it would be “wise for space to be given to the regulator” to handle this – in other words, that parliament should back off – some Labour MPs are rapidly reaching the opposite view.
A law that doesn’t work in real-life scenarios is a law that doesn’t work, full stop. On this evidence, parliament should prepare to roll up its sleeves.'

Is Labour about to agitate to change the EA? How will that work, will someone propose a Bill?

Did they have committees discussing the impact on women before changing women's spaces and services to mixed sex?

Of course they do......and yesterday i read an article which was suggesting the that the Equality Act had led to a surge in failed claims for racial discrimination...the implication being that the act had negative unintended consequences. Fortunately, it seemed that the government was response was that they had no intention to change or abandon the Equalities Act.

The writer of this piece seems a bit confused by the incredibly complicated ruling, so I'll try to help her a bit ...

Which toilets trans people can use
The one for their sex or a gender-neutral one

... what this means for your local women’s running club or gym
It is for women

... how employers can handle sensitive situations at work without outing or humiliating trans staff
No-one needs to be outing or humiliating trans people

The EHRC issued interim guidance saying that trans people should stop using the toilets, changing rooms or NHS wards of their preferred gender ... and only play on the grassroots sports teams of their birth sex. But is that really what the court intended?
Yes

The former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption has already warned of the risks of overinterpreting the ruling, arguing that he took it to confirm that single-sex services are entitled to exclude trans people, but not obliged to if they don’t want to.
Lord Sumption immediately went on air and misinterpreted the ruling.

Suppose you wanted to start a women’s walking group, the Labour MP Rachel Taylor asked her, but you actively wanted to include trans women. Is that allowed? No, was the eventual answer: of course you can let your trans friend join, but then you’d be a mixed not single-sex group, and would have to also accept any man asking to join
Correct, and fair enough.

What the biological women in this group actually want – where they’d draw their own boundaries, or what feels right to them – is irrelevant on this reading
What biological women want would certainly be irrelevant if the ruling had gone the other way as they would have no rights ever to single-sex spaces or services.

Asked how this imaginary walking group should check that every new member was definitely biologically female, Falkner suggested they might make a judgment on sight, but that nobody was going to be walking around with badges on policing it.
Correct - that is how single-sex facilities have always worked.

Yet where people do and don’t feel welcome in society is determined by social norms as well as rights, and the former have swung from one extreme to the other in recent years; you don’t have to disagree with the supreme court’s ruling to see how that could be wildly disorienting.
Very true - Stonewall and others should never have gone around misinterpreting the law.

A law that doesn’t work in real-life scenarios is a law that doesn’t work, full stop.
Also very true - and it certainly wouldn't work in real-life scenarios to have a law that says "Women's spaces can exclude most males but must include males with a GRC but no-one can ask to see the GRC". Which is likely one of the reasons why the Supreme Court did not rule this way (they did say previously that any law has to be "workable in practice").

Excellent riposte, Disappearing - could you put that in a letter to the Guardian?

Well obviously elements within Labour want to change it, but no way is No 10 going to agree to putting a Bill on this through Parliament as it would be a political nightmare.

Of course it is true that it is parliament, not the regulator, that makes law, and the most committed and entrenched trans activists would quite happily throw overboard all of the hard won and established rights of different groups simply in order to allow male people into female categories, and to continue feeling like they alone are on 'the right side of history'.

They aren't going to take their ball and go home quietly, watchful waiting is the only way forwards for us now.

If they want to change this they are going to have to debate it in public.

Yes. Labour as a whole is not completely made up of pro-trans zealots, and even leaving that aside, if the government were to focus on expanding trans rights now that would be political suicide, as the Tories and Reform would jump all over it (see also: America).

Even Starmer must have been grateful the Supreme Court put the definition issue away.

Exactly - they can't just implement this by stealth. And actually it's far more complicated than people like Hinsliff, Maugham and others of that ilk seem to understand.

As DisappearingGirl pointed out, if the Supreme Court ruling had gone the other way, "single sex" spaces for women would have meant including biological women and biological men with a GRC while excluding biological men without a GRC and biological women with a GRC. How the hell is that going to work in practice?

Alternatively, they could scrap the idea of a GRC and say that every man who "identifies" as a woman, regardless of legal certification, should be allowed into women's single-sex spaces, including lesbian groups and rape crisis centres - thus rendering the word "sex" completely meaningless. No one with any sense is going to tolerate that.

That 'element' within Labour is the same element that would, if they could, have been on the 'rescue' boat sailing with Greta Thunberg and allies. They all align with the exact same omnicauses, and are increasingly becoming ever more extreme and polarised.They are in the grip of an impulsive revolutionary instinct which easily slips into action purely for the thrill and the sake of it.

I've been there myself in my youth, and you end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater in your fervour to be 'liberated' and free from all restraint and 'oppression'.Then you realise that you have to start again from scratch and try to rebuild that which you have rejected, due to being in the grip of this urge. People get addicted to this feeling of being a rebel and lose all persepctive and ability to discriminate.

I think the Government's preferred choice of candidate to replace Baroness Falkner speaks volumes. Starmer might be slippery but he's not thick. Of course Bryant, Eagle et al will have tantrums but I don't see them gaining any traction. And crucially no debate is over, even in the opinion of the chair of Stonewall. So any change in the law will not avoid public and media scrutiny this time around.
I won't click on the article because I wouldn't give the Guardian a fraction of a cent of ad revenue (former regular reader of the paper for decades).

As I have often said before, do write a letter to the Guardian. The letters page is pretty balanced and increasingly so. It is also a useful way of shifting its writers out of their echo chambers

They could go for an amendment to the EA saying that it does not constitute indirect discrimination to other users to offer a service based on 'female sex plus males with the pc of gender reassignment' giving service providers the choice, and relying on the chilled environment to make sute they make the 'right' choice. Or they could add that it does constitute gr discrimination to exclude a person with the pc of gr from a single sex service of their choice (either their birth sex or target sex) on the basis of their sex or gender reassignment status. So basically lifting ppl with the pc of gr out of any obligations/restrictions based on sex.

Or if they only want to use the gendery lingo they could do a general amendment to the ea saying 'sex means self identified sex, woman means anyone who identifies as a woman' rendering the pc of sex completely useless.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a private members bill on this at some point. But as a pp said, at least it will have to be debated in public, and the pink leggings can loom large.

The assisted dying bill shows what's possible for a private members bill.

This isn't true. It is just Hinsliff hoping for something to happen so men in dresses get to be all important again.

The easiest way to derail the ruling by Labour would not rely on Parliament, a complicated process, but just appoint someone to EHCR to sabotage it.

Instead Labour want to appoint Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson. It is pretty clear she is fairly terfy.

It is not that Labour leadership are keen on women's rights it is they see no benefit in trying to end them electorally. The SNP went all in on being anti-women and got crushed. The Cass Review has exposed the science as being a disaster. Labour are terrified of Reform. The MPs who are keen on this stuff are in the minority.

Instead Labour want this whole debate to be over. They don't want to admit they got it wrong. So the easiest thing is to say the ruling has solved everything and there are no problems now. Move along folks.

Exactly this. What’s happening is that TRA in yjr Labour Party are using the guardian to signal what it is they want and to see if there is support for it (which there isn’t)

its classic tactics to try and make it “A Thing”

They do not even fully understand what it is they are wanting in trying to over-turn the Equalities Act. What they really want is for them to be on the 'right side' again, even if that means getting rid of sex based protections for the female sex. Especially if it means getting rid of Sex based protections for the female sex.

When you are caught up in a cult you are prone to extreme, black and white thinking and can end up doing extreme things to keep the vision pure and untainted. Any threats from 'outside' simply serve to increase the zealousness.

The economy is fucked. The NHS is fucked. Food prices are only going to increase with climate change. Nobody can do anything about migrant boats. The enshittification of the UK is visible on most high streets. No end in sight to war in Ukraine and Gaza. Trump is an alarming wild card.

Is Labour really going to waste time arguing that men should be allowed into women's spaces? They can't change a major piece of legislation like the Equality Act on the sly, much as many would like to. They are going to be asked difficult questions. Isla Bryson and Isla's cock-bulge will be mentioned.

Much as I can't stand Farage, it's more easy votes for Reform to point at any attempts to reword the EA2010 and say "look what these wokies are doing now!"

I'm sure elements in Labour do want to change the EA, but those are also people who don't care about being decimated at the next election.

ETA: Worse than decimated as they would lose far more than 1 in 10 Labour MPs.

The gov would be committing political suicide if they tried to change this.
However it doesn’t surprise me that those entrenched in this dogma would try to suggest the government should do it.

On one hand, if it means that those MPs sitting on the fence have to do some work and come to a decision, that is not a bad thing.

On the other, it just seems like when we get clarity, we are tediously defending that clarity. It is like we are stuck in a viscous cycle.

Also though, I suspect any future bill will be so heavily scrutinised that hopefully there will never be anyway that it could be misinterpreted.

Ironic that members of the party who introduced the equality act in the first place, now want to scrap it, and allow discrimination, in order to be on the right side of history.

If they go ahead with this, they'll need to be creative to explain how its different from how Reform promised to replace the 'Equalities act'. Will it be a fine example of pretzel thinking, or a case of 'thing is bad when they do it but fine if we do it'?
I did not sign up to live in interesting times.

The sensible people in Labour must surely realise that if they try to nobble the EA to create a set of loopholes to benefit transwomen, then a currently very complex and difficult to manage piece of legislation will end up having all kinds of unintended consequences. But the difference this time will be that what MPs said and did in Parliament to push it through will be scrutinised hard, and the first time something horrible happens as a consequence, there'll be people demanding an accounting of responsibility.

It would be insane for so many reasons for the government to stick its neck out over this, simply to benefit a tiny group of people, the most visible of whom come across disastrously in the media.