Does the FWS ruling mean that being GC is no longer a belief?

[ToClimb]

If there is, in law, such a thing as biological sex, then surely being GC is no longer a belief, but a biological reality?

I have always felt it was a bit odd to say being GC is a belief, when to my mind it was and always has been just a fact, determined by science. Pretty much like saying cancer exists.

Am I overthinking this?

The only way it could be a protected characteristic is by defining it as a belief. I agree it's bonkers. And needs to change.

But surely it is protected because biological sex is protected?

I would say it is a belief proven by science

Belief that people have a Gender Identity is a belief & likewise a belief that Gender Identity does not exist is also a belief. The latter has been declared in court to be WORIADS so is a protected belief whereas a belief in GI has not been tested but is likely to be seen as a belief WORIAD.

Surely belief in GI is automatically protected given that gender reassignment is another one of those protections!

You could have a believe in GI without being trans and having the PC of gender reassignment

The reason 'belief' was made a protected characteristic is because people have the right to believe things that cannot be proven and aren't widely accepted as facts, as long as they aren't harmful.
For that reason, I was not happy when 'GC' was legally defined as a belief.

No, they are separate decisions. There are nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act. Belief is one protected characteristic. There are all kinds of beliefs, even opposing beliefs, that are protected. Gender crititcal beliefs are protected after the Forstater decision. I don't think it's been tested in court but it's quite likely that gender ideology beliefs are protected too.

Sex is another of the nine protected characteristics, and so is gender reassignment. They are all separate and none of them trumps the others.

The Supreme Court clarified that in the Equality Act 2010 "sex" means biological sex, and that a gender recognitition certificate doesn't change your sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. You still can't be discriminated against for believing differently, or even for saying you believe differently, or for campaigning to change the law so that sex in the Equality Act would mean something different from biological sex.... but ni matter what you believe, under the Equality Act 2010 you still can't let transwomen use women's facilities and services.

I don't think the law can rule on what is reality. That would be quite scary.

GC is based on the premise that there are 2 sexes, sex is immutable and in some circumstances sex is important. The last part is why, I understood, it becomes a belief. A person may know that the first 2 are real but may believe that a person’s gender identity is always more important than their sex.

I don't think the law does have to rule on what is reality. It just has to define what is generally accepted and provable. Without definitions we don't have any workable laws at all.
Scientists can't agree on how to define 'life', but we don't have to worry about the scientific definition of life to be able to define murder.

Forstater’s case did not dispute that biological sex is a fact. It focused on the legal protection of the belief that this fact is immutable and distinct from gender identity.

I also struggle with this distinction but that might be because I’m baffled that some people think it’s possible to change sex

I don't think the law can rule on what is reality. That would be quite scary.

Without reality, there cannot be any law, surely? It needs proof, you cannot have proof without reality 🤯

This is helpful. I am also baffled by people who think they can change sex. You can change how you present yourself, but sex is sex.

No: that’s a fact, & it turns out it’s ALSO the meaning of sex in law (as it is in science).

The belief aspect of the Protected Belief is the belief that it matters.

Sex matters: clue is in the name.

There are points in the Granger criteria that mean GI beliefs may not actually qualify as a PC.

Chiefly the ones about internal consistency, & about infringing other people’s rights.

GI believers argue

• Sex exists as a binary, but you can change from one to the other (let’s call that the Nemo hypothesis);

• sex does not exist & it’s all a performance in imitation of a model that does not itself exist (aka Butlers all the way down);

• sex is a spectrum which either you can move along OR which you are fixed at one point on forever

• sex does exist but is trumped by gender identity (aka unicorns beat horses)

• whether people ‘transition to’ or ‘always were’ the sex they claim to be

and

• whether they mean sex, gender, both or neither at any given moment.

I’ve seen these different & contradictory claims made by the same TRA in the course of 4 or 5 exchanges.

The second criterion, about infringing the rights of others… well it should be obvious they don’t meet that.

And have dealt with it by loudly proclaiming we have no such rights.

Indeed.

And it would be unwise to do so.

Not only because look what happened when the “law” in Christendom (aka the church) ruled that the earth was the centre of the solar system.

But also because it is not actually illegal to believe in ridiculous & counterfactual stuff.

As I've pointed out on a couple of other threads, there has been a shift in how some transpeople are defining themselves, after years of TWAW/TMAM, when it was transphobic hate-speech to even suggest that
'Trans women are women. Trans men are men'
was not 100% true.

Now there seems to be a shift towards accepting - as if TWAW/TMAM had never happened🙄- that 'of course' they haven't actually stopped being the biological sex they were born into, they've just changed their gender presentation to 'present as' a woman/man.

The problem with this is that if they now say they have only changed their gender, not their biological sex, it removes their rationale for using the sex-segregated facility of their choice, which are segregated by biological sex and not how you present yourself.

Dr Upton is not one of those, though, he maintains he has somehow changed his sex and is an actual biological woman.

Sorry I've derailed a bit from the main topic, but I think this 'I know I'm still a man/woman because you can't change sex, but...' is a significant shift in TRA discourse, and the implications are interesting.

GC is more than just sex being real and important.

Being gender critical (as I understand it) means not believing that you have an inherent gender in your soul that might not match your body.

Scientifically you can't prove it either way as that would be like proving that babies' souls don't wait in a special part of heaven before being born (say).

The gendered soul thing and being born in the wrong body is something that some people believe. I do think it's totally bonkers to frame laws around such a niche belief.

But technically we can't prove that people don't have gendered souls that might mismatch our bodies, even though that seems extremely improbable, so logically being gender critical is a belief.

I don't believe in the flying spaghetti god (can't remember the name) but technically you can't prove/disprove it, no matter how improbable