Bristol City' Council's awful response to the EHRC consultation

[BristolW0man]

Someone has done an FoI and obtained Bristol Council's response to the EHRC Consultation that was held earlier this year regarding their draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations.

Quelle surprise, the council's response is awful. There's a useful thread on X that lays it out: https://x.com/pictseamon/status/1967152146576806346

Highlights (lowlights) include them admitting that their previous equality impact assessments were not carried out correctly and that they have not trained staff to understand the difference between the protected characteristics of gender reassignment (bearing in mind the Equality Act set these out in 2010!)

The homophobia and lack of understanding of the law is also outrageous, the council say:

"A man attracted just to women, whether cis or trans, is heterosexual. The proposed language misgenders trans people and implies that their identities are not real, which is both inaccurate and discriminatory."

This has been picked up by Bev Jackson of the LGB Alliance where she says:

"The constant attempts to redefine sexual orientation on the basis of “gender identity” are a direct assault on the rights of gays and lesbians. They are also “incoherent” - as the UK Supreme Court explained at length in its ruling."

I hope someone sues them.

Also, it makes me wonder what other awful responses the EHRC got and from who - maybe some more FoIs are in order.

*difference between the protected characteristics of sex and gender reassignment that should say

The fact that they have been involed with that nonsense at all is a shit show.

My all time favourite line, ever:

We also recognize that individuals may not identify with the word maternity and prefer paternity as it is gender neutral.

Crazy isn’t it!

🤪

Sometimes it seems like the world is being run by teenagers.

No, it’s being run by people who are scared of their teenagers, and aren’t able to tell them ‘no’

“paternity is gender neutral” 😂😂😂😂 Apparently they also don’t understand English

To know that this has come from allegedly responsible adults is terrifying.

Yet another example of how signing up to gender ideology beclowns individuals and organisations. Yet they're completely unaware of their stupidity 🙄

This is profoundly depressing.

We also recognize that individuals may not identify with the word maternity and prefer paternity as it is gender neutral.

What a strange thing to brazenly lie about. Just baffling!

In instances where we find policies and service design that are not compliant with this, we would have to update and redesign policies and services, which would absorb significant capacity and resource at a time when local authorities are stretched.

Is this the same council in Bristol where there perpetually offended keep getting up an walking out when any member of the public ask's a sex realist question?
If it is, I can see how this policy got written in the first place. 🙄

Oops, I just read the tweet, it is them. So that's why they were leaving they were running away from awkward questions about how stupid they are. 😂

Can Bristol councillors use a dictionary?

Another reason to learn Latin (apart from the fact that it's awesome)

Seriously?

Do they never get public duty for dummys training when they get voted in to office?

149 Public sector equality duty PC
(7)The relevant protected characteristics are—

• age;
• disability;
• gender reassignment;
• pregnancy and maternity;
• race;
• religion or belief;
• sex;
• sexual orientation

Being a Daddy is not a protected class.

Not suprised Its like wolverhampton staff saying they decided not include pregnancy/maternity as a PC because the 2021 Census did not need to collect data on births (as wolverhanptons is obliged to supply the data to the ONS)

My word, that is certainly up there with the worst!

Oh fucking hell

Wow @MyAmpleSheep that’s as hilarious as it is horrifying. What a bunch of nitwits!

Hm well I suppose ‘patriarchy’ is ‘gender’ neutral - males of any gender are more than happy to benefit from it and exert it.

’paternity’ is likewise ‘gender’ neutral - it’s sex specific. But equally so is ‘maternity’. It’s been legally established in relation to the word ‘mother’, hasn’t it?

?!

Birmingham City Council may be bankrupt and presiding over a city overrun by giant rats, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets might be bywords for dodginess, but I tell you what, it would be hard to beat Bristol in the race for stupidest local authority in the UK.

I wonder if they are merely young, silly and ill-educated and have no sense of etymology or where words come from; or if they are under some kind of weird assumption that “paternity” is like the male third person plural in French and somehow covers both men and women?

It’s like a bizarre return to the days when the grammatical masculine in English was assumed to incorporate the feminine, so you could write “mankind” and “he” and “man” and so on and it grammatically “covered” the feminine as well. So weird, as debates around the correct use of this is like zooming back to the late 1980s/early 1990s which was when that finally went out of use!

I tried to explain to a young woman recently why referring to men and women as “men and non-men” was not the progressive flex she seemed to think it was (given the millennia of patriarchal history of designating women as the non-man “other”).

But just as it’s very noticeable that gender ideology actually brings back all the ideas of “man as default human” that we’re historically familiar with, it also even brings back man as the default bodily human (“chestfeeding”) and man as the default linguistic human as well! Next thing we’ll be bringing back “mankind” and the default “he” as it’s “gender neutral” and everyone will nod along sagely.

"In instances where we find policies and service design that are not compliant with this, we would have to update and redesign policies and services, which would absorb significant capacity and resource at a time when local authorities are stretched."

Translation: We're short of cash and if we have to comply with law of the land it's going to be a real hassle fixing all our illegal processes and services.

Also “paternity” rights in law are different to “maternity” rights. So way to be completely fucking confusing and piss off most mothers!

Tbf that does fit in with the general idea that for a man to be non-binary he merely has to wear eyeshadow and/or nail polish whereas NB women seem quite frequently to want double mastectomies. Default Man, innit?