The Times has seen a copy of EHRC's final guidance

[Igneococcus]

and it looks like it's pretty rubbish:
"Under the new guidance, places such as hospital wards, gyms and leisure centres will be able to question transgender women over whether they should be using single-sex services based on how they look, their behaviour or concerns raised by others."

https://www.thetimes.com/article/82eecc43-711f-4c0a-b669-42d09d60d63e?shareToken=e5c7b92df4468caa07dbd71d66c660ab

It is going to be a headache for service providers because there will be transwomen, who are very obviously male, but who will insist when challenged that they are biologically female, and who brandish a passport testifying to this.

Not a major headache - the guidance clarifies that the passport is not sex ID.

As with all such things - like not selling alcohol to minors - guidance and law contains a list of valid acceptable ID.

In the case of sex, there is currently no acceptable ID.

And even if there was, the obvious male would never have it anyway.

Someone being turned away for having the wrong sort of ID is not an earth-shattering new concept.

The only unfamiliar thing here is this being a rare case where a passport is insufficient.

And that's why we have guidance - to help clarify oddities like this.

We effectively have self-ID for passport and driving licence changes. That could be corrected so that only people with a GRC can change their official documents. It would still be a fudge but it would minimise issues for service providers. Also, as the FWS judgement makes clear that service providers must limit female services and facilities to biological females they are still able to exclude TW.

As an employee you could be in trouble if you don't uphold your employer guidelines. Less likely for a customer to bother.

The narrative needs changing on this. More focus on why there's a group of men refusing to comply with the law and insisting on accessing women's single sex spaces where they have the opportunity to commit sex crimes of voyeurism and indecent exposure.
More questions about what the consequences should be for law breakers lke this.

Who has duty of care and legal responsibility here?

We've established that tw are not women.

Are we now saying that if someone trans the lies it absolves an organisation of all responsibility to protect other users from harassment?

That would mean that all toilets would be become 'use at own risk'. That's not going to be acceptable to a lot of women because it offers zero protection.

But this certainly isn't the care for some places - certainly there are different levels of duty of care in law already. Hospitals definitely have a higher threshold and have to do more legally. And if you are an employer you have a greater responsibility too. (I'd have to look up the exact details but I know hospitals definitely have duty of care obligations related to anyone admitted to a ward).

And honestly, should this be tested in court, I'm not sure I'd trust those guidelines to protect me if I was a gym etc.

I simply do not understand how a hospital wouldnt be liable if a member of staff said they were female and was performing intimate procedures on a female patient admitted to a ward.

It would make it almost harder to challenge in certain circumstances imo if this isn't properly sorted.

My only thought is leaked stuff before official release is usually to kick up a shit storm so it magically gets fixed before publication.

How the GRA and EA2010 interact has not been properly explained at all and can't be until sex falsification of documents is ended.

I think this massively overstates the significance of sex-stating documentation. For one thing, in a number of frontline situations (the changing room at Primark for example) it would never have been practical or realistic to resolve the situation on the basis of documentation being provided. Can you imagine a fitting room attendant ever doing this, even in the days before people could change their sex markers on docs? In these situations, documentation is a red herring. The fitting-room attendant would simply call the security staff, who would escort the individual from the store. And thanks to the new guidance their employer could feel confident that (provided they had followed their own procedures properly) a civil challenge by the excluded person would not succeed

For another thing, in cases where it might be realistic to ask for documentation (such as intake at a refuge), the law has clarified that providers can consider the normal range of evidence in front of them regarding a person's sex, including their behaviour and the concerns of anyone involved. They aren't required to use documentation as a criterion for determining sex, so it doesn't really matter that documentation is an unreliable determinant of sex, except in the genuinely tiny number of cases where all the other evidence of sex (appearance, behaviour, concerns) is moot

Also, I think the concerns about documentation misrepresent the ways in which a 'challenge' would occur. In many cases, it wouldn't be a simple one-off moment of challenge. It would be a civil matter in which a person accessing a single-sex facility is breaching the terms under which they are permitted to be on the premises. The provider could then take action to get them off the premises.

As will all civil matters, the police may not be able to become involved (unless the individual is also suspected of breaking criminal law - eg threatening behaviour, sexual assault). But providers encounter this sort of situation all the time (in contexts unrelated to enforcing single-sex facilities) and devise systems to deal with it. For example, imagine a gym where someone is trying to use the equipment but their direct debit has bounced so they haven't paid their membership fee.

Access to my gym is by means of pressing a smart-tagged bracelet against a reader, which opens a turnstile. If someone was abusing single-sex changing rooms or failing to pay their membership fee, I would expect that, under the terms and conditions of membership, these are grounds for terminating their membership, which would result in their bracelet simply being deactivated.

In different contexts, other procedures and security measures may be appropriate. But the point is that providers aren't likely to be relying on a receptionist or similar 'holding the line' by means of a challenge, much less a challenge to provide documentation.

It is largely going to come down to women being expected to face up to an angry man who may or may not be hinged, intent on breaking her boundaries and those of other women.

I hope the focus is going to shift to passionate provision of additional mixed sex resources - which I wholly applaud, but the men in question won't thank the politiicans championing it. I suspect those people need to find this out for themselves the hard way however, we've been in the trenches years longer than they have.

It’d be great if that’s what it means. I’m worried though. If this is the correct wording, it feels odd and ambiguous. Why does a trans woman need to be questioned? If they are trans, they cannot not use sss’s. Feels like a loophole.

This is a strange concern. The guidance doesn't say that a 'trans woman needs to be questioned'. It just clarifies that a provider of facilities is completely within their rights to question a person, when they consider that necessary in order to enforce single-sex spaces. Previously, the provider may have felt open to a challenge under the Equality Act by a person who was subject to such questioning.

It is completely clear in the law and the guidance that a provider has a duty to provide single-sex spaces where appropriate, and that that includes a duty to take action to enforce the exclusion of opposite sex people. It does NOT say that 'questioning' is a necessary or sufficient part of enforcing exclusion. It simply lets people know that they are allowed to question.

" It simply lets people know that they are allowed to question".

This is so important. We're going back to what we've always had - men being told that women's single sex spaces are for women - not them - and vice versa. It worked fine for so long.

This overwrought discussion about how it will work could do with being reframed to why we have a cohort of men determined that they must be allowed to watch girls and women undressing. That's the problem - there's a group determined that they should be exempt from the law and basic safeguarding. It's them that should be facing the question - why should they be exempt from obeying the law like everyone else?

What if Suzie, or, say, Beth, replies "I'm biologically female" and is lying through their teeth ?

This overwrought discussion

I feel genuinely concerned by this overwrought discussion. It feels so full of misinformation and misunderstanding that it mirrors the extreme misrepresentation of the SC judgement that TRAs have encouraged over the last several months.

Although well-intentioned, it adds to a post-truth atmosphere in which everyone suffers. We need to be operating on the basis of a shared reality, and that implies a duty to think twice and check facts before adding to all the errors out there.

I'm sure there will be informed commentary on the guidance-as-leaked before long, from the Forans of this world. We should probably wait and read that before commenting.

(I'm aware that I haven't been waiting. IANAL and there may be errors in what i have written. I was just so alarmed by the level of anxious misunderstanding on the thread. )

If you think Suzy is male, you just say no.

I wasn't meaning to criticise this thread - sorry if it came over that way. I do agree that the TRA post truth wailings have had some success. I've been reading the comments under the 3 articles in the Times and there's a significant amount of hyperbole there.
All this is deliberately framed by transactivists - "oh no, the butch women, the lesbians who'll be kicked out, you can't tell". All emotive nonsense and exhausting to keep having to challenge.

What if they reply "I'm over 18" and are lying through their teeth?

You don't hand over the extra-strong cider.

Your legal responsibility is to not sell alcohol to minors. If you're in doubt, and someone can't present valid ID to dispel your doubt, you will have to turn them away.

What this is all about is the fact that you can't trust trans-identifying men to be honest. They will lie. Unfortunately we are in a situation where people have been legally allowed to falsify documents such as passports.

The situation I can think of that is most comparable is the age restriction on buying cigarettes or alcohol where a shopkeeper or publican is obliged to ask for ID if a person looks underage. Fortunately the law doesn't allow people to falsify their date of birth on their passport or birth certificate.

That is true. And in the case of under 18s, every public sector service provider hasn’t spent the past decade enforcing the lie that they are adults and should be sold alcohol, thus making them think they can get away with their lies. That’s really the part that’s going to be difficult to unpick.

Requiring a GRC to update your driving license and passport would be reasonable, but I fear most people here would never accept it

Sorry, making my point clearer : there is such a thing as an ID to prove you're over 18. But unless I'm mistaken, you can have a genuine ID falsifying your sex. For people with GRC. It's not tractable is it?

Absolutely not, sex is immutable, if they want to add a gender then ok, but sex is sex.

As mentioned in the SCJ so succinctly, lesbians are not sexually attracted to a certificate.

Having a piece of paper does not turn a man into a woman in a way that removes his impact upon women. It's sad for him, but it doesn't. Having a piece of paper is not contingent on having changed appearance in any way, or having had any kind of surgery, or even having a record clean of any sexual offenses against women. Any man can get a certificate.

Additional resources can be created for him to support his chosen identity and his rejection of being in fact male, but those have to not involve removing equality and access for women who do not consent to use a mixed sex space that supports his fiction.

Sex is, but secondary sex characteristics are not and are how we identify sex. Being able to change your driving license or passport makes life easier and reduces friction from having an ID that doesn’t reflect how people see you.

Do you think a trans man that has a beard and could be perceived as male will have an easier time with an ID that says male or female?

I read it as the scenario where a TW uses the women’s facilities despite knowing they shouldn’t - a likely scenario given how many have been all over social media saying they will use women’s spaces regardless. It’s explicitly stating that the service provider can challenge them and ask for proof that they’re female.

The Times headline is awful. It doesn't help.

The government - Trans people need their id changed to reflect their desired sex, day to day life would be difficult if they presented as one sex and had id as the other.

The government - there is no id that reliably records a persons sex, so a service providers do not need to ask for id to maintain SS services.

So what use is the sex markers on trans peoples id?