... “Women’s rights begin with recognising women as a coherent group with a definition that doesn’t include men,” she says. “If you have a binary category, it can’t be porous. The reason women have sex-based rights, including the right to separate spaces, is because men as a class can pose a threat to women. You can’t include men in the category and still preserve those protections.”
The hostility to this analysis was not universal, but it was organised. “Certainly not all of them, but there was a hard core of activists.” EHRC staff are not civil servants, yet the job calls for a civil service impartiality. In practice, Reindorf felt not everyone shared that commitment, though she was undeterred.
“There would have been no point in me being at the EHRC if I didn’t have opinions. My purpose was to have informed, evidence-based views I was prepared to discuss and be flexible about. I was brought in because I had expertise — I wasn’t going to put that aside because people got upset.” Meanwhile the board, she says, worked well despite wide political differences and was largely aligned in its legal approach. That alignment, however, drew criticism from some staff, who were quick to brand commissioners “gender-critical”.
In 2023, EHRC chair, Baroness Falkner, faced an investigation after staff complaints about the commission’s independence and its direction on sex and gender policy. No wrongdoing was found. The inquiry stalled after leaks and was later dropped following a ministerial review. “It was testing,” Reindorf admits drily. ...
Full article at https://thecritic.co.uk/gender-self-id-was-never-the-law/