Trick to sidestep equality law?

[Gerri1992]

Just saw this on x. This wouldn't work right? It would obviously just be an attempt to break equality law.

It wouldn't work using the word 'gender', but all these places could become mixed sex.
The issue is basically that to stop the risk of discrimination claims, they have to accept all males, not just a subset of allegedly trans identified males.
But if they can change their Articles of Association or whatever their founding documentation is, they can just drop 'girl' or 'women' and accept both sexes.

They are claiming they could setup a club that restricts on gender e.g. female gendered people only, and argue that is allowed because you can discriminate on anything that isn't in equality act.
Like setting up a club for Tory supporters, or a chess club requiring a specific play rating to join.

At which point of course the transgender “community” would lose all interest in joining them, since their only aim is to join (or more often IMO help to run) an all-female organisation.

It's interesting reading posts like this one linked, because it's an admission that sex is indeed real and not at all the same as gender ID. Yet I'm guessing it is written by a Believer in gender ideology?

I think the club more analogous to having a chess or Tory club would be having a club for fans of gender ID. But I don't see how they could lawfully exclude males without special identities and females with special identities from the same club.

Oh dear....

There's no actual definition of gender though.

Or what 'female gender' is. Is this going to be a mixed sex group of people deemed to be 'performing femininity' to the right stereotypes? Where's the criteria going to sit? Long hair, long nails, giggly, can't park or read maps, cries a lot? Who is going to draw the lines? Girls with short hair and interests in trains and spot welding banned? I thought this movement was all about embracing gender non conformity? What about NBs?

Ffs what is this absolute batshit over the idea of permitting girls and women to have an inch of the universe to themselves?

Boys and men wanting that very special experience of being embraced within a women and girls' single sex space are just going to have to get over it, and get their heads around the idea that women and girls aren't resources for them to use. They are not on the planet to provide theme park experiences for males. Round up some handmaidens ffs and play with them, and leave the non consenting ones in peace.

it's an admission that sex is indeed real and not at all the same as gender ID

It is. Let's face it, the desire is absolutely that there should be single sex spaces on a sexed basis for women and girls and that a man or boy can be in there with them. The desire is as a male to experience being in a single sex female environment.

This is why mixed sex provisions won't do.

If they had any actual fucking brains, they would ask their members if they wanted
Single Sex
Mixed sex with a rebrand to 'The Institute' or 'The Guides'

And see what their actual membership wants.

Well, and they could, couldn't they? Provided they could work out a reliable definition of what it is to have a certain gender.

People are free to form associations on all sorts of bases. It wouldn't violate equality legislation. There is nothing wrong as such with having a mixed sex organisation. And there is nothing wrong with having an organisation that (I dunno exactly ...) only catered to people who liked pink and princesses or whatever the flip would be their basis for assigning gender.

I think it would be indirect sex discrimination against men.

If only people of woman gender* can join then that would exclude most men as they as a sex class are less likely to have a woman gender than women as a sex class so the gender requirements are indirectly discrimating against men as a sex class

*assuming woman gender can be defined

Just to add, though, that they couldn't, in their female-gender-based organisation, admit females just on the grounds of their sexed female bodies and have a different criterion for males -- eg that they liked dresses and pink and being called female. That would be sex discrimination.
The criteria for both sexes would have to be dresses/pink/princess/etc. I would not be eligible for a female-gendered-based organisation despite being a woman.

It wouldn't be discriminating against men unless they had different entry criteria for men than for women.

How can this work when all humans would still be of one sex or the other and sex is a protected characteristic?
Magic wand to unsex everyone?

If you set identical entry requirements but very few of a particular protected characteristic would be able to meet those requirements it can be indirect discrimination.

It depends on what the entry requirements are set as.

The scouts went mixed sex so Guides could do it but as others have said, the trans activists would then lose all interest in joining.

@Gerri1992 no this wouldn't work because the people who drafted the original Equalities Act were not stupid and the legislation already covers such underhand attempts to subvert it.

In general, all people should be treated as equal. It is ok to provide services differently to people on the basis of protected characteristics where it is a reasonable means to achieve a legitimate aim (eg having social organisations for women and girls like the WI and girl guides is a recognised way to help women and girls to overcome and transcend the disadvantages faced by female people within a patriarchy and that is something that affects transmen because their sex is female,but doesnot affect transwomen because their sex is male and frankly the sense of entitlement with which the desires of tranwomen are promoted above the needs of women is very much in keeping with promoting the patriarchy) - if they are not doing that then they need to be open to everyone.

What they would be doing if they restrict access on the basis of "gender" ie allow entry to anyone with a feminine gender would come under the definition of "indirect discrimination" in the same way that banning people who are wearing headscarves from a premises would be indirect discrimination against muslim people even though not all muslim people wear headscarves and not all people wearing headscarves are muslim but because the restriction will disproportionately affect muslims more than non-muslims. In the same way, any restriction on the basis of gender would automatically always disproportionately affect one sex more than the other and therefore would automatically be indirect sex discrimination.

‘gender’ is highly correlated with ‘sex’ - that is the whole reason why men want to access girl guides. You cannot discriminate on the basis of sex other than in accordance with the EA exemptions so discrimination on the basis of gender would be unlawful as it is unlawfully discriminating on the basis of sex.

The courts are quite clear on this concept - they have regularly ruled that certain things are discriminatory because they disproportionally impact one PC more.

They asked and voted many years ago to remain single-sex.

No, it wouldn't work.

Caselaw is that a rule has to affect men and women equally to avoid being considered as discrimination on the grounds of sex. For instance in Smith vs Safeway the Court of Appeal held that to require employees all to wear lipstick and earrings and have shoulder length hair would be a rule that if applied equally to men and women would disproportionately affect men by forcing them to present themselves in an unconventional way.

So, to allow entry or membership only to people who have female "gender", "present as" female (or some other proxy) affects men very differently from women and would still be considered as discrimination on the grounds of sex, with all that flows from it.

To be clear, I couldn't give a fuck if adults who claim to have female gender ID want to hang out together.

For children, is there actually a protected characteristic related to gender at all? It would be hard to explain exactly why the adult male with the female gender ID needed to be supervising the little girls and boys in the "I like princesses not football" club, but Jimmy and Kimmy's dad Nigel wasn't allowed to.

There probably are many boys and girls who'd enjoy a Pink Princess club.

But the organisers would have endless issues with righteous twits in the first five minutes who wanted to wear blue because Reasons, and to extend Princesses to Lego and rugby, and it wasn't fair, and so on, and legally it would be very difficult to stop anyone joining who wanted to, whether or not they were the target clientele, or caused havoc to the group as a whole. As with any other kids' club. Because legal exclusion is based on one protected, shared, characteristic to provide something that can only happen if that group is allowed to be by itself.

The point of Guides was to let girls have a space that was theirs alone, with freedom from the limitations of gender and the impact of boys.

Yes, both children and adults alike can hold the PC of gender reassigment.

Indeed and they must not be treated different to others of their (biological) sex because of it.

I love the way the tweet is written as though they think 'ha! Bet those feminists have never thought to question what 'gender' is!!' - bless.

This question has been done to death in the GG and WI threads.
You can have a 'gender identity' club if you want, but it would have to be open to everyone.

There's nothing that differentiates 'woman gender identity' from 'man gender identity'.

Unless, of course, they want to articulate their definition of 'woman' which they can't and won't do, because we'll all see how laughably sexist it is.

it's an admission that sex is indeed real and not at all the same as gender ID

It's hardly an admission.
The entire definition of 'transgender' relies on this distinction - "Trans: A term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth."

It's not 'people who wish to be the opposite sex'. It's people whose gender identity makes them, literally, a man or a woman, because it is that feeling that makes someone, male or female, a man/woman.

That might be true in certain circumstances, but I don't think it can be true as a general principle. What about a netball group that requires applicants to have a commitment to playing a regular netball games per season. Assuming men are much less likely to want to play regular netball than women are, they are less likely to qualify for membership.

That is not sex discrimination, because there is no detriment to men: any man who actually wants to play netball can join, regardless of the fact that men as a class are less likely to want to play it.

Similarly, an organisation for 'female gendered people' (again with the caveat: what t f is that anyway?) would be available to any man who had a female gender, regardless of the fact that men as a class are less likely to have this.

You might get into difficulties in some circumstances if the organisation was providing a wide range of benefits in addition to the performance of gender that non-female gendered people could not access elsewhere. If that were the case, then males without a female gender might conceivably be regarded as facing a detriment, on the grounds that they were more likely to lack a female gender than women

But if that were a problem for a female-gender organisation, it would equally be a problem for a sex-based group. Say, for example, Girl Guides was waaay better than Scouts at providing abseiling courses and similar. Could males sue for sex discrimination?? I doubt it