Good Law Project to report Sex Matters over 'deviant' remark

[IwantToRetire]

In its assessment of the EHRC guidance, Sex Matters took issue with the following phrase: "It is unlikely to be either practical or appropriate to approach any particular individual to make enquiries about their sex in relation to facilities, such as toilets, which are incidental to the primary service.”

The sex-based rights group responded in a publication entitled <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/lLjDq/sex-matters.org/posts/updates/sex-is-not-special-category-data/?ref=ed_latest" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"Sex is not a 'special category' data", saying: "There is no legal basis for this instruction, which in effect licenses men to enter women’s facilities and claim that it is inappropriate, possibly unlawful and a breach of their human rights to challenge them."

The group further stated: "Telling staff supervising single-sex spaces that they must second-guess themselves when they become aware of a man engaging in the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space, or risk breaching data-protection law, will lead to unwanted conduct related to the protected characteristic of sex that is likely to meet the definition of harassment in the Equality Act. It 'violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment'."

From article at https://www.thenational.scot/news/26143769.good-law-project-report-sex-matters-deviant-remark/
and at https://archive.is/lLjDq

Deviant describes actions, beliefs, or behaviors that depart significantly from accepted social norms or cultural standards.

using it to describe men going into the ladies lavs seems legit

poor Jolyon. Not busy at the moment obvs

Telling staff supervising single-sex spaces that they must second-guess themselves when they become aware of a man engaging in the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space

Surely Jolly agrees that it's wrong for men to go in the women's, and that's why he's only arguing for one type of women to go in there?
Is he now acknowledging it's actually men he's arguing for, and there's nothing wrong with it? I can't keep up.

Deviant is the perfect word to use.

Is he suggesting these men are sexually deviant?

Given that Jolly thinks it’s ok to beat foxes to death while wearing his wife’s kimono, I’d say his definition of deviant doesn’t match most people’s.

Well that will be fun.

It's just another opportunity for Maugham to grift another crowdfund frenzy by telling his gullible, legally illiterate, followers that the bad people at Sex Matters called them all 'deviants'. Instead of the truth which is SM describing men intruding into women's single-sex spaces as deviant behaviour.

Why would JM assume deviant men means transwomen?

Foucault-addled grievance gerbils let loose on the OED🙄
with apologies to the entirely sensible Bluestocking gerbills!

Taking offence at the correct use of a standard English word is really scraping the barrel, and just makes him look silly. Sillier.

Foucault-addled grievance gerbils let loose on the OED🙄
with apologies to the entirely sensible Bluestocking gerbills!

Now that’s given me an idea…

I think it is an intentional escalation of rhetoric on the SM's side, namely: Even if a transwoman believes he ought to have the right to access single sex spaces, it's now clear that 1) a large number of women object to transwomen in their spaces, 2) the law clearly states that they shouldn't be there, 3) there are virtually always alternatives; that means he's there in defiance of those three points, which is deviant behaviour. Men exhibiting such behaviour are not neutral risk to women - they are an elevated risk. They are exactly the sort of men you don't want in a single sex, women's space, and deviant underscores that situation.

and moreover, men are men. some may describe themselves as 'transwomen', but when I look at them I see what's there - a man. So if I see him in the ladies toilets I see a man in the wrong loos - deviant behaviour.

how am I supposed to tell the difference between the men in the ladies loos because they think they're 'transwomen' and the ones in there because they're exhibiting deviant behaviour?

I saw this.

Poor Jolyon.

He isn’t clever at all. He loses so many cases. He made case law in GLP v EHRC that can be used against the very people who paid his crowd funders forever.

Given the failure rate of his attempts to use the courts as his personal cudgel - I wonder when he’ll be considered a vexatious litigant.

Sex Matters are clever with their words - Jolyon just can’t see how stupid his response makes him.

This is what happens when middle aged men sit in the sun for too long without a knotted hanky on their head. Their brains melt.

Silly Joylon. 🤪

Am pretty sure SM meant behaviour that deviates from the law, as in behaviour that breaches the law, that the person should, or ought to know about.

JM inference is wholly on him

what a laugh.

https://richarddunstan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/screenshot-2025-05-27-at-12.46.20.png

Given this track record I think Sex Matters can happily rest easy.

When I was younger, there was a man found in the women’s toilets at our local park. He was long gone before a policeman arrived but I remember a letter being sent to parents from our headteacher to watch out for him.

To be fair it implies trans people are only using the lav to conduct 'abnormal' business rather than the regular kind & deviancy is often associated with perversion.

I don't know how you're getting all that from this:
'the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space'

The 'deviance' is defined in the sentence itself: it is a male accessing a female-only space.
Nothing about abnormality, perversion or anything similar.
What is your interpretation based on?

Just had a look on reddit and yep, there it is! 😄

How did you know...

Well, replace 'deviancy' with its usual social association 'perverted' & it implies its perverted to for trans people to use the lav of the opposite sex. Why is it 'perverted'? And don't give me that vague 'socially unacceptable' fig leaf. The implication is they will do something 'perverted'.

Words have common social associations that more uncommon associations won't save them from.

They didn't say "deviancy".
But it's interesting you did, though.

They said deviant behaviour. That is, behaviour that deviates from the accepted social norm. I.e. the accepted social norm of men not going into women's toilets.

Deviant is milder synonym of 'illegal' in this context.

Why should I 'replace' a word with a different word, in order to change the original meaning and make the sentence offensive?

'the deviant behaviour of accessing a female-only space' is a standalone and perfectly clear statement: the 'deviant behaviour' is accessing a space you [one] are not entitled to access.

What adjective would you have preferred to describe that behaviour?

Whether 'deviant' or 'deviancy' is used is irrelevant. The point is deviance is commonly associated with 'perversion'…& SM would have known that. And knowing that they could have used other less inflammatory words…but they chose not to which implies an intentional association of trans people with perversion.

SM after all is an activist group whose interests benefit from associating trans people with danger.

Pp has misunderstood, I think. "Deviant" means unusual or not usually accepted. "Perverted" means something that's been changed.

If you deviate from a path, you're not perverting or altering the course of that path. You're just doing something different.

The fact that people think words meant different things from their actual definitions is irrelevant to what was actually conveyed.

Reminds me of the people who get "substituted with" and "substituted for" the wrong way round!