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

That the law IS important is proven by all the kicking off about it.

If it didn't matter, activists would not care what it said and ministers wouldn't be spending a year wangling and trying to bend it around corners to their own preferences. It does matter and they all know it. Men can no longer smugly smile in women's facilities however they behave and enjoy telling women that they're legally allowed and women can't stop them.

But there is a difference between civil law and criminal law.

There is no specific criminal law that says you can't use an opposite sex toilet. There are just laws that allow you to be excluded and other laws that might come into effect if you resisted exclusion.

The main consequence of a service provider allowing somebody to use an opposite sex facility would be that they wouldn't be able to rely on the Equality Act single sex exemptions that allow discrimination, so the facility would just be mixed sex.

Whether or not they would be complying with other regulations would be another matter, but it is not yet clear what a court would decide.

The main consequence of a service provider allowing somebody to use an opposite sex facility would be that they wouldn't be able to rely on the Equality Act single sex exemptions that allow discrimination, so the facility would just be mixed sex.

But surely the main consequence of a service provider allowing somebody to use an opposite sex facility would be that they would leave themselves wide open to be sued, with no effective defence?

So the common understanding of the word "woman", or any other word, depends on how nefarious the context of usage implies it is?
Right...

Did you actually read that?

I'm glad it is there for all to see.
No one has to reinterprete your words to see just how batshit that is.

Thanks for the expected cynical 'interpretation'. But that's unrelated to the point being made which wasn't that words don't have broad meanings rather some words are commonly socially interchangeable with other words despite their broader meanings & are shrewdly employed to provide plausible deniability.

'Woman' isn't exploited in such a way.

Woman is one of the most exploited words there is right now. And we are over it.

Deviant is a perfectly adequate word to describe men going into single sex spaces designed for the opposite sex. However deviantly they are using the word woman to justify themselves.

Woman is one of the most exploited words there is right now.

Uh huh, biological essentialists just like any other ideology has a barrow to push.

Biology is a fact not an ideology. Don't be so silly.

Thank you for informing us all that you don't know that an is is not an ought.

May I suggest a rudimentary course in philosophy 101 to correct this deeply flawed reasoning?

OK, let's play it your way:

We are told repeatedly, in a hectoring, moralising manner, that "Trans people exist!"

So what? An is is not an ought.

Absolutely. But transgender and queer theorists argue that human rights, dignity and legal protections are matters of social negotiation and value—not objective deductions from the natural world. By treating sex as a fundamental "ought" that dictates human rights, GC frameworks conflate descriptive biology with human moral frameworks.

More than 99.9% of babies have their sex accurately observed at birth. Fewer than 0.018% have a developmental difference that leads to their sex being ambiguous in any way. Even in these rare instances, science informs us as to whether they are biologically male or female.

The only people suggesting that a person’s sex is complicated are those seeking to legitimise deviant behaviour, such as using single sex provision for the opposite sex. They know very well which sex they are. In the case of transwomen, they know they are male as this is one of two essential criteria for being a transwoman.

A more honest argument would be to present the case as to why some males should be permitted to use female only provision and why. This doesn’t happen because many, perhaps most, transwoman find any acknowledgment of them being male morally injurious and can’t tolerate it - so go all out to avoid it.

I’ve no interest in discussing single sex provision with people who don’t accept a starting point of people knowing which biological sex they are and that this is not complicated. It’s futile.

But notions of human rights etc aren't plucked from the air. The particular rights required arise from needs. And one of the major origins of needs is bodily physical realities.

So if you have accepted the concept of human rights at all (that's the separate philosophical "ought" bit), the realities of human embodiment immediately set up some fairly obvious specific "oughts". Like allowing for people to sleep, eat, drink, and not be physically damaged or killed just because somebody feels like doing it.

One can quibble about details of implementation ( the appropriate length of a working day, for example), but if human rights are to be fit for purpose, physical realities can't be just dismissed.

Rights based on the bodily needs of women and men respectively are just a subset of this, and no different. If human rights are a thing, then for example recognition that one category of human (though not the other) is vulnerable to enforced pregnancy and needs protection from that, is just another "ought" based on a verifiable fact.

I hear you, but the problem is where 'needs' apply isn't uniform so the material context matters. The overwhelming amount of male violence occurs in very particular settings as in the perpetrator is known to the victim & occurs in their home when they are alone hence we don't require sex segregation in employment spaces, restaurants bars, cafes etc.

The equality act has been in place since 2010 where effectively 'woman' was not defined till 2025 & yet there hasn't been an uptick in trans women's violence in public toilets. It's only in the last few years that this has become a pressing issue without any increases noted despite the growing trans population, widespread grass roots complaints or consistency in female discontent because of a huge generational divide.

If its material evidence that justifies how society should be organised then you kind of need it that often irrelevant oversimplifications don't necessarily qualify as.

unfortunately the perpetrators and victims of violence in our society are classified basically by sex. Very rarely are the gender identities of the perpetrators discussed or recorded. So you are describing a set of people based on their biological basis, and then wanting to use these statistics to prove something for gender identity. But the two are unrelated.

Until all people are properly educated in gender identity theory and have it recorded next to their crimes I don’t think it’s a useful comparison. Where are the statistics on agender or pan gender criminals? Are gender fluid people more likely to be violent when identifying as male or female?

Most victims of violence are not able to discuss gender identity with their attacker and rely on biological facts to describe them to the police. Very rarely does the attacker ask for their gender identity first too. This goes for both male and female victims of violence.

How can human rights apply to something we are unable to see or measure, which is completely unrelated to how violence is effected, experienced or recorded?

Yes it is. It’s used for an adult human female, but also used by some men to allow them access to female spaces for whatever their reason, nefarious or just predatory.

The equality act has been in place since 2010 where effectively 'woman' was not defined till 2025 & yet there hasn't been an uptick in trans women's violence in public toilets.

Perhaps you're unaware that one the fastest growing porn genres is transwomen in women's toilets wielding various weapons including their penises.

And since transwomen have also taken to social media to threaten women constantly with beheading, beating and rape, your claim is pointless.

Men constitute the predator class, and transwomen conform entirely, if not more so than non TIMs, to male pattern violence. It's not the winning argument you think it is that all the predators in the male sex class should be able to access vulnerable women just because most of the time they confine their killing and raping to their partners.

Police reporting isn't the only method of tracking. Complaints to local authorities about trans women in public toilets in the UK is virtually non existent.

https://translucent.org.uk/how-many-complaints-about-trans-women-using-toilets/

At TransLucent, we have a strict policy of “truth, clarity and justice” – our mission is not to erode womens rights

🤣

Hmm, not really related to male violence that you are discussing though. And who complains to the council? You’d be better off finding out who complains to their friends.

Whereas biology, reality of crime data, coroners reports and common sense dictate the best toilet design is in a single sex environment.

Councils are not responsible for many toilets anymore. Years of misuse, subsequent funding issues and the fact they are not legally obliged to provide toilet provision means that this exercise was always going to be futile.

Why would the council log a complaint about a man being in the women’s toilets at a pub? Or a workplace? What would they log it under? Why would anyone think to ring up the council - what would that achieve?

The only thing the very time consuming report shows is that there is no system in place for people to collate what’s going on in toilets.

It's related directly to the context of material evidence discussed upthread specific to the demographic in question being excluded. Trans women.

You would have thought issues that are supposedly warranting the total reorganisation of social resources might register in complaints to local authorities or grass roots activism or even widespread protests as they often do. But alas no such evidence exists. Only a particularly loud small cohort of women who are a usefulr political cudgel that's been astro turfed by powerful right wing links in the media.

They were for those jurisdictions mentioned in the link for 16 million people but nary a whisper.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Thank you for my morning laugh today.

Biological essentialists. 😂😆😭😂😆😭

I’m a breathing essentialist too. How very fundamentalist of me.