Cambridge University ignoring the Supreme Court ruling?

[yoursweetpotatoesarebland]

Dd is going to the Cambridge open day coming up, I got an email through about the colleges and was having a read through. There’s a section about “gender identity” and how it impacts on what colleges you can apply to. There are two women’s colleges but both accept anyone who identifies as a woman!

This is from Murray Edwards:
“At the admissions level, we will consider any student who, at the point of application, identifies as a woman“

How can this still be allowed? It’s self ID too so has NEVER been legal for the purposes of the eqA.

Historically disadvantaged due to their sex you mean.

Don’t twist words and history to suit your agenda. These colleges were set up for women. Biological women.

Not people ‘disadvantaged in some way by gender’.

@murasaki I’m an alumna of one of the women’s colleges too and I’m here to tell you that you clearly didn’t notice! There have been trans women students and faculty at Newnham for decades!

Do you mean historically there have been men studying at these colleges wearing dresses and skirts and no one noticed because they passed sooo well?? I'm sure you can evidence that other than just your word otherwise we'll be treating that the same way we treat all the usual hyperbolic claims by TRA that men have been using all of women's spaces and places for literally ever and no one ever noticed ie total bullshit

I note as well that these claims are often made by people who have barely been alive more than 2 decades....

A lot of waffle that in no way explains why they feel able to ignore the law.

And no people have traditionally been discriminated against for their gender, as it’s not observable. People have been discriminated against because of their sex.

So I’ve done a bit more reading and Murray Edwards seem to imply that because UCAS doesn’t collect sex data only gender identity- it isn’t possible to distinguish on the basis of sex.

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/why-we-have-written-to-ucas-about-data/

I don’t understand how this is still happening - I feel so naive!

Which decades?

There was Rachel Padman, but he was a fellow.

So, from what you're saying, Newnham and Murray Edwards are now mixed sex and no longer for female students only.

At least since the 90s, entirely possible before then, but I don’t have first hand experience of that

Well I’m more than 4 decades old. Not everyone agrees with you. I never post on these threads normally, mostly people who don’t want to be shouted at avoid them.

I'm not sure the subject heading is correct. The colleges decide who they accept, not the university. As long as the university (as opposed to college) buildings have single-sex facilities and services where those are necessary, then the university isn't violating the SC ruling.

As regards the colleges, it's an interesting question to what extent the women's colleges are violating the SC ruling by accepting male students because it's up to them whether their student composition is single sex or mixed sex. The real issue arises if they are then also allowing male students to use the female students' loos and bathrooms or whether they are setting aside any loos and bathrooms for the use of a handful of male students who claim to "identify" as women that they might accept.

There are plenty of great mixed-sex colleges your daughter could apply to.

It’s motivated reasoning by left-wing activists who see no problem in dishonesty in their arguments.

On the subject of how can someone a bit dim graduate from a top university, it’s worth remembering too that some not very bright people with a phenomenally good (and expensive) education can make it to and through Cambridge, especially in humanities degrees with enough help.

As I’ve heard it put, you can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.

If they are mixed sex then they must accept normal men, not only trans-identifying ones.

TeachWithMissM's post summarised (if I'm understanding properly): "I've never felt threatened by a trans woman at college so they should let them in; actually I've never even met a trans woman at college". The last bit completely breaks the attempted argument of the first! If there happened to be hoards of well-behaved trans women then maybe (maybe) you could make a statistical case that letting them in wasn't actually causing any problems, but that isn't the case at all.

Anyway it's not just about feeling threatened. Transwomen at a place like Cambridge are often very masculine in many aspects of their social interactions and learning styles (e.g. in the ways they dominate conversations). Female students deserve to be able to escape that.

So no evidence whatsoever then as is normal when ppl come here airily waving their hands saying "ooooh but men wearing dresses and performing female stereotypes have been in all women's everything's for years and years and years and you just didn't notice because they passed so well"

I hope and assume you are not reading law.

Ask one of the law tutors to explain to you why this policy is completely irrelevant to the question of whether Newnham is compliant with the Equality Act as clarified by the FWS Supreme Court judgment.

Then ask them to explain the mechanism within that statute by which the college lawfully justifies excluding all undergraduate men except undergraduate men (who remain "men" under the Act - GRC or not) who have the additional protected characteristic of 'gender reassignment'.

I'd love to hear the response.

I agree that the difficulty now is that the law very clearly does not allow single sex facilities to be mixed sex, in that the justification for excluding some men or some women because of their sex is not legal if it doesn’t exclude all of them.

Therefore both colleges in my view (IANAL) are opening themselves to a case for discrimination on the grounds of sex by a male student who did not get a place at Cambridge because he wears clothes coded as male rather than clothes coded as female.

And tbh if that doesn’t show you what an absolutely ludicrous situation we have ended up in, nothing will. And it has ZERO to do with your looooooovely friend Jane who transitioned in 2012 and is your bestie. Or FGS that male people have been observed on the college site.

The outcome I think will eventually be both colleges becoming fully mixed sex. I don’t really see how else they will square the circle of the law vs their own feelings when required to actually state that women are women. However, knowing some senior people at Newnham I do harbour some hope that they will hold out; there have been changes already, see threads passim.

I’m stating I was there and I knew trans people there. You can choose not to believe me.

They’ll consider which means they’ll then send them on to another of the colleges, most don’t get the one they apply to.

Dr Rachel Padman (retired) was appointed as a Fellow of Newnham in 1996. I can well believe there were several admissions of male people along the way. That was then, this is now.

I suspect the reality was that everyone knew who the trans students were and accepted them.

If you didn't know any transwomen there then you must have known transmen, if, as you say, you knew trans people at college. Transmen are women, so they belong in a women's college.

Newnham claims to be using the Schedule 12 exemption that permits single-sex educational establishments to admit opposite-sex students 'exceptionally'. (This enables sixth-formers, for instance, to access a wider range of academic subjects within daily commuting distance.)

It's less clear why they don't consider themselves bound by their own founding instrument, which, having been ratified by the King at the time, has the force of law. But they can, of course, change it, as many colleges did in order to become mixed-sex.

They did recently advertise a female-only fellowship. Ordinarily an occupational requirement tied to a protected characteristic in this way must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim (Schedule 9). They were exempt from this criterion because their founding instrument predates the Employment Act of 1992 (which outlawed arbitrary occupational requirements, even those introduced by the women's colleges in the interests of advancing women's education). So they are still slightly less misogynist than your average academic, by a hair's breadth.

There remains the as yet unanswered question of whether they are illegally discriminating against male candidates by applying to them more onerous admission criteria than those applied to female candidates. Swift J has commented on this in the context of Schedule 3 services, but I don't know how this translates to educational establishments (which presumably are governed at least partly by regulations outwith EA2010).

Or had no choice but to accept them.

Just for clarity, how many trans women did you know? (To avoid word games, I mean male people presenting as female).

Trans men (female people presenting as male) are not a problem in this context as they are female, and therefore part of the disadvantaged demographic for whom the college was set up.

This is particularly relevant given the Cambridge teaching system. However TiMs may present, because of their sex and socialisation they tend to retain male behaviour. It is so easy for men to dominate in small supervision groups. Women do need and deserve a space of their own.