Thread by @soniasodha

15 surprising things about the Peggie v NHS Fife ET judgment - a thread 🧵

1. Top of the pops has to be mis/partial quoting of the Supreme Court judgment in a way that badly misrepresents what it said.

2. It also includes a quote supposedly from the Forstater EAT judgment that actually isn’t in the judgment. And went onto say that the Supreme Court in endorsing the Forstater judgment implicitly endorsed that nonexistent quote.

3. Its use of partial language (“assigned male at birth”, "trans female” to talk about a male doctor who identifies as trans) while also bending over backwards nog to use pronouns for the male doctor (“second respondent” appears in judgment > 1k times) is weirdly inconsistent.

4. It misunderstands the Supreme Court in a pretty fundamental way. Here it seems to think the alternative to “can separate by sex” is “can allow men to self-identify into female-only services” not “mixed sex”. It leaves out the rest of the paragraph that makes this clear.

5. Here the judgment totally ignores the far more likely meaning of the Supreme Court judgment - which is that there has never been a right for men to self-identify into female-only spaces, services and support.

6. How is excluding someone male from a female-only space unlawful direct or indirect discrimination when they are being excluded on the basis of their sex not their gender reassignment, so the comparator is a male without PC of GR?

7. Imagine applying these arguments to disability. The implication here of disabled people not being able to use non-accessible toilets is not they are unemployable, but that employers must make arrangements for accessible provision. Same goes for trans people and third spaces.

8. Men are no greater risk to women in a changing room environment than women, apparently.

9. The effect of claimant’s understanding of the Supreme Court judgment is that no one male can *ever* go into a female changing room or toilet to clean or make repairs. And third spaces are “unworkable” for employers… despite the fact it would v likely be OK for a small employer to combine a single accessible and gender neutral facility.

10. Women can’t articulate their belief men can’t change sex in a way that says men aren’t women because to do so is to say a man who believes he’s a woman is wrong to do so.

11. In fact to do so is proselytising.

12. Here the ET seems to ignore that the Equality Act contains single-sex exceptions not single-gender-reassignment exceptions. (Here it does NOT limit its conclusion to workplaces but implies this applies to all changing rooms.)

13. But then the ET goes on to say it thinks the Supreme Court judgment applies only to service providers, not employers/workplaces - despite the fact that the Supreme Court does not explicitly draw this limitation around its judgment (and surely would have done if that had been what they meant?)

14. Really????? Even given the existence of the 1992 Workplace Regulations specifying employers must have separate toilets for men and women unless they’re individual/lockable rooms?

15. And then there's what the ET seems to think it means to appear female... in a word, it's "feminine". (The 1950s called wanting its ET judgment back.)

There's more, but at that's enough for now.