The performance of the liberal legal commentator blokes who have sought to be the 'voice of reason' on the sex and gender debates, sitting above the 'toxic' and furious and women, while refusing to engage with the content of what women are saying is telling
It shows how if you are not willing to challenge the foundational logic of the trans rights activist orgs like RightsInfo, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence etc.. that "transwomen are women & anything else is transphobic" then you will have to throw women under every bus that comes
Because its no good just saying 'balancing rights' in theory, you have to be willing to be able to stand up for women some time. Males in women's prisons? Males playing contact rugby with women? These are extreme examples of real harms to women really happening ...
If you won't draw a line to protect women from discrimination, harassment & physical harm here, where will you draw it? But drawing the line anywhere means standing up to the bullies, including the economic bullies & that is too much to ask. So could women please just shut up?
The tragedy of all this is that there really is need for a grown up debate about how to protect women's rights & trans people's rights. As @GoonerProf points out, it starts w recognising that sex & being trans are different (as are disability, age etc...) forwomen.scot/public-meeting…
Thats why the Equality Act has separate protected characteristics. Sex =/= gender identity fairplayforwomen.com/single-sex/ Including trans people in public life does not depend on undermining women and girls boundaries, and their ability to organise politically.
That no grown up organisations have been willing to stand up (including orgs like @fawcettsociety) is why guys who i am sure are lovely & clever in other spheres are able to mistake their shallow pronouncements on this for wisdom & use any excuse for not listening to women
But women are not shutting up. And men are speaking up too. Time to be brave!
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The OfS-Sussex judgement is logically flawed and can't be allowed to stand. @ObhishekSaha with a very good analogy about paths.
Sussex's defence was that it had a high level sign saying "this path will only be closed for very good reasons". Therefore it must have had a very good reason 🙄
In order to keep the footpath functionally open the local authority has to apply some rules to the users of the path. It has a duty to keep the path open for cyclists and pedestrians, but not for motorbikes. This is in the bye-laws
(this is the university's equality act compliant equality policy that is part of its governance)
There are some short parts of the path that are so unavoidably narrow that the local authority puts up signs saying "cyclists dismount here" to keep the whole path safe and open for all users.
That is fine, the path is still open to pedestrians and cyclists.
(that's a proportionate means to a legitimate aim in the Equality Act, its "no noisy protests that disrupt exams")
This is quite the exercise in missing the point by Prof Shreya Atrey in Modern Law Review.
FWS will have a severe impact on "transgender, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, polygender, genderqueer and intersex" it says (without defining any of these terms).
Remember, FWS was just about whether a GRC changes a person's sex for the purpose of the Equality Act.
Atrey says the protected characteristic of sex should be amended to include sex characteristics, gender, gender identity, gender expression and gender performance. 🤨
A curious thing about the draft government guidance: It has no conceptual underpinning at all
“In recent years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of children who are questioning the way they feel about being a boy or a girl, including the physical attributes of their sex and the related ways in which they fit into society. “
Er ok…🤷♀️
It then dives into “where a child or their parent has raised a request relating to social transition”
The phrase appears 29 times in the guidance, but is never explained what it means or what it might involve.
The schools are told they must "consider what is in the best interests of the child and other children, and a decision relating to social transition may not be the same as a child’s wishes. "
The phrase “gender identity” appears 36 times in the judgment
Leonardo’s policy is that any member of staff who is proposing to to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process for the purposes of reassigning their gender can use the toilets intended for the opposite sex.
I am hugely grateful to Naomi Cunningham for the work that she has done as the first chair of Sex Matters, and for her equally important role as a barrister representing claimants using the law to fight for justice.