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 arguments made on behalf of the Women and Equalities Minister yesterday were a desperate attempt to shoehorn "case-by-case" back into the single sex services following the Supreme Court judgment.
At paragraph 36 she says there are there are no equivalent exceptions to the single sex service exceptions that apply to employers.
She seems to have forgotten the provisions about protection of women in Schedule 22!
She said that the FWS case was principally decided by reference to maternity rights.
It wasn't. The SC concluded "it important that the EA is interpreted in a clear & consistent way so that groups which share a PC can be identified by those on whom the Act imposes obligations so that they can perform those obligations in a practical way"
Ollie was Chair of the Civil Service Rainbow Alliance for 9 years from 2008 -2017, then held a number of roles in the GEO.
So all the time that the government was getting the law wrong and getting Stonewall prizes for he was leading this.
In 2012 he wrote in Civil Service World about his personal opinion that the government shouldn't renege on its commitment to this particular approach to diversity.
Peter Wilkins case exposes another public body (this one part of @DefenceHQ) that lost sight of the Equality Act and of civil service principles of impartiality and objectivity.
One colleague accused him of making a "threatening" FOI request when he tried to draw attention to @dstlmod 's Line Manager’s Guide.
The FOI was turned down but I tried again.
At first DSTL said they couldn't find the document.
I said "have another look, its on your intranet" and they located it.
Then they thought long and hard about whether they could withhold it on security grounds.
Lynn O'Donnell had writen a document entitled Line Managers Guide to supporting LGBT+ Identifying staff.
It included the old Stonewall definition of transphobia (which has now been withdrawn).
The action starts not long after the Forstater EAT judgment.
Prof Sophie Scott is awarded the Faraday Prize and O'Donnell goes onto DSTL's "distillery" chat forum to say 'tis a pity she's a TERF....and linked GC views to rise in violence against LGBT people
The High Court has granted an anonymity order in relation to three individual "trans and intersex" claimants in the Good Law Project's case against EHRC for its interim update.