Thread by @hogotheforsaken

THREAD -
House of Commons Women & Equalities Committee -
'Enforcing the Equality Act: the law and the role of the Equality & Human Rights Commission.'
10th Report of Session 2017–19:

publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…

Balancing rights in single-sex services - 2 particular areas where law is clear but frequently misunderstood and unenforced:
1) Commissioning single-sex services
2) Ability of organisations to use Equality Act exceptions to provide single-sex services.
(7, p 46)

"The law has always recognised that discrimination and inequality are not symmetrical and that there are certain circumstances when treatment that may otherwise be discriminatory should be allowed.
The provisions that allow for single-sex services are among these."
(159, p 46)

There are four exceptions under the Equality Act 2010 relevant to single sex services, outlined in the box below:
(Box 5, p 47)

Equality Act permits service providers to provide a different service or exclude a person from the service who is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone gender reassignment, if as "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim".
(161, p 47)

"If providers of single-sex services have reason not to admit a trans person (including a person who has a Gender Recognition Certificate), they should be using the exception allowing providers of single-sex services to discriminate because of gender re-assignment."
(162, p 48)

"Public authority commissioners appeared to be commissioning gender-neutral services in breach of the public sector equality duty."
(163, p 48)

"Equality Act recognises that, in certain circumstances, substantive equality will only be achieved if people with different protected characteristics can be treated differently, for example, to reflect their particular needs."
(164, p 48)

"We heard that public authorities were increasingly commissioning ‘gender-neutral’ services “that will not enable the aims of equality set out in the Equality Act to be full achieved.”
(165, p 48)

"Failure of public sector commrs to properly apply public sector equality duty to decision making = clear example of what's going wrong because of current system of equality law enforcement. This cannot be left to affected orgs to fix. They do not have the resources."
(167, p 49)

"We recommend that Government Equalities issue clear statement of law on single-sex services, inc requirement under public sector equality duty for commissioners of services to actively consider commissioning specialist & single-sex services to meet particular needs."
(168, p49)

"Many wrote to us that the planned changes to Gender Recognition Act to remove certain barriers to the granting of a GRC could undermine women’s rights and
specifically threaten the use of single sex-exceptions by service-providers."
(171, p 49)

"We desperately need legal clarity on the terms ‘transgender’ ‘transsexual’ and ‘gender reassignment’—I think the way they are currently being used, and the way the Equality Act interacts with the GRA 2004, is being
abused, misused, misapplied and misrepresented."
(171, p49)

“The combined effect of the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act is to conflate sex and gender irretrievably, and what remains is a rat’s nest of contradictions, where sex-based rights cannot be properly invoked.”
(171, p 49)

According to Karon Monaghan QC (expert equality
law barrister), if Self ID comes in, a trans woman with a GRC can still lawfully be excluded from single-sex services such as rape crisis centres.
(172, p 51)

However, with the following stipulations:

1) "Subject to thresholds being reached"
2) "It cannot be an arbitrary refusal: We’re calling this a single-sex space. You can’t come in.'"
3) "It has to reach a certain threshold of proportionality."

What do these stipulations mean? Clarification needed.
(172, p 50)

"Many organisations may be fearful of using the exceptions due to 'chilling effect' from lack of clarity in the law. Many smaller organisations 'do not feel confident
about where the boundaries are.'"
(173, p 50)

Karen Ingala Smith expressed concern over lack of clarity re:
1) advocation of "case-by case analysis" of exclusion on basis of gender reassignment.
2) "proportionality" could be interpreted in a number of different ways.
(185, p 53)

"It is not enough to have a paragraph in a code of practice saying, 'You can exclude people on the grounds of trans status if you need to.' It needs to say, These are the circumstances and these are the factors you need to
consider."
(187, p 54)

"We do not believe that non-statutory guidance will be sufficient to bring the clarity needed in what is clearly a contentious area."
(190, p 54)

This seems like a very significant report to me.
I know we are in midst of Parliamentary meltdown, but I'm hoping the crucial issue of the current erasure of women's sex-based rights does not get drowned in the general morass, as has happened so very many times before.