1. The privacy rights of transgender people 2. The need of service providers for clarity in order to treat everyone well 3. Respect for the privacy & freedoms of others (particularly women & girls)
1) @GEOgovuk & @EHRC should urgently review national guidance. They should clarify that the Equality Act does not give individuals the right to use services provided for the privacy or needs of members of the opposite sex
2) Public bodies should be instructed to withdraw misleading guidance.
All state funded bodies should review existing policies on single sex service services to ensure they are compliant with their duties under the Equality Act.
Guidance, policies or training suggesting that expecting bodily privacy from the opposite sex is ‘bigotry,’ or encouraging people who identify as trans to believe they are entitled to share spaces which are designated for the privacy of the opposite sex — should not be promoted.
3) Amend the GRA 2004 to exclude any effect of s.9 (which changes a person’s sex “for all purposes”) and the Equality Act 2010,
For the purposes of the 2010 Act, “sex” should mean biological sex.
4) Simplify the system for trans people to obtain birth certificate privacy.
Replace medicalised GRCs with a super simple administrative system to enable anyone to obtain a copy of their short-form birth certificate with the ‘sex’ field left blank.
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.