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 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.
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.