Some thoughts on Stonewall's rebrand and strategy.
Erm.... does anyone else think that the rebrand is an 'up yours' to EHRC??
They went from LGB to LGBT in 2015 .... now adding "queer, questioning and ace" (asexual .... a spectrum which includes "demisexual", which means heterosexual who experiences sexual attraction based on emotional connection with a person...)
This is likely to mean that lesbian and gay men are a minority in the LGBTQ+ movement.
The government's LGBT survey (not a representative survey, but still interesting) suggests this is already the case amongst 16-24 year olds
Stonewall's charitable objects concern human rights and in particular sexual orientation
The word "women" appears twice, both times prefaced by LBTQ+
There can be no category of women that does not include males who identify as women
Their vision is that "LGBTQ+ people should have the same rights as everybody else"
What rights do "LGBTQ+" people lack in the UK?...
Hmm... 1. A legally enforceable ban on conversion therapy
(there is no evidence of a trend of actual abusive conversion therapy going on in the UK. This is clearly intended to outlaw 'watchful waiting' of children w gender issues) & medical assessment in general
Hate crime and hate speech laws
(this is deeply illiberal and worrying - anonymous hate crime reporting?? 😬)
Legal gender self-ID - including for people who identify as non-binary
They are expanding the Diversity Champions workplace scheme, work in schools, and sports.
And with faith communities and "elders" (the photographs are all of youngers though...)
They lobby governments across he UK to "protect and extend LGBTQ+ rights"
LGBTQ+ is not a category recognised in the Equality Act 2010 - public and private bodies would be wise not to delegate decision making to this lobby group.
It feels like a protection scheme.
Everyone can join.
And anyone who doesn't Stand With Stonewall will be fair game to be reported to their school, university or employer.
You are "Free to Be" what we tell you to be...
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I have seen quite a lot of this question going around.
Its called the "transman gotcha" and it is addressed in the Supreme Court judgment.
It goes like this: If you exclude "trans women" from women's spaces then you must include burly, bearded "trans men"
The answer in the judgment is that the Equality Act exceptions mean that both sex discrimination and gender reassignment discrimination prohibitions are disapplied so a service provider can lawfully exclude both ways.
There will be much talk of the single-sex exceptions in the Equality Act over the next few days.
These are the exceptions that allow service providers to offer services that are only open to one sex or the other (found at Schedule 3 Part 7 of the Act). (1/7)
Without these provisions service providers would be committing sex discrimination by excluding men or women.
Service providers don’t need to “use these exceptions” to exclude people, they just provide the service in the normal way. If they were to get sued they (or a lawyer) can point to the exceptions to show the service is lawful. (2/7)
The exceptions disapply both the prohibitions against sex discrimination and gender reassignment discrimination.
Again service providers don’t have to “use the exceptions” to exclude someone based on a particular protected characteristic. (3/7)
The CEO of @AdvanceHE has written to university vice chancellors acknowledging that "certain policy statements" cited in the @officestudents decision on @SussexUni "originated in part from" their template.
The parts in yellow came word-for-word from the Equality Challenge Unit/ Advance HE template....
i.e. almost all of it.
... this policy was influential and contributed to the culture of declaring everything "transphobia" and of hounding and not protecting those accused of it.
The ONS have new guidance out on their gender identity data from the census....
They say that you can take it from them with "high confidence" that around 1 in 200 people have a "gender identity different from their sex at birth" 🤨
So who is "Mr X" the trans identifying man held in high security male prison after multiple convictions for luring boys into sex acts while pretending to be a teenage girl on social media?
Could it be former children’s holiday camp manager Cameron Osman who engaged more than 70 teenage boys in sexualised chat pretending to be a 16-year-old girl “Lizzie lemon”.