Galop is crowdfunding for £10k to "keep our National Conversion Therapy helpline open"
You might think that is an odd thing for a £1.6m organisation to do....
Until you learn that Galop only raises about £15k a year from donations.
The rest comes from government contracts.
Galop say in their Crowdfunder that work with victims of conversion therapy "every day"
Which is odd because when Stonewall, Mermaids etc did a national survey they could only find 43 people who said they had had such a negative experience in relation to gender identity transgendertrend.com/conversion-the…
How much helpline does £10k buy you? And why, given that Galop already run two helplines (on hate crime and domestic abuse), are people not already using its existing services to report this abuse?
(Indeed you would think Galop would have some numbers on this 🤔)
Galop say a new helpline is specially needed now during the govt consultation on conversion therapy which may be triggering...
But also, the govt's proposal to ban conversion therapy (for which Galop is campaigning) includes a plan to commission a helpline (starting the process in Nov before the consultation is finished).
Who better to do that then the org already running the "National Helpline"?
I hope @trussliz tendering process has an equality policy that includes belief discrimination
Galop's policy on who they hire and who they block suggests they operate a "No TERFS on our Turf" policy which is not fully inclusive of all LGBT+ people
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.