This is the clearest possible bulk harassment of all Oxfam's gender-critical staff: deliberately demonising them with this hate-filled imagery. Our DMs are open. legalfeminist.org.uk/2021/09/09/don….
"If you want to make this real – well, run the thought experiment, substituting in groups defined by other protected characteristics for “TERF” in “Be less TERF.” It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?"
"[Bulk harassment] is exceptionally efficient. You don’t have to bother to harass your gender critical staff individually. Instead... you can harass them all at once – even including those you don’t know about (yet)."
"It's also... bullet-proof. If you try to discriminate against staff members who express their views, there may turn out to have been something in the manner in which they did so that gives you a defence...
But if you harass them at large, irrespective of whether they have said anything at all, there’s no possibility of running a defence of that kind."
"GOQs" went out with the EqA; it's now just "occupational requirement". Detail, but it's not an encouraging start.
Occupational requirements don't provide permission to discriminate within a job: they make it lawful to ring-fence some jobs for workers with a particular protected characteristic (including, in the case of gender reassignment, not having that PC).
Letting men who say they are women use women's facilities makes those facilities mixed for all women: a detriment to a class comprising 51% of the population, for the benefit of a class comprising (at the almost certainly inflated Census figure) less than 0.5%.
Even the classes of women who are unable to use mixed facilities by reason of trauma caused by male violence, or for religious or cultural reasons, are likely to be much larger than the class of trans-identifying men who seek access.
So even assuming a legitimate aim, it is very hard to see how it could ever be proportionate to let the claims of a tiny proportion of men trump the needs of women in this way.
Making a case and building a consensus is how proposals to amend the GRA should have begun. Instead, proponents of reform chose to pretend that there was already a consensus among all right-thinking people, and howl down and punish dissenters as bigots.
That tactic is the explanation for the toxicity of the current debate. It is toxic because those who want to change the law are wholly intolerant of dissent.
It's a tactic that worked well for a while, reaching its high water mark with the astonishing decision of an employment tribunal in Forstater that dissent from gender identity theory was "not worthy of respect in a democratic society".
A short explainer of the recusal decisions in the Higgs v Farmor's School case.
Mrs Higgs, a school administrator, was sacked after someone complained about some Facebook posts she had made expressing anxiety - from a broadly gender-critical perspective - about teaching on the subject of gender in schools.
She complained to an employment tribunal of discrimination. Her complaint was dismissed, and she appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal.
In July, it will be recalled, Edward Lord, a prominent campaigner on the sex denialist side of the gender debate, had to be recused from the panel for apparent bias.
That was July 2022. The judgment set out how the panel for this particular case had come to be assembled: