For all 3, A engages in unwanted conduct which violates B’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for B (if not deliberate, it must be reasonable for B to experience it that way)..
2/ The first kind of harassment is where the conduct is "related to" sex. This is broad. Eg:
- telling sexist jokes
- putting sexually explicit posters up
- saying “hiya, big tits” to a woman
- calling a man “a bald c*nt*” (even though some women are also bald)...
3/ The second kind of harassment is where the conduct is “of a sexual nature”. Eg:
- sexual touching
- physical “horseplay”
- sexual comments directed at B
In addition to being liable for this kind of harassment, employers have a duty to prevent it…
4/ The third potentially relevant kind of harassment is where B is treated less favourably:
- because she rejected or submitted to the conduct, and
- the conduct was either of a sexual nature or was related to gender reassignment or sex
NB “related to” is broad: see 2 above.
5/ In my view, it's strongly arguable that wearing giant prosthetic breasts at work is conduct related to sex. Then the question is whether it's either deliberately violating women's dignity etc or it's reasonable for women to feel that way...
6/ If wearing the giant prosthetic breasts at work is connected to the man identifying as trans, it's arguable that it's conduct related to gender reassignment. If so, a woman employee must not be treated less favourably for objecting to it.
7/ Wearing giant prosthetic breasts at work is less likely to be conduct of a sexual nature, but depending on the circumstances it might be. In which case, the employer has a duty to prevent it.
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Long 🧵
1 Reading Billy Bragg comparing the @EHRC Code with Thatcher & section 28 is baffling. In the 80s I was a left wing feminist teenager – demonstrating against s.28, implacably anti-Thatcher, visiting Greenham Common, the whole scene – & I came out as a lesbian in the 90s…
2 Section 28 wasn’t about the LGBTQ+ community. It was about same-sex attracted people. It was an attempt to prevent the normalisation of our private & family lives. At the time lesbians’ kids were being removed by the state & lesbians were routinely violently attacked by men...
3 The “joke” that lesbians hadn’t met the right dick yet was prevalent. Feminists were mocked as lentil-eating dungaree-wearing harpies. But then, in the new century, there was a seismic change in social & civic life for LGB people and the perception of feminism…
🧵 (reposted) on the only big change to the @EHRC Code of Practice made at the behest of @bphillipson: the new paras 12.74 and 12.75 on multi protected characteristic associations...
1 This is about *associations* only. It’s a legal interpretation allowing membership of an association to be restricted to those who have either one or the other of two (or more) protected characteristics…
2 The Equality Act on its face doesn’t allow this mix & match
It only allows an association to be restricted to people who all share one protected characteristic (eg “women only) or who *all* share more than one PC (eg “disabled women only”)…
@rachelsfletcher @tarteArcEnCiel @Bird_OnA_Wire @BiologyStupid @SteveChalke Honestly, this conversation is like 2021.
Here are the reasons we don't want trans-identified men to use women's single sex facilities: 1) They're men. That's actually enough, but there's more. 2) They're not a sacred caste. They sexually offend at a higher rate than other men../
@rachelsfletcher @tarteArcEnCiel @Bird_OnA_Wire @BiologyStupid @SteveChalke 3) Even if they were a sacred caste of harmless men, we can't tell them apart from other men, so we'd have to let all men in. 4) They're not at as much risk of injury from men as we are, because they're physically male.../
@rachelsfletcher @tarteArcEnCiel @Bird_OnA_Wire @BiologyStupid @SteveChalke 5) There is no evidence that they'd be at particular risk of violence if they used the men's. 6) Even if they were at risk of violence if they used the men's, that's not women's problem. Lots of men are at risk in men's facilities: young men, disabled men, gay men, old men etc../
🧵
1 I’m sure @NadiaWhittomeMP will be correcting the Parliamentary record at her earliest opportunity and withdrawing her statement that the @EHRC interim update went “far beyond even the Supreme Court ruling”. Swift J rejected that argument in R (GLP) v EHRC [2026] ⤵️
“The SC had the unenviable job of attempting to interpret the will of Parliament”: this is a metaphor for “the meaning of the statutory words with regard to their context & the purpose of the legislation”, not "what MPs thought when they passed it" ⤵️
3 It’s therefore irrelevant which Party was in government at the time and what their preferences were.
Nonetheless, it’s good to see that @NadiaWhittomeMP has recognised that the only way around the Supreme Court judgment for transactivists is legislative change ⤵️
The judgment was *only* about whether the c.10k trans people with Gender Recognition Certificates should be treated as the opposite sex under the Equality Act
*The Supreme Court decided that they should not*
/2
Any service already operating lawfully should have had no difficulty in adapting to the SC judgment
But vast numbers of services and employers were already acting unlawfully because lobby groups like @stonewalluk told them to. And now they can't work out how to get out of it
/3