🧵on the Variations in Sex Characteristics. The Hate Crime and Public Order Act in Scotland creates a new offence of stirring up hatred against the VSC category. I have argued repeatedly this is unnecessary and designed to introduce this Yogyakarta derived concept in the law. The only definition adopted in UK policy derives from a paper published by the Government Equalities Office in 2019, which adopts also all the usual gender ideology language (sex assigned at birth). This definition is not used in the Scottish Act.

Thread on interpreting the GRA 2004 and the EA 2010. It is commonly held that the GRA modifies the meaning of sex in law, extending it to include people of the opposite sex with a GRC, and that this modification applies to the EA 2010 as well. See Lady Haldane in [2022] CSOH 90. There are two erroneous application of the rules on interpretation here. The first, text needs to be interpreted in the context of the whole Act unless otherwise provided. So s9 GRA has to be interpreted in the context of the whole act. S9 is the 'all purposes' provision.

If you want to know how you effectively silence an academic, here is a little story.
In April 2019 I had written the first thread on Twitter about women's rights and gender identity theory. I had received plenty of hatred online. I wa not afraid of that. At the time, I was Junior Professor at Leuphana University, in Germany.
In October 2019, I met the head of my department on the stairs. He told me he had received an email, he mentioned Mermaids. And he told me never to write about this stuff again.

By writing about how @CambPressAssess ignored my inquiry about a book on gender identity in international law I seemingly broke one of the unspoken rules of academia. Never publicise your failures. Never talk about the posts you did not get. The funding bids rejected (the majority are!). The articles the journals refused to publish, except by making some lame joke about reviewer no. 2. So your career will seem an upwards trajectory towards greatness.

Reflecting on my academic experience I feel I should add that an important part of it is the way students are turning against their lecturers and professors, as little soldiers of the gender cult. It is scary and also very upsetting. My academic colleagues showed me how little they value academic freedom in research. The students proved how little they understand about academic freedom. Since I started to write about gender, this happened:

I spent 10 years in Scottish academia. Immediately told off for this tweet by people telling me I should read Foran. So a little lesson on how academia works.

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1748630190496927860

When a new topic arises in an academic field, academics start researching it. They write blogs, articles, books. They organise colloquia, seminars, conferences. A group of 'experts' soon emerges. From that group, then it branches out to specialists in cognate areas.

Short thread because the misinformation about what a GRC does never stops. A GRC is a legal document with legal effects. According to s9 GRA, a person with a GRC is to be considered of the opposite sex 'for all purposes'. This clearly means all LEGAL purposes. Because that is the function of certificates. At the time, people thought, or deluded themselves into thinking, that people seeking a GRC would be passing in their 'acquired sex' even if the law specifically did not require that.

Happy New Year to my passport policy FoIs!

https://x.com/AlessandraAster/status/1636011542050230272?s=20

https://x.com/AlessandraAster/status/1638251377976569885?s=20

🧵This is section 10 of the Equality Act. It defines the protected characteristic of religion or belief. It is clear that s10, contrary to what many (too many!) lawyers and academics say, protects *holding a belief* and not *believing*. This is a subtle but crucial distinction, and one that lawyers should be able to appreciate.

The latest part of the passport policy FOI saga. Since March I have been trying to find out the legal basis for granting passports with a female sex marker to males, and when the policy was first implemented. 🧵 Yesterday I received the latest response. This is my first question, and the answer.

Probably the most upsetting thing about the Forstater case is that it would not have been won if the woman discriminated against had not been able to prove that she held a 'philosophical belief' about sex under the stringent Grainger test. Imagine having to prove this about being a woman :
(i) The belief must be genuinely held.
(ii) It must be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available.
(iii) It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial...

My most controversial legal opinion is that the Forstater case ultimately is damaging to women's rights because it presented knowledge about sex as a belief, and not the biological reality underpinning the PC of sex. Sex is now as groundless as 'gender' reassignment. Or, conversely, gender identity is now as real as sex. This cannot be true, as is evident if one considers the meaning of 'manifestation of belief'. If sex is a belief, health care would be a 'manifestation of belief' to the extent that it is administered in a sex specific way.

Smurf language and pronouns. Thread If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably remember the Smurfs (i Puffi in Italian). They were known for using their special language, replacing noun and verbs with the word smurf. Today I smurfed a smurf for smurf.

With all this rain, the Rio Grande lives up to its name. Walking to the land.

Thread on rules and how they affect single sex services.
In law you can have rules that prohibit you to do something. Like the rule against murder.
Rules that compel you to do something. Like the rules on paying taxes.
And rules that allow you to do something. This last type are permissive rules. Typically they carve out a right to do something against a general prohibition not to do something, or a right not to do something against a general duty to do it.
Also typically they contain conditions for the permissive rule to apply.

What does 'equality' mean? 🧵
Many people, including a disconcerting high number of academics, seem to think that equality between the sexes (or gender equality as it has come to be known, unfortunately) means that the law ought to treat women as it treats men. In a way, as if 'man' is the default human. This is incorrect.
The goal of equality is to treat all human beings as humans. When a human being is negatively discriminated against because of their sex (and this happens almost only to women), this should be remedied.

The rain is working its magic. An afternoon at the land. Swiss chard and green beans.

If you want to buy a puppy, these are the rules. But if you are buying yourself a human baby, this is what the agency promises you.

Does sex matter? 🧵
There seems to be a line of thinking developing on what sex means in law that, in my opinion, makes some bold claims about the nature of law. The starting point is, and we should not forget that, that women fought for a century or more to make sure that their sex *did not matter* in law, meaning that their sex should not prevent them from having full citizenship rights.

Gender ideology is constructed upon a false syllogism. (short thread)
All women are human.
All transwomen are human.
Therefore all transwomen are women.
The structure of this syllogism is
All A are B.
All C are B.
Therefore all C are A. The correct structure is a follows:
All A are B.
All C are A.
Therefore all C are B.
E.g.:
All humans are mammals.
All women are humans.
Therefore all women are mammals.

Thread on McDonalds and trans ideology.
In 1986, the first McDonalds in Italy opened in Rome amongst protests. I remember the protests and I remember the obsessive marketing to teenagers. This was the decade of the 'paninari' after all. They were McDonalds prime target. It was easy to convince them McDonalds was cool and fashionable.