Update from Maya!

What an amazing day: 16th April 2025, the day women in the UK got their rights back. I was sitting in the front row of the Supreme Court with Helen Joyce, Fiona McAnena, Anya Palmer, Naomi Cunningham and Michael Foran.

Fantastic coverage of @forwomenscot’s win at the Supreme Court.

Years of stellar reporting by many media outlets in Scotland and wider UK meant well-informed correspondents able to produce a wealth of comprehensive and insightful news articles.

Here are some highlights…. /1 @SanMan1978 reported in her new role for @TheTimes on what the ruling means for women’s sports and single-sex services.
/2thetimes.com/article/b6fe21…

Following the Supreme Court judgment the Equality Act is clear

What should the government and regulators do now?

sex-matters.org/posts/updates/… (1) NHS bodies should review policies & ensure they recognise & record immutable biological sex. This includes in relation to single-sex hospital accommodation ( “Annex B” ), single-sex facilities for staff at work, the patient records & staff records, and the provision of same-sex care.

Update from Helen!
On Wednesday I spoke to a full house at the Sheldonian, the largest venue in the Oxford Literary Festival (OLF). It was a fantastic event, with only a half-hearted, minimally attended protestoutside and a large, joyous, engaged audience inside.

https://twitter.com/mforstater/status/1907568212222292413

Update from Maya!
Last weekend I had my first in-person board meeting with the new full board of Sex Matters.
Working for a virtual organisation that launched during lockdown, I still find it a (pleasant!) shock to be with so many of our human beings in one place. Here I am (after the meeting) with our board members (left to right): Naomi Cunningham, Emma Hilton, Anya Palmer, me, Michael Biggs, Julia Casimo, Claire Weir, Rebecca Bull, Charlotte Cadden, Tim Allan and Kate Owen.

Update from Maya!

The Sullivan Review has been a long time coming, and it is so good! Professor Alice Sullivan of University College London and her team set out in careful detail the grave problems with official data collection on sex, in areas including health, justice, education and the economy.
sex-matters.org/posts/updates/…

The government is seeking to remove safeguards from the #DataBill, saying that they breach human rights.

Today we are publishing a paper which shows that, far from this being the case, the three safeguards are necessary to support everyone’s human rights 🧵 Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom – the parliamentary hero of the Post Office scandal – has provided a foreword to the report.

📄

"Trusting government computer systems to be infallible can result in serious harm to ordinary people." sex-matters.org/posts/publicat…

Update from Maya!

This week we learnt that the National Police Chiefs’ Council is proposing to adopt new guidance encouraging police forces to allow male officers with a gender-recognition certificate (GRC) to strip-search women and girls. The Kafkaesque guidance says that if a detainee objects, the officer may be swapped out, but consideration should also be given to the manner in which the detainee objects “and any prejudicial language should be dealt with positively”.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

Update from Maya!

It has been another extraordinary week of fallout from the Sandie Peggie case, which escalated as the week went on. The case has had coverage everywhere (apart from The Guardian) and has continued to make front-page news, political debate and kitchen-table conversations.

Update from Maya!
This week I have been in Dundee at the tribunal hearing of Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton. Sandie is a nurse who should have been able to expect her employer to protect her from sexual harassment and to provide a safe workplace.
dunfermlinepress.com/news/24914478.…

The case being heard today (and tomorrow) by @UKSupremeCourt will test the legal uncertainty about how GRCs interact with the Equality Act.

There is no ambiguity, however, about the lawfulness of women’s sport 🧵 Whatever the outcome of the FWS case it is clear that female-only competition is lawful.

🔹The #EqualityAct, section 195, says that it is permissible to discriminate by sex in a sport in which the physical strength, stamina or physique of average persons of one sex would put them at a disadvantage compared to average persons of the other sex.

🔹It also makes specific provision to allow gender-reassignment discrimination wherever it is necessary to secure fair competition or the safety of competitors.

Any sport that runs separate competitive categories for men and women, or boys and girls, is relying on s.195 ⬇️

Update from everyone!

The Sex Matters team spent last weekend at the Battle of Ideas in London. The festival of public debate included around 100 lively discussions on big issues in politics, science, economics, culture, the law and more. Panels that touched on sex-based rights took place alongside sessions on riots, China, AI, cities, prisons, art, energy and education.

Update from Helen!

Last weekend I attended the Bigger Picture conference held by @genspect in Lisbon. It was Genspect’s third conference in under 18 months – a remarkable achievement for a small, newish organisation and another step towards fighting back against the “gender affirming” model of healthcare for trans-identifying people…

genspect.org/the-bigger-pic…

NEW BLOG POST: on our schools model policy

Why "watch and wait" doesn't work for schools.

sex-matters.org/posts/updates/… The draft DfE guidance says “Allow for watchful waiting: Wait for a period of time before considering a request, to ensure it is a sustained and properly thought through decision. This period of ‘watchful waiting’ may help to ensure unnecessary action is not undertaken.”

Update from Fiona!

Over the past few weeks (even while Sex Matters was closed for a much-needed summer break!) we have been busy with the fallout from the scandal of male boxers in the women’s Olympic boxing. With Emma Hilton, and the rest of the team, I have been doing interviews, media briefings…

Update from Maya!

Last year, while I was on a summer holiday, I was emailed by the Metropolitan Police and told I was under investigation for the crime of “Malicious Communications”. Now I’ve been told that the case has been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service… My crime was to tweet about a male doctor who was presented to patients as a woman and allowed to examine them without their informed consent.

?unherd.com/newsroom/why-i…

Today we ran a briefing on the facts and science behind the women’s boxing row at the #Olympics

Thanks to @DerryBanShee, @FondOfBeetles, @mara_yamauchi & @sharrond62 for speaking.

The full video is now available on our YouTube ⬇️
@DerryBanShee @FondOfBeetles @mara_yamauchi @sharrond62 Male advantage over females in sport is huge. You can see it in the Mixed 4 x 400 relay at the 2019 athletics World Championships – watch the best women in the world be overtaken easily. That’s male advantage.

On Thursday and Friday this week, the Olympics is expected to feature male boxers in the ring with women. And that’s after Zambia fielding a women’s football team suspected to include male players.

What’s going on at the Olympics? 🧵

https://x.com/ReduxxMag/status/1817263397706015193

The footballers were previously ruled out of the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, supposedly because of high testosterone. In this context, “female with high testosterone” usually means male with female passport.

https://x.com/FWSSport/status/1818227932290031885

The @EHRC has issued guidance that “a sex-based occupational requirement that a [job] applicant is a woman…will include women who are recorded female at birth and also transgender women who have obtained a GRC.”

We think this is wrong.

1/12
sex-matters.org/posts/updates/… The EHRC says that when you say, print or broadcast that a job or service is for “women” you must by law mean

(♀️ - 📃)+ (♂️ + 📃)
Female people without a certificate saying male
+ male people with a certificate saying female.

This is nonsense



2/12

https://x.com/EHRC/status/1813198568565432412

Breaking: @UN_Women says gender-critical activists are an “anti-rights movement” 🧵

@DerryBanShee in @thetimes:

“It’s a sad day when UN Women lectures women’s rights campaigners on the need to include men with transgender identities in our work.”

thetimes.com/uk/society/art… In an Insta post, UN Women claims that “anti-rights movements” – its deceptive label for sex-based rights campaigners – are on the rise

Today is a good day to #buyapaper #CassReview

Show your support for the brave journalists who covered the subject before Cass made it less risky to do so, and the editors who stood up against ideological capture

🧵 @ObserverUK #CassReview