#LAGvAHRC 23/02/26 - typing up Dr Megan Blake of LAG first - as she covered every argument you wanted to hear, with reference to law, relevant guidelines, rationale and logic. It was pure sweetness . 🤩
(Correct/Savage anything I get wrong, I'm paraphrasing - I'm not typing everything word for word it would take hours.) 🧵

Overall Dr Blake argued that the Tribunal made a legal error when refusing a Section 44 exemption by misidentifying who the relevant protected class is under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA). This error flowed directly from how sex and sexual orientation were construed.

She started her argument - has 2 independent pathways.
Pathway 1 - Sex for the purposes of the SDA is a biological category, that is not changed by gender identity.

Pathway 2 - if it’s found by Judge or the full court, that Tickle and Giggle was not decided incorrectly on this point, the SDA (Sex discrimination Act) still gives a priority to the female sex and that this category exists with unique needs and interests, even within a broader legal sex category. 1⃣ In plain English - under the Act, sex is a biological category. It is not changed by gender identity. Gender identity is a separate protected ground, but it does not redefine sex.

Because sexual orientation depends on sex, lesbian sexual orientation necessarily means female people who are attracted to other female people. If sex is no longer biological, sexual orientation loses its meaning as a legal category.

Blake explained that the Tribunal relied on Tickle v Giggle to adopt a non-biological reading of sex. On that basis, the Tribunal treated:
biological women who are attracted to women, and
biological men who identify as women and are attracted to women -as belonging to the same sex class and the same sexual-orientation class.

That move collapsed two fundamentally different groups into one. In doing so, the Tribunal eliminated lesbians as a distinct sex-based class under the Act. 😯

(CoAL, FLC etc made the same call in their meeting with AHRC a few days ago, I loved hearing it made in the court though.)
2⃣

@gnoble79 I think your post is rhetorically powerful but, I feel it mixes valid critique, category errors, & market doom porn. I agree that real-world task failure is massively under-reported:
Academic benchmarks ≠ commercial reliability
Looks good in a demo” ≠ works in production
/1 @gnoble79 - Agentic workflows collapse under ambiguity, missing context, and edge cases. The Remote Labor Index-style findings (low paid-completion rates) track with my experience in education, test automation, lived knowledge of “automation optimism ➡️ human cleanup” BUT... /2