Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

smartcooky said:
These organizations and companies who bought into the Stonewall bollocks really are going to have to be dragged kicking an screaming every step of the way to compliance. @Rolfe mentioned earlier that organizations like FWS and Sex Matters are loaded for bear to take on these cases. They are going to need to be if this is the tactic these recalcitrant arsehats are going to resort to.
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Joanne Rowling has set up a legal aid fund that women can apply to for funding for bona fide cases where they want to sue a provider or take an employer to an employment tribunal. When it was first announced the usual crew of aggressive trans activists gleefully announced that they were going to paralyse the system with a flood of spurious claims. Some even posted screenshots of what they were doing. Rowling just laughed and said, do you think we didn't anticipate you'd do that? Do you think I haven't taken competent advice about how to run this? They soon gave up.
 
Aber said:
https://hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds.commonplace.is/en-GB/proposals/v3/consultation?step=step2

The last one is interesting - the Council is against making the ponds mixed sex, while most of the options would be? :rolleyes:

I'm guessing that the 4th option is their preferred compromise.
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It's the usual story. Trans-identifying men simply start using women's facilities and the provider doesn't have the guts to stop them. Women who are upset are reluctant to complain for fear of being called transphobic, and intimidated into silence if they do. Male access to women's spaces becomes the de facto norm without any consultation, risk assessment or even a public announcement.

Then finally when the objections build up a sufficient head of steam that they can't be ignored (and of course the FWS SC judgment has been a catalyst here) it's all so terribly complicated and we have to take so many points of view into account and we need to have a massive consultation which could take years and in the mean time trans-identifying men can go on doing anything they like.

Actually, looking at this again, most of the options are actually illegal. They can make all the ponds mixed. They can operate strict sex segregation. They can make them mixed at some times and operate strict sex segretation at other times. But that's it. There's nothing in law that allows them to admit some men but not others to a pond labelled "women", at any time, and nothing in law that allows them to admit some women but not others to a pond labelled "men", at any time. Someone really needs to challenge these illegal options.
 
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Rolfe said:
There's nothing in law that allows them to admit some men but not others to a pond labelled "women", at any time, and nothing in law that allows them to admit some women but not others to a pond labelled "men", at any time.
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Is there some applicable UK law which bars this approach, should service users happen to prefer it?
 
d4m10n said:
Is there some applicable UK law which bars this approach, should service users happen to prefer it?
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For a start, the April 16, 2025 Supreme Court ruling....

"the terms 'sex' and 'woman' in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex and biological women, respectively"​

....which brought clarity to the legal definition of sex. This affected areas such as workplaces, schools, and public spaces, including single-sex facilities.
 
d4m10n said:
Is there some applicable UK law which bars this approach, should service users happen to prefer it?
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Yes. If you open a facility to some men but not others, you are unlawfully discriminating against the men you are excluding. This does not seem to have penetrated the thick skulls of those who are desperately trying to get round the SC ruling, despite the fact that it has comprehensively checkmated them.

You can have completely mixed provision, but if you do that in certain circumstances you are probably opening yourself to a claim of indirect sex discrimination from women, because it is recognised that in certain circumstances lack of sex segregation disadvantages women more than it disadvantages men. Attempts to make all toilets in a large venue unisex will probably fall at this hurdle. The legislation is fairly clear that provision of unisex facilities is intended to cover very small venues where there is only room for one toilet.

You can have strict sex segregation, so long as this can be shown to be a legitimate means of achieving a proportionate aim. Toilets, changing rooms and sleeping accommodation would certainly be covered by this. I can't imagine that swimming pools wouldn't, particularly in the situation under discussion where there are three pools that have operated as men's, women's and mixed for a very long time, thus there is somewhere for everyone.

What you cannot do is say, this facilitiy is for one (or the other) sex, but we will let certain members of the opposite sex use it, but not others. The SC was absolutely clear about this.
 
smartcooky said:
This affected areas such as workplaces, schools, and public spaces, including single-sex facilities.
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I'm aware of the ruling, but it's not obvious why the facility owners couldn't just put up a sign saying "This pool is for females and for transgender people" without running afoul of the EA2010. While I agree that "lack of sex segregation disadvantages women more than it disadvantages men" I don't see any British case law standing for that proposition.
 
d4m10n said:
I'm aware of the ruling, but it's not obvious why the facility owners couldn't just put up a sign saying "This pool is for females and for transgender people"
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Clearly, that would be functionally equivalent to "open to anyone", since transgenderism is an unverifiable quality purely defined by just saying you are, which is clearly not workable.
 
d4m10n said:
I'm aware of the ruling, but it's not obvious why the facility owners couldn't just put up a sign saying "This pool is for females and for transgender people" without running afoul of the EA2010. While I agree that "lack of sex segregation disadvantages women more than it disadvantages men" I don't see any British case law standing for that proposition.
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That would be illegal under the EA as determined by the SC Ruling.
If what you suggest here was legal, then what would prevent ANY organisation from putting up a sign saying "These facilities are for females and for transgender people" on any toilet, bathroom, changing room, hospital ward, rape crisis centre etc? What would prevent a sporting body from announcing "This competition is for females and for transgender people"?
 
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The women's organisations who would take them to court over it. It is absolutely explicit in the SC ruling that that is not lawful.
 
Rolfe said:
It is absolutely explicit in the SC ruling that that is not lawful.
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Where does it say in the ruling (or the EA) that individual communities cannot choose to provide mixed-sex provisions based on cisgender/transgender status? I don't recall seeing that anywhere.
 
They can choose "open to anyone" legally, so long as this doesn't put any group with a protected characteristic at a disadvantage.

What they cannot do legally is declare "some men may use this facility but not others". Because that definitely puts the men who are excluded at a disadvantage.
 
Rolfe said:
What they cannot do legally is declare "some men may use this facility but not others". Because that definitely puts the men who are excluded at a disadvantage.
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I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that completely separate ponds based on birth sex doesn't put "men who are excluded at a disadvantage" if marginally less sex-segregated ponds does so. Have any British jurists weighed in on this in law review articles?
 
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