Tag: Equality Act
Finally, there is legal clarity in the UK: the word “woman” refers to sex, not gender. But contrary to some claims, the rights of trans people are unchanged, secure and affirmed.
Clarté juridique au Royaume-Uni : le mot « femme » renvoie au sexe, non au genre. Mais contrairement à ce qu’on peut entendre, cette décision n’entame en rien les droits des personnes trans.
Thank the Lord for some common sense. In this case, thank Lord Hodge, who yesterday* delivered the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that trans women are not biologically female.
Extraordinary as it is that such an obvious statement requires an 88-page judgment, compiled over many months by the highest court of appeal in the country, this decision is crucial.
The UK Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is someone whose sex is female. The judgment, handed down this morning by Lord Hodge, sought to establish coherence in an area of law that has become the focus of an emotional, and sometimes heated debate. For that we should all be grateful.
For ten years, gender identity ideology ploughed through western societies. It started quietly, a decade earlier, when a group of human rights experts gathered in Yogyakarta, in Indonesia, and established gender identity as an innate human quality. They demanded that it must be protected in law and policy.
Yesterday’s* judgment by Lady Haldane is good news for everyone. She ruled that the UK Government was right when it blocked the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Much has already been written about why the bill was incompetent, and why it would have been bad news for women and children, but where does this decision leave transsexuals?
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We need trans-only wards
The Health Secretary Steve Barclay is expected to announce plans to ban transwomen like me from female hospital wards today*. Let’s be clear, the privacy, dignity and safety of women in hospital have been overlooked for too long – but Barclay will also need to offer separate wards or rooms for transgender people. Yes, women should not be expected to budge up and make room for men who identify as transgender, but nor should the Health Secretary make the lives of those who transitioned – perhaps many years ago – more difficult than needs be.
Kemi Badenoch is considering a change to the Equality Act 2010 that would restore the meaning of sex to what everybody once understood. I am a science teacher, so I know this. There are two sexes: male and female. Females produces large gametes called eggs while males produce small motile gametes called sperm. Science doesn’t care whether it happens in frogs, monkeys or people – sexual reproduction is a robust process that has been around for millions of years.
The omnishambles playing out in Scottish politics makes one thing clear: Nicola Sturgeon has no clue what she is doing when it comes to trans rights. The First Minister’s flagship Gender Recognition Reform Bill has hit the buffers. Now an ‘urgent review’ has been launched on an issue that hardly requires much common sense: that transwomen should not be housed in women’s prisons.
Debbie Hayton 