A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
What happens if all the robots are based in other countries ?
I think Mary Harrington is right about Andrew. Casting him out is a convenient way to try to "save" the monarchy.
And make him the scapegoat so few further investigations into the other wealthy and powerful people in Epstein's orbit
That won't work.
The stupidity of the Republicans was to wind up the "Epstein file" into a piece of red meat they could deliver to MAGA. They might not have known of the reports of the photos of Trump in Epstein's safe. But Trump and perhaps some of those around him know what horrors await publication. They can bring down not just senior Republican figures and backers - but potentially even Trump himself.
The panic measure of closing down the House so that no vote can happen look to be the actions of people having no idea how to handle the problem. And now they have tens of millions of the poorest of Americans being deprived of the state support that feeds them, as fall-out from trying to keep this Epstein problem from being delivered ot the public domain. It is a problem just getting worse and worse.
Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, Bill Richardson were amongst senior Democrats who hung out with Epstein, it was not just Trump and some Republicans who were mates with him
Indeed. But I'm pretty sure Congress isn't blocking the release if the files in order to protect them ?
They were careless people, Donald and Melania - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
They were careless people, Donald and Melania - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
What happens if all the robots are based in other countries ?
The Chinese Communist Party may also find its rule comes under threat if it replaces half the population's jobs with robots and no new jobs are created in their place. That is a recipe for revolution
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
You don’t speak for all women @Cyclefree. You might know that, but you talk like you do. That said, I wish you good health.
She is speaking for all women. She is not expressing the opinion of all women. Women are not a monolithic bloc - I think we've all just about grasped that.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
What happens if all the robots are based in other countries ?
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
What happens if all the robots are based in other countries ?
As I said, the robot tax would be global. No party would be elected anywhere on the planet without one to fund a UBI if AI leads to global unemployment of near 50% in terms of full time roles
So you think China is going to tax its robots and give the proceeds to the UK to fund a UBI ?
Driving back from Wales to Gloucestershire today on the M5 I saw perhaps the brightest rainbow I've ever seen - and it lasted more than half an hour. A rare moment of real joy.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Bringing back manufacturing, though, is essential. Certainly on a European scale.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
You don’t speak for all women @Cyclefree. You might know that, but you talk like you do. That said, I wish you good health.
She is speaking for all women. She is not expressing the opinion of all women. Women are not a monolithic bloc - I think we've all just about grasped that.
I have set out facts and the law. If people have a problem with the facts and the law that is their issue not mine.
It is a real problem in this debate - and others - when people choose to ignore relevant facts and the law. Those women who challenged this ideology turned out to be right, both factually and legally. And it seems that some men have a problem with that. Tough.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Then GRCs want abolishing, or the government needs to change the law to make them mean something - now that the Supreme Court has made them mean close to nothing. What third way is there?
You don’t speak for all women @Cyclefree. You might know that, but you talk like you do. That said, I wish you good health.
She is speaking for all women. She is not expressing the opinion of all women. Women are not a monolithic bloc - I think we've all just about grasped that.
I have set out facts and the law. If people have a problem with the facts and the law that is their issue not mine.
It is a real problem in this debate - and others - when people choose to ignore relevant facts and the law. Those women who challenged this ideology turned out to be right, both factually and legally. And it seems that some men have a problem with that. Tough.
Please do point out where my interpretation/summary is mistaken.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
That is not the only way the factory could compete - the factory seems to have 'competed' until 2003, despite the relative difference in Indian and UK wages, and the already massive burdens imposed before then - it just couldn't survive thereafter.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
That seems a reasonable position to me, and appears to be quite consistent with the law (if not the 'guidance / interpretation') ?
And I would guess (it is a guess) that position is most likely to achieve societal consensus ?
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
No, its clarified them.
Those with a GRA are not permitted in single sex spaces.
They're allowed to use whatever pronouns they please, whatever name they please, but when it comes to safeguarding women then that is reserved for actual women.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Then GRCs want abolishing, or the government needs to change the law to make them mean something - now that the Supreme Court has made them mean close to nothing. What third way is there?
I don’t disagree!
In the meantime, organisations with legal obligations are, I think, in something of a quandary. It’s also perhaps why the EHRC are sitting on their hands & hoping the government will step in, despite being run (by the accounts I’ve seen) by very TERF-sympathetic leadership.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Notably, they state: "the specific law governing toilets, changing rooms and strip searches is not contained in the Equality Act itself, but in different sets of regulations, like the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the School Premises (England) Regulations. The definition of “biological sex” does not automatically read into this law." and, importantly "It is still possible for women-only spaces to include trans women".
As you rightly point out, we now have a bit of a mess of contradictory laws that are open to interpretation. However, opinions (note: not facts) such as "the supreme court ruled that trans women are men and are therefore excluded from all 'women only spaces'" is not a reading supported by the legal community. The ECHR (the european court of human rights - note, not the EHRC, the equalities commission!) believes that such a law is incompatible with it and would be successfully challenged at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The EHRC (the equalities commission) is attempting to use the ruling to create precisely that law, however.
As I've said, a bit of common sense is required and both the gender critical lobby who would exclude trans women from female spaces even post-op, and the extremist wing of the 'trans rights' lobby who would have us believe any bloke can put on a wig and demand access to women's only spaces both need to give their heads a wobble.
If you are using the EA exemption (from the ban on sex discrimination) to create a single sex space, the single sex space you create must now be open only to people who were born in that sex. Otherwise it's not a single sex space. That's my understanding of what the SC ruling means.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
That is not the only way the factory could compete - the factory seems to have 'competed' until 2003, despite the relative difference in Indian and UK wages, and the already massive burdens imposed before then - it just couldn't survive thereafter.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The world doesn't owe us a living
But you can't cut wages below the minimum wage as where the f*** would the people live and eat given the cost of food and housing in this country. Heck the original point of minimum wage was to force companies to pay people enough to minimise the cost of universal credit and other such poverty reducing schemes.
And there are still a lot of things made in the UK - problem is a pair of Solovair shoes or a Barbour jacket is twice the price of the Asian made equivalents.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Notably, they state: "the specific law governing toilets, changing rooms and strip searches is not contained in the Equality Act itself, but in different sets of regulations, like the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the School Premises (England) Regulations. The definition of “biological sex” does not automatically read into this law." and, importantly "It is still possible for women-only spaces to include trans women".
As you rightly point out, we now have a bit of a mess of contradictory laws that are open to interpretation. However, opinions (note: not facts) such as "the supreme court ruled that trans women are men and are therefore excluded from all 'women only spaces'" is not a reading supported by the legal community. The ECHR (the european court of human rights - note, not the EHRC, the equalities commission!) believes that such a law is incompatible with it and would be successfully challenged at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The EHRC (the equalities commission) is attempting to use the ruling to create precisely that law, however.
As I've said, a bit of common sense is required and both the gender critical lobby who would exclude trans women from female spaces even post-op, and the extremist wing of the 'trans rights' lobby who would have us believe any bloke can put on a wig and demand access to women's only spaces both need to give their heads a wobble.
It’s good to see that the Good Law Project disagrees with Jolyon that the government wants to shoot trans women.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
No, its clarified them.
Those with a GRA are not permitted in single sex spaces.
They're allowed to use whatever pronouns they please, whatever name they please, but when it comes to safeguarding women then that is reserved for actual women.
I believe you’re wrong about this: This is not how the Equality Act 2010 is constructed & the Supreme Court judgement only applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act 2010.
The EA is built on a tower of clauses. Section 29 states that services cannot discriminate between protected characteristics:
29Provision of services, etc.
(1)A person (a “service-provider”) concerned with the provision of a service to the public or a section of the public (for payment or not) must not discriminate against a person requiring the service by not providing the person with the service.
Then various carve outs are made to that, to permit such discrimination in specific circumstances & for specific protected characteristics. Most relevant to this discussion, the section on single-sex spaces:
Single-sex services
27(1)A person does not contravene section 29, so far as relating to sex discrimination, by providing a service only to persons of one sex if— ...
Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
If you are using the EA exemption (from the ban on sex discrimination) to create a single sex space, the single sex space you create must now be open only to people who were born in that sex. Otherwise it's not a single sex space. That's my understanding of what the SC ruling means.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
It depends what the space is.
A man who has had an op should never be able to compete in women's only competitive sport for example.
A rapist who has had an op should not be able to go to a women's correctional facility either. Even if they need protective solitary custody to protect them from men.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
That is not the only way the factory could compete - the factory seems to have 'competed' until 2003, despite the relative difference in Indian and UK wages, and the already massive burdens imposed before then - it just couldn't survive thereafter.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The world doesn't owe us a living
But you can't cut wages below the minimum wage as where the f*** would the people live and eat given the cost of food and housing in this country. Heck the original point of minimum wage was to force companies to pay people enough to minimise the cost of universal credit and other such poverty reducing schemes.
And there are still a lot of things made in the UK - problem is a pair of Solovair shoes or a Barbour jacket is twice the price of the Asian made equivalents.
Yes, and the reason for that is the adding of cost upon cost to UK businesses so that they cannot compete globally.
It is foolish to take one solution (making the labour market more flexible by abandoning the minimum wage) and declare that it wouldn't work because of a collection of other issues that also require solutions - for example the housing shortage.
We need to ensure cheap energy. We need to destroy anti-competitive regulation. We need to reduce business taxes. We need more plentiful housing. We need a more flexible planning system.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
What happens if all the robots are based in other countries ?
As I said, the robot tax would be global. No party would be elected anywhere on the planet without one to fund a UBI if AI leads to global unemployment of near 50% in terms of full time roles
So you think China is going to tax its robots and give the proceeds to the UK to fund a UBI ?
Well if China has mass unemployment as a result of automating half its workforce, Beijing will either have to impose a robot tax to fund its own UBI as the UK would too in a similar situation. Or there would be a revolution in China which would see mobs storm the Chinese Parliament and President's residence and Communist Party HQ
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
It's not the costs, its the reaction to the costs. China faced with increasing costs, have gone all in for robots and is eating the west's lunch and dinner. It's the last man standing strategy. Switzerland at the other scale with costs that would give UK business a heart attack, trade up and invest. It's the ROI that counts which brings you back to the infrastructure to do this in terms of health, education, logistics etc. Wishing to go back to 'how it was before' simply blinds people to the need to invest capital and the skills to go with it.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Then GRCs want abolishing, or the government needs to change the law to make them mean something - now that the Supreme Court has made them mean close to nothing. What third way is there?
I don’t disagree!
In the meantime, organisations with legal obligations are, I think, in something of a quandary. It’s also perhaps why the EHRC are sitting on their hands & hoping the government will step in, despite being run (by the accounts I’ve seen) by very TERF-sympathetic leadership.
What I can't get my head around in all this discussion is the notion that all those organizations should pay good money for legal advice as to their obligations. Which is - presumably - unlikely to be identical in all cases, given the underlying conflict. Lawyers, famously, disagree - and a court might disagree again!
The safest and cheapest option is - or at least was - to wait on the resolution of the conflicts by the special government bodies involved, up to and including Parliament. Anything else is just asking for trouble, even if there is another clock running in terms of obligations.
The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.
It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.
The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:
“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”
The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.
You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.
Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?
2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”). Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.
Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
The following is my understanding of the current legal position:
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
Then GRCs want abolishing, or the government needs to change the law to make them mean something - now that the Supreme Court has made them mean close to nothing. What third way is there?
I don’t disagree!
In the meantime, organisations with legal obligations are, I think, in something of a quandary. It’s also perhaps why the EHRC are sitting on their hands & hoping the government will step in, despite being run (by the accounts I’ve seen) by very TERF-sympathetic leadership.
What I can't get my head around in all this discussion is the notion that all those organizations should pay good money for legal advice as to their obligations. Which is - presumably - unlikely to be identical in all cases, given the underlying conflict.
And particularly given part of the problem had been people taking different approaches in the first place, thinking that their approach was the correct one.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
So unless a person is rich enough to pay for private treatment, they will identify as 'trans' for an average of 12 years before being able to access hormones.
That puts some of the 'trans on hormones' vs 'trans not on hormones' figures in perspective.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
No, they are pandering to violent extremists who are objecting to the govt following the law.
Most trans people are not violent extremists who would campaign to change the law peacefully.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
First class commentary on women’s right from @Cyclefree
Seconded. Its time to make this site a much more welcoming place for women posters and their political views again, I am incredible sad at the loss of so many of the previous cross party female posters who used to comment here. Despite our political differences, one of my favourites was always the lovely and very informative SNP supporter Marcia who was a delight to engage with here.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
That is not the only way the factory could compete - the factory seems to have 'competed' until 2003, despite the relative difference in Indian and UK wages, and the already massive burdens imposed before then - it just couldn't survive thereafter.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The world doesn't owe us a living
The economy is not "shutting down". What we are seeing is the inevitable strains of other countries quite reasonably wanting to achieve the high standards of living the developed West enjoys and using their current cheaper labour costs to undercut us while they catch-up. As they do catch-up their advantage diminishes but there's a long way to go. Japan is an example of a country that 'caught-up' through the 20th century and now sits firmly on the 'developed' side of the equation with lno clear advantage over other developed countries.
It's unrealistic of the West to expect our living standards to continue to stretch ahead of the rest of the world forever.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
I think some American history may be relevant to this discussion: Throughout our history, individuals have chosen to "pass" from a disadvantaged group to a group they see as advantaged. The best-known example is light-skinned blacks "passing as whites". (It would be more accurate to describe them as being of mixed race, but I'll follow historical precedent.
In the late 60's, in my first full-time job, I met women who tried to "pass" as men, by using only their initials in business correspondence. So, for example, a woman named Anna Beatrice Smith might sign business letters: "A. B. Smith". (It often worked.)
More recently, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren tried to pass as an Indian -- in situations where that was to her advantage.
The trans fad* began with boys deciding they would have better lives passing as girls. When girls saw that happening, they decided they, too, could get better lives by going trans, creating still another category.
FWIW, when last I looked, Amazon will not sell you a book from the male side, When Harry Became Sally.
*My apologies for using so light a word, but I can not think of a better one.
(There is a certain inconsistency in the cultural left's thinking. In some states, voluntary psychiatric treatment to reorient homosexuals is banned, even while trans surgery is encouraged.)
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
If a provider wishes to make their venue unisex then there are legal requirements to be met to meet that.
Most notably most single sex facilities have communal sinks outside of the cubicles, while single sex ones require each individually lockable facility to have its own sink.
Nothing wrong with unisex provision, done right.
But letting men into a women's only facility, without unisex safeguards? That is not ok.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
No, not at all. But I am saying that who used (& uses) these spaces was never defined on legal “male” or “female” grounds in most cases, but rather on custom & management preferences, in consort with their customers. For these kinds of places, the EA exemptions were always irrelevant because in reality they were never 100% single sex in the first place.
I completely agree that the law now defines explicitly single-sex spaces as having an exemption from the Equality Act anti-discrimination laws only if they constrain themselves to a single biological sex.
I think Mary Harrington is right about Andrew. Casting him out is a convenient way to try to "save" the monarchy.
And make him the scapegoat so few further investigations into the other wealthy and powerful people in Epstein's orbit
That won't work.
The stupidity of the Republicans was to wind up the "Epstein file" into a piece of red meat they could deliver to MAGA. They might not have known of the reports of the photos of Trump in Epstein's safe. But Trump and perhaps some of those around him know what horrors await publication. They can bring down not just senior Republican figures and backers - but potentially even Trump himself.
The panic measure of closing down the House so that no vote can happen look to be the actions of people having no idea how to handle the problem. And now they have tens of millions of the poorest of Americans being deprived of the state support that feeds them, as fall-out from trying to keep this Epstein problem from being delivered ot the public domain. It is a problem just getting worse and worse.
Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, Bill Richardson were amongst senior Democrats who hung out with Epstein, it was not just Trump and some Republicans who were mates with him
But (a) they're not in power any more and Trump is; and (b) Trump is a proven sexual assaulter who perved on underage girls.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
You're a libertarian. Or at least I thought you were.
The correct response is to let the individual business or institution decide - not have it mandated by law either way.
The government should not be able to force trans women into a male toilet in a pub where the pub owners (and clientele, by choosing to frequent the business) are happy with trans women in female spaces.
Equally so, nor should trans women be allowed to force that space to accept them, using the law to allow themselves into spaces where they aren't wanted.
It is the "should a bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding" argument writ large. As a libertarian, my answer is no, they should not.
There are areas where it gets muddier, such as single sex NHS wards. My compromise is to suggest that trans women are treated as women for such purposes if they have a) been diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist, b) are in active receipt of cross-sex hormones and c) on a waiting list for surgery (their status would be revoked if they declined such surgery). This will weed out 99.99999% of the 'fetishist' types. If the NHS were able to offer transition on a 1 year timeline (instead of 12 years plus to even be diagnosed and receive hormones, as I note downthread) I would go further and argue the cut off point should be the, er, cut off point. But we live in a messy world where transition is a process of many years - even decades, for those who cannot afford private healthcare.
I would also note that 'cross sex hormones' for trans women are the same drugs given to sex offenders for so-called 'chemical castration' because they nuke the male sex drive and ability to maintain an erection. This is why, for example, Alan Turing developed breasts during his 'punishment'.
Trans women (of the type I have described above) are not a danger to women. Men are a danger to women.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
Note that a fair proportion of those identifying as trans are identifying as non-binary, not as the other sex.
If you are using the EA exemption (from the ban on sex discrimination) to create a single sex space, the single sex space you create must now be open only to people who were born in that sex. Otherwise it's not a single sex space. That's my understanding of what the SC ruling means.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
It depends what the space is.
A man who has had an op should never be able to compete in women's only competitive sport for example.
A rapist who has had an op should not be able to go to a women's correctional facility either. Even if they need protective solitary custody to protect them from men.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
If you are using the EA exemption (from the ban on sex discrimination) to create a single sex space, the single sex space you create must now be open only to people who were born in that sex. Otherwise it's not a single sex space. That's my understanding of what the SC ruling means.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
It depends what the space is.
A man who has had an op should never be able to compete in women's only competitive sport for example.
A rapist who has had an op should not be able to go to a women's correctional facility either. Even if they need protective solitary custody to protect them from men.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
If you are using the EA exemption (from the ban on sex discrimination) to create a single sex space, the single sex space you create must now be open only to people who were born in that sex. Otherwise it's not a single sex space. That's my understanding of what the SC ruling means.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
It depends what the space is.
A man who has had an op should never be able to compete in women's only competitive sport for example.
A rapist who has had an op should not be able to go to a women's correctional facility either. Even if they need protective solitary custody to protect them from men.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
No, not at all. But I am saying that who used (& uses) these spaces was never defined on legal “male” or “female” grounds in most cases, but rather on custom & management preferences, in consort with their customers. For these kinds of places, the EA exemptions were always irrelevant because in reality they were never 100% single sex in the first place.
I completely agree that the law now defines explicitly single-sex spaces as having an exemption from the Equality Act anti-discrimination laws only if they constrain themselves to a single biological sex.
Single sex spaces means biological, yes.
And they were single sex in the first place (even if customarily we disregard children) because the law places a higher threshold on design for unisex facilities.
Unless the design meets unisex requirements, eg a sink behind the lock, then it is required to be single sex. Which means biological.
Usually, but certainly with some exceptions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2452014425001554 <- A phenotypical woman, with XX chromosomes in most of her body, but her blood is XY and descends from her male twin <i class="Italic">in utero. So, you take a blood sample and she appears to be male.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
You're a libertarian. Or at least I thought you were.
The correct response is to let the individual business or institution decide - not have it mandated by law either way.
The government should not be able to force trans women into a male toilet in a pub where the pub owners (and clientele, by choosing to frequent the business) are happy with trans women in female spaces.
Equally so, nor should trans women be allowed to force that space to accept them, using the law to allow themselves into spaces where they aren't wanted.
It is the "should a bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding" argument writ large. As a libertarian, my answer is no, they should not.
There are areas where it gets muddier, such as single sex NHS wards. My compromise is to suggest that trans women are treated as women for such purposes if they have a) been diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist, b) are in active receipt of cross-sex hormones and c) on a waiting list for surgery (their status would be revoked if they declined such surgery). This will weed out 99.99999% of the 'fetishist' types. If the NHS were able to offer transition on a 1 year timeline (instead of 12 years plus to even be diagnosed and receive hormones, as I note downthread) I would go further and argue the cut off point should be the, er, cut off point. But we live in a messy world where transition is a process of many years - even decades, for those who cannot afford private healthcare.
I would also note that 'cross sex hormones' for trans women are the same drugs given to sex offenders for so-called 'chemical castration' because they nuke the male sex drive and ability to maintain an erection. This is why, for example, Alan Turing developed breasts during his 'punishment'.
Trans women (of the type I have described above) are not a danger to women. Men are a danger to women.
What the law should be, and what the law is, are two different things.
Under the law as it is firms can choose unisex. To do so they need to meet certain regulations, such as giving each cubicle behind a lock its own sink.
Or they can choose single sex, which means biological.
If a firm wants to allow men into the women's facilities, without meeting unisex requirements, then no that is not legal.
Should planning requirements be relaxed? I certainly won't object to that, though toilet regulations would not be my starting point for that.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
Note that a fair proportion of those identifying as trans are identifying as non-binary, not as the other sex.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
You're a libertarian. Or at least I thought you were.
The correct response is to let the individual business or institution decide - not have it mandated by law either way.
The government should not be able to force trans women into a male toilet in a pub where the pub owners (and clientele, by choosing to frequent the business) are happy with trans women in female spaces.
Equally so, nor should trans women be allowed to force that space to accept them, using the law to allow themselves into spaces where they aren't wanted.
It is the "should a bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding" argument writ large. As a libertarian, my answer is no, they should not.
There are areas where it gets muddier, such as single sex NHS wards. My compromise is to suggest that trans women are treated as women for such purposes if they have a) been diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist, b) are in active receipt of cross-sex hormones and c) on a waiting list for surgery (their status would be revoked if they declined such surgery). This will weed out 99.99999% of the 'fetishist' types. If the NHS were able to offer transition on a 1 year timeline (instead of 12 years plus to even be diagnosed and receive hormones, as I note downthread) I would go further and argue the cut off point should be the, er, cut off point. But we live in a messy world where transition is a process of many years - even decades, for those who cannot afford private healthcare.
I would also note that 'cross sex hormones' for trans women are the same drugs given to sex offenders for so-called 'chemical castration' because they nuke the male sex drive and ability to maintain an erection. This is why, for example, Alan Turing developed breasts during his 'punishment'.
Trans women (of the type I have described above) are not a danger to women. Men are a danger to women.
What the law should be, and what the law is, are two different things.
Under the law as it is firms can choose unisex. To do so they need to meet certain regulations, such as giving each cubicle behind a lock its own sink.
Or they can choose single sex, which means biological.
If a firm wants to allow men into the women's facilities, without meeting unisex requirements, then no that is not legal.
Should planning requirements be relaxed? I certainly won't object to that, though toilet regulations would not be my starting point for that.
I don’t believe that providing (only) unisex facilities is legal.
Under the The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, para 24 states:
“24.—(1) Suitable and sufficient facilities shall be provided for any person at work in the workplace to change clothing in all cases where—
(a)the person has to wear special clothing for the purpose of work; and
(b)the person can not, for reasons of health or propriety, be expected to change in another room.
(2) Without prejudice to the generality of paragraph (1), the facilities mentioned in that paragraph shall not be suitable unless they include separate facilities for, or separate use of facilities by, men and women where necessary for reasons of propriety [F1and the facilities are easily accessible, of sufficient capacity and provided with seating]. ”
Whilst the GRA 2004 states:
“(1)Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).”
The question then arises: Is an employer breaking the law or not breaking it if they permit, or do not permit, a trans man to use the men’s changing facilities? Are they required to make them use the men’s changing facilities as the law defines them to be male? (and vice versa for trans women obviously). Can they make either of them use unisex facilities if they make those available in addition to the male and female facilities they are required to offer?
Remember, the re-definition of woman as “biological woman” only applies to the interpretation of the Equality Act, which permits but does not require single biological sex spaces to be established. It doesn’t define “woman” or “man” in the Workplace Regulations.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
So you want unisex?
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
No, not at all. But I am saying that who used (& uses) these spaces was never defined on legal “male” or “female” grounds in most cases, but rather on custom & management preferences, in consort with their customers. For these kinds of places, the EA exemptions were always irrelevant because in reality they were never 100% single sex in the first place.
I completely agree that the law now defines explicitly single-sex spaces as having an exemption from the Equality Act anti-discrimination laws only if they constrain themselves to a single biological sex.
This is also my understanding. If it's a SS space relying on the EA exemption from the ban on sexual discrimination then it must be for people of that birth sex only. But I can't say I'm 100% about it.
Depending how you define trans, around 300,000 people identify[1] as trans, around 25,000[2] on cross-gender hormones, and about 8,000[3] with GRCs. I assume the number of people in Bash Back is less than 100. So they are pandering to a lot more than that.
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority) [2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down [3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
Note that a fair proportion of those identifying as trans are identifying as non-binary, not as the other sex.
Indeed. I think the numbers are changing quickly. Most transgendered individuals used to be MTF, but the big increase is in women transitioning into men or nb, and men transitioning into nb. E.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7906237/ describes increasing numbers of FTM compared to MTF, while https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/10/2133 describes how non-binary identities are becoming very common in trans student populations.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010.
Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
That is not the only way the factory could compete - the factory seems to have 'competed' until 2003, despite the relative difference in Indian and UK wages, and the already massive burdens imposed before then - it just couldn't survive thereafter.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The world doesn't owe us a living
The economy is not "shutting down". What we are seeing is the inevitable strains of other countries quite reasonably wanting to achieve the high standards of living the developed West enjoys and using their current cheaper labour costs to undercut us while they catch-up. As they do catch-up their advantage diminishes but there's a long way to go. Japan is an example of a country that 'caught-up' through the 20th century and now sits firmly on the 'developed' side of the equation with lno clear advantage over other developed countries.
It's unrealistic of the West to expect our living standards to continue to stretch ahead of the rest of the world forever.
It is one thing to be sanguine about other economies doing some catching up. It is quite another to abandon healthy competition and commit economic seppuku. Nobody has asked us to have industrial energy four times as expensive as America - which is also a developed economy, and according to your theory should also be in precipitous decline.
You have prospered from a healthy British economy - your philosophical apologia for a disastrously mismanaged economy that will not support future generations to grow prosperous in the same way is pathetic.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
Eh? Nobody has a sitting room?
In the scumbag HMOs, any space that isn’t actually a bedroom is liable to be turned into one.
Due to the shortage of properties, these practices are spreading up the market.
So everything in the building is a bedroom, or a bathroom (less and less) or a tiny kitchen space.
A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
Eh? Nobody has a sitting room?
In the scumbag HMOs, any space that isn’t actually a bedroom is liable to be turned into one.
Due to the shortage of properties, these practices are spreading up the market.
So everything in the building is a bedroom, or a bathroom (less and less) or a tiny kitchen space.
Eliminate the shortage and tackle the problem.
It isn't rocket science. Drive scum landlords out of business as tenants choose to go to non-scum properties.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
Eh? Nobody has a sitting room?
In the scumbag HMOs, any space that isn’t actually a bedroom is liable to be turned into one.
Due to the shortage of properties, these practices are spreading up the market.
So everything in the building is a bedroom, or a bathroom (less and less) or a tiny kitchen space.
Eliminate the shortage and tackle the problem.
It isn't rocket science. Drive scum landlords out of business as tenants choose to go to non-scum properties.
As a student I lived in a house without a lounge communal space.
As a former renter in a shared house, we never had a lounge. So long as the kitchen has a table to chat around, en suites are a much more valuable commodity. En suites plus sink and fridge in each room? Almost like a flat.
According to the key labels the house we are currently renting doesn't have a lounge or a front room, or a living room for that matter - it has a drawing room. Now that is proper posh (or pretentious).
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
Eh? Nobody has a sitting room?
In the scumbag HMOs, any space that isn’t actually a bedroom is liable to be turned into one.
Due to the shortage of properties, these practices are spreading up the market.
So everything in the building is a bedroom, or a bathroom (less and less) or a tiny kitchen space.
Eliminate the shortage and tackle the problem.
It isn't rocket science. Drive scum landlords out of business as tenants choose to go to non-scum properties.
As a student I lived in a house without a lounge communal space.
That was forty years ago.
Plus ca change.
As a student I lived in a house with a lounge communal space.
* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies) * The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
Prankster who used fake credentials to access pitch and line up with Aussie Rugby League team arrested for fraud. Sounds a bit of a stretch to consider that fraud, especially if we think our courts and police are already too stretched.
It's funny, no harm has been done, and the authorities can simply kick him out of the ground.
Comments
https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/world-robotics-2023-report-asia-ahead-of-europe-and-the-americas
But I'm pretty sure Congress isn't blocking the release if the files in order to protect them ?
So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.
This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.
And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.
I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.
Certainly on a European scale.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
This is what that looks like:
https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/denholme-velvets-foreside-mill-june-2010.51483/
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
The Equalities Act is constructed in the following fashion: it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of biological sex (or any of the other protected characteristics), however where the law explicitly requires the provision of single sex spaces it is not a breach of the Equality Act to restrict those spaces to a single (now explicitly biological after the SC judgement) sex.
Meanwhile the Gender Recognition Act 2004 still applies: for the purposes of the rest of UK law, women means “person born female, or person born male with a GRC”. (The Scots were planning to eliminate the need for a GRC IIRC.)
Which is why many organisations, despite Cyclefree’s assertions to the contrary, are asking the obvious question: given that the GRA still applies, when the law says we must offer a single sex space, clearly under the EA 2010 we are now permitted to make that a single biological sex space, but the GRA 2004 says that such spaces (as defined in law) are for both biological woman & natal men with GRCs (& vice versa). Eg schools are required to offer gendered toilets: the EA now permits that to be split on the basis of biological sex, but it seems that the GRA establishes that those with GRCs should be permitted to use the facilities that match the gender on their GRC - the redefinition of terms in the Supreme Court judgement does not extend to (say) the relevant Education Acts, nor the Acts that setup the NHS.
In short, the EA 2010 enables the provision of single biological sex spaces by asserting that they do not breach the discrimination provisions of the Act. Other laws require single sex spaces, but are not covered by the SC judgement definition of woman/man as “biological woman/man” and are still affected by the redefinition of terms written into the GRA 2004.
What, therefore, is an organisation that wishes to abide by the law supposed to do? The SC judgement has, if anything, further muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
It is a real problem in this debate - and others - when people choose to ignore relevant facts and the law. Those women who challenged this ideology turned out to be right, both factually and legally. And it seems that some men have a problem with that. Tough.
I would be happy to see wages paid at a rate that the market supports. I seem to recall you being a big admirer of Denmark - they have no minimum wage.
We will not be able to make things more cheaply than India, but we could level the playing field enough to compete at the quality end of manufactured goods.
The economy is shutting down and all you can do is make fatuous and meaningless comparisons.
The world doesn't owe us a living
AFC Wimbledon 0, Gateshead 2
Heed Army!
And I would guess (it is a guess) that position is most likely to achieve societal consensus ?
Those with a GRA are not permitted in single sex spaces.
They're allowed to use whatever pronouns they please, whatever name they please, but when it comes to safeguarding women then that is reserved for actual women.
In the meantime, organisations with legal obligations are, I think, in something of a quandary. It’s also perhaps why the EHRC are sitting on their hands & hoping the government will step in, despite being run (by the accounts I’ve seen) by very TERF-sympathetic leadership.
https://goodlawproject.org/resource/trans-inclusion-after-the-supreme-court-decision-faqs/
Notably, they state: "the specific law governing toilets, changing rooms and strip searches is not contained in the Equality Act itself, but in different sets of regulations, like the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the School Premises (England) Regulations. The definition of “biological sex” does not automatically read into this law." and, importantly "It is still possible for women-only spaces to include trans women".
As you rightly point out, we now have a bit of a mess of contradictory laws that are open to interpretation. However, opinions (note: not facts) such as "the supreme court ruled that trans women are men and are therefore excluded from all 'women only spaces'" is not a reading supported by the legal community. The ECHR (the european court of human rights - note, not the EHRC, the equalities commission!) believes that such a law is incompatible with it and would be successfully challenged at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The EHRC (the equalities commission) is attempting to use the ruling to create precisely that law, however.
As I've said, a bit of common sense is required and both the gender critical lobby who would exclude trans women from female spaces even post-op, and the extremist wing of the 'trans rights' lobby who would have us believe any bloke can put on a wig and demand access to women's only spaces both need to give their heads a wobble.
The GRA, otoh, is unchanged and says that a person who has transitioned and has a GRC in recognition of this is to be treated as being of their acquired gender for all practical purposes.
How these two things work together is a question to be resolved.
And there are still a lot of things made in the UK - problem is a pair of Solovair shoes or a Barbour jacket is twice the price of the Asian made equivalents.
Very long read, which is (for anyone who hasn't been following this moderately closely) absolutely jaw dropping.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
https://x.com/treesey/status/1984593283671068713?s=61
The EA is built on a tower of clauses. Section 29 states that services cannot discriminate between protected characteristics: Then various carve outs are made to that, to permit such discrimination in specific circumstances & for specific protected characteristics. Most relevant to this discussion, the section on single-sex spaces: Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
A man who has had an op should never be able to compete in women's only competitive sport for example.
A rapist who has had an op should not be able to go to a women's correctional facility either. Even if they need protective solitary custody to protect them from men.
Women are born, they are not made via operations.
It is foolish to take one solution (making the labour market more flexible by abandoning the minimum wage) and declare that it wouldn't work because of a collection of other issues that also require solutions - for example the housing shortage.
We need to ensure cheap energy.
We need to destroy anti-competitive regulation.
We need to reduce business taxes.
We need more plentiful housing.
We need a more flexible planning system.
And many more things besides.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074p8c/edge-of-darkness-series-1-1-compassionate-leave
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074p95/edge-of-darkness-series-1-2-into-the-shadows
[1] 2021 Census, still accurate in broad according to the Authority (not that Authority)
[2] There was a report from GPs some years ago: I don't know what it is now, but I doubt it's gone down
[3] Number of people with GRCs, according to Baroness Faulkner
The safest and cheapest option is - or at least was - to wait on the resolution of the conflicts by the special government bodies involved, up to and including Parliament. Anything else is just asking for trouble, even if there is another clock running in terms of obligations.
So unless a person is rich enough to pay for private treatment, they will identify as 'trans' for an average of 12 years before being able to access hormones.
That puts some of the 'trans on hormones' vs 'trans not on hormones' figures in perspective.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Most trans people are not violent extremists who would campaign to change the law peacefully.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
https://x.com/MaxFlugrath/status/1984343042497921126
It's unrealistic of the West to expect our living standards to continue to stretch ahead of the rest of the world forever.
Now we are losing the lounge...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93063q2lzeo
1) Free for anyone to use
2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
Personally, I'd just make expats pay UK taxes (offset by any local taxes they pay) for as long as they wish to remain British citizens.
The house we are building won't have a lounge either, just one large kitchen/dining/living space.
In the late 60's, in my first full-time job, I met women who tried to "pass" as men, by using only their initials in business correspondence. So, for example, a woman named Anna Beatrice Smith might sign business letters: "A. B. Smith". (It often worked.)
More recently, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren tried to pass as an Indian -- in situations where that was to her advantage.
The trans fad* began with boys deciding they would have better lives passing as girls. When girls saw that happening, they decided they, too, could get better lives by going trans, creating still another category.
Abigail Shrier's is the best source I know of on this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters-ebook/dp/B07YL6XK55?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1#customerReviews
FWIW, when last I looked, Amazon will not sell you a book from the male side, When Harry Became Sally.
*My apologies for using so light a word, but I can not think of a better one.
(There is a certain inconsistency in the cultural left's thinking. In some states, voluntary psychiatric treatment to reorient homosexuals is banned, even while trans surgery is encouraged.)
That is an option.
Or single sex, meaning women and men, is an option.
Gender of choice is not.
Either make unisex provisions, which means more than just slapping a male and female logo on it (eg it requires each cubicle to have it own sink), or have single sex.
Gender of choice is fictional and not the law.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
Most notably most single sex facilities have communal sinks outside of the cubicles, while single sex ones require each individually lockable facility to have its own sink.
Nothing wrong with unisex provision, done right.
But letting men into a women's only facility, without unisex safeguards? That is not ok.
I completely agree that the law now defines explicitly single-sex spaces as having an exemption from the Equality Act anti-discrimination laws only if they constrain themselves to a single biological sex.
* The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly
Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
The correct response is to let the individual business or institution decide - not have it mandated by law either way.
The government should not be able to force trans women into a male toilet in a pub where the pub owners (and clientele, by choosing to frequent the business) are happy with trans women in female spaces.
Equally so, nor should trans women be allowed to force that space to accept them, using the law to allow themselves into spaces where they aren't wanted.
It is the "should a bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding" argument writ large. As a libertarian, my answer is no, they should not.
There are areas where it gets muddier, such as single sex NHS wards. My compromise is to suggest that trans women are treated as women for such purposes if they have a) been diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist, b) are in active receipt of cross-sex hormones and c) on a waiting list for surgery (their status would be revoked if they declined such surgery). This will weed out 99.99999% of the 'fetishist' types. If the NHS were able to offer transition on a 1 year timeline (instead of 12 years plus to even be diagnosed and receive hormones, as I note downthread) I would go further and argue the cut off point should be the, er, cut off point. But we live in a messy world where transition is a process of many years - even decades, for those who cannot afford private healthcare.
I would also note that 'cross sex hormones' for trans women are the same drugs given to sex offenders for so-called 'chemical castration' because they nuke the male sex drive and ability to maintain an erection. This is why, for example, Alan Turing developed breasts during his 'punishment'.
Trans women (of the type I have described above) are not a danger to women. Men are a danger to women.
And they were single sex in the first place (even if customarily we disregard children) because the law places a higher threshold on design for unisex facilities.
Unless the design meets unisex requirements, eg a sink behind the lock, then it is required to be single sex. Which means biological.
Under the law as it is firms can choose unisex. To do so they need to meet certain regulations, such as giving each cubicle behind a lock its own sink.
Or they can choose single sex, which means biological.
If a firm wants to allow men into the women's facilities, without meeting unisex requirements, then no that is not legal.
Should planning requirements be relaxed? I certainly won't object to that, though toilet regulations would not be my starting point for that.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
Under the The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, para 24 states:
“24.—(1) Suitable and sufficient facilities shall be provided for any person at work in the workplace to change clothing in all cases where—
(a)the person has to wear special clothing for the purpose of work; and
(b)the person can not, for reasons of health or propriety, be expected to change in another room.
(2) Without prejudice to the generality of paragraph (1), the facilities mentioned in that paragraph shall not be suitable unless they include separate facilities for, or separate use of facilities by, men and women where necessary for reasons of propriety [F1and the facilities are easily accessible, of sufficient capacity and provided with seating]. ”
Whilst the GRA 2004 states:
“(1)Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).”
The question then arises: Is an employer breaking the law or not breaking it if they permit, or do not permit, a trans man to use the men’s changing facilities? Are they required to make them use the men’s changing facilities as the law defines them to be male? (and vice versa for trans women obviously). Can they make either of them use unisex facilities if they make those available in addition to the male and female facilities they are required to offer?
Remember, the re-definition of woman as “biological woman” only applies to the interpretation of the Equality Act, which permits but does not require single biological sex spaces to be established. It doesn’t define “woman” or “man” in the Workplace Regulations.
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/toilet-provision-in-buildings-other-than-dwellings-technical-consultation/annex-e-draft-approved-document-t-toilets
You have prospered from a healthy British economy - your philosophical apologia for a disastrously mismanaged economy that will not support future generations to grow prosperous in the same way is pathetic.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Due to the shortage of properties, these practices are spreading up the market.
So everything in the building is a bedroom, or a bathroom (less and less) or a tiny kitchen space.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It isn't rocket science. Drive scum landlords out of business as tenants choose to go to non-scum properties.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
That was forty years ago.
Plus ca change.
That was just over twenty years ago.
Prankster who used fake credentials to access pitch and line up with Aussie Rugby League team arrested for fraud. Sounds a bit of a stretch to consider that fraud, especially if we think our courts and police are already too stretched.
It's funny, no harm has been done, and the authorities can simply kick him out of the ground.