The Supreme Court decision to effectively destroy the Gender Recognition Act and reverse the Equality Act has been described in newspapers as bringing “clarity”, which is ironic: it’s created anything but, and the anti-trans groups and their pals in the press have used the judgement to spread lies.
One of the biggest lies is that trans women are now banned from women-only services. While the Supreme Court verdict is incredibly anti-trans, it doesn’t go that far: it says that if a service provider chooses to exclude trans women, it can do so without breaking the Equality Act. But the Act still says that such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, and blanket exclusion is unlikely to satisfy that condition. And trans people are still protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment.
That may well change, and the EHRC – whose head was given the job specifically because she’s a transphobe, whose own staff have accused her of deliberately setting out to undermine trans people’s rights, and who has made it very clear that she is using the equalities body to attack trans women – is certainly going to craft guidance to try and change that. But the guidance is currently unwritten and has to be approved by Parliament.
It’s also important to note that the Supreme Court decision is only about the Equality Act. There are many other pieces of legislation that affect trans people’s rights.
Just because bigots want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. Even if – especially if – it’s printed in the UK press.
That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court verdict isn’t horrific, at odds with the intention of both the GRA and the EA, and introduces more confusion rather than clearing it up: its definition of “biological woman”, for example, is effectively “we know it when we see it”. But be very wary of newspapers with an agenda parroting bigots’ wish-lists and pretending they’re law.
It’s still a very bleak day for trans people, and for cisgender people too: the British Transport Police have already announced that they will have male officers strip-searching trans women; under the Supreme Court ruling, that means an officer can now molest any woman and claim he did it because she looked trans. There will be many more such examples, and many more cisgender women singled out because they’re tall, or masculine-looking, or Black. And there will be more legal attacks not just on trans people’s rights, but on human rights more widely.
Here’s long-term human rights campaigner Jane Fae on the decision:
I think the strategy of the anti-trans all along has been to swamp the UK with money – dark money, far right money, evangelical money – to reverse what they see as the evil of “gender theory.” Which also includes gay marriage, and women’s rights: they’ll be back for those later.
And this post is very good too: The UK Supreme Court destroys 20 years of legal rights for trans people in 20 minutes.
The odious and gleeful head of the EHRC continued that a complete ban of trans women from women’s toilets and changing rooms in British society was on the way, hinting ominously also that a review of gender ID change per se was in the pipeline. To the question of where trans women are supposed to urinate now, she replied that ‘maybe trans activists should campaign for a third space?’ That’s the head of Britain’s Equality body removing a minority from society and sneering at us. It’s not even that she doesn’t care. She’s loving it.
…there is no reasoning with the people who have driven it all, in our country and in others.