Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
The thing about the Supreme Court is that the law is whatever they say it is. They are the final word. It is the right ruling because it’s the ruling they made.
I hear lots of trans activists insisting it’s just an opinion. They are wrong. It is the definitive opinion; the binding one, not just on what the law is right now, but what it always has been. That’s the bit some of them haven’t twigged yet, and which HR departments up and down the country will be absolutely pooing their pants over today.
To take one current example - it is now beyond any doubt whatsoever that the Darlington Nurses, and Sandie Peggie in Fife, were asking for nothing more than their legal rights when they told their employers they did not want to share their single-sex changing room with a man.
The NHS in Darlington and in Fife seems to have been content to insist that it was fair for them to treat the men in question as if they were women. The Supreme Court has made clear that the NHS was wrong in law to do so. And it does not matter that these events are in the past, months or years before this ruling, because the Supreme Cour’s rulings don’t make the law, they clarify what laws passed by Parliament actually mean. And the Equality Act has been on the statute book for 15 years now.
Your friend Danielle still has his rights under the EA 2010 not to be discriminated against on the basis of his trans-identity (in which I assume he says he feels like a she). But he is not entitled to the protections afforded to women under the EA2010 because he is not a woman.
---------- Post added at 18:55 ---------- Previous post was at 18:43 ----------
No, it would not make a difference so far as the Equality Act 2010 is concerned.
Let’s not lose sight of what the court has ruled on here, and what it has not ruled on. It has not ruled on an individual’s right to get surgery and change their name from Dave to Davina. It has not ruled on a man’s right to put on a dress and ask people to refer to him as ‘she’. And it has not ruled on anyone else’s right to refuse to do so, on the basis that he is in reality, immutably, a man. Those things were what they were on Monday and they are still what they are today.
The Supreme Court ruling relates to the Equality Act 2010 and whether someone with a Gender Recognition Certificate, which entitles them to change their passport and birth certificate and be treated by the State by their newly certified gender rather than their biological sex, has also acquired the rights conferred on the sex they have “changed” to. The Scottish Government claimed that a trans-identifying male has the rights afforded to women under the Equality Act. The Supreme Court says they do not, because a gender recognition certificate cannot change biological reality.
In truth this is a problem the last Labour government ought to have seen coming. Legislating to create a legal fiction is always fraught with difficulty no matter how well intentioned.
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Thanks for explaining. I had assumed that the NHS women had objected because some trans people elect not to have their genitalia surgically changed and they were fearful of sexual assault by a penis, this is why I asked what I did.
I can understand why they would object to a M to F person who is sexually attracted to females being in a place where they are in a state of undress, but the person may be sexually attracted to men, whose to know! Also, would they object to getting changed with a naturally born woman who happens to be a lesbian?
I suppose males and females being segregated in places where they get undressed goes back to the days where it was assumed that all men fancied women and all women fancy men. Perhaps changing rooms should be segregated according to whether one is gay or straight!
There again, women still wouldn't be safe as some men may lie in order to gain access to undressed females.
And what about those who are bisexual etc??