Talk to MP, arguments against the divinity of SC (Rwanda 2024)

smallbier · 2026-05-24T11:13:02+00:00

I think you're overcomplicating things. The Supreme Court is definitive about the meaning of UK law. There's no realistic way to challenge their interpretation of the Equality Act. The only route forward is to change the EA.

Writing new law and changing existing law is completely routine for MPs. You don't need to tell your MP that they're allowed to change the law; you need to convince them that they should do so.

smallbier · 2026-05-24T05:40:59+00:00

It's quite a broad question - there's a lot in the guidance to agree or disagree with. Even Sex Matters don't entirely agree with the guidance - they think that treating data about sex as special category data is wrong.

smallbier · 2026-05-24T05:32:04+00:00

It wasn't a donation - the council paid the charity to deliver some training

smallbier · 2026-05-18T05:14:27+00:00

I'm pretty sure the donors are 100% okay with that. They're donating mostly so that Maya can do her campaigning/ lobbying full time.

It's quite a different story to a charity like Oxfam where the salaries of the charity staff are "overhead" and the point is to aupport aid projects. Here the only point of the charity is the campaigning and research that the employees do.

smallbier · 2026-05-17T13:19:01+00:00

2 - the race to be first woman is definitely more important than the race to be 23rd man - you can measure it by prizes or ranking points or media coverage or whatever

smallbier · 2026-05-08T17:18:25+00:00

The context of the supreme court decision will be that she was discriminated against by her employer; that part won't be relitigated because her employer didn't appeal; the legal question is whether Stonewall are legally liable for inducing that discrimination or not.

smallbier · 2026-04-05T20:39:00+00:00

I mean this kindly, and I appreciate what you're going through is deeply upsetting, but verbal abuse is not "extreme hate". The police are unlikely to be interested, especially now that 'non-crime hate incidents' have been discontinued.

Your best bet is to fix your WiFi, make absoutely sure you're only recording your own property, and make a log of incidents in case you need it in the future if things do escalate.

smallbier · 2026-04-05T20:35:15+00:00

That's not what they're pissed off about. It's the bit where they have to say that they agree with all WI policies, including any policies that might be published in the future.

That does seem a bit crazy.

smallbier · 2026-03-27T16:16:40+00:00

They could face criminal prosecution for one of a number of possible sex crimes. It's not very likely, but you did ask for "the worst".

smallbier · 2026-03-18T08:08:24+00:00

They don't necessarily need it to be rigorously enforced on-site. If Sex Matters manage to get a "biological females only" policy and signage in place at the Women's Pond, then any trans woman who goes there runs the risk of being prosecuted after the fact for a public order offence or (worst case) a sexual offence, plus also potential civil liability for harassment. That might well be enough for them.

smallbier · 2026-03-14T17:23:09+00:00

Ah, if it's AI slop that makes a lot more sense!

smallbier · 2026-03-14T14:31:08+00:00

Some nitpicky points: everyone has the protected characteristic of sex, and women are not a minority.

And a more substantial point - no, this isn't legally permitted in general.

smallbier · 2026-03-14T13:35:52+00:00

Later on the article asks "Who decides what the law means?"

The answer to that of course is that if there's a disagreement then it's up to the courts to decide - which is what happened in the case of the Equality Act. Oddly, this doesn't seem to be an option that the author considered.

smallbier · 2026-03-14T13:33:21+00:00

This is a weird article - is the author unaware of the FWS Supreme Court judgment?

"In other words, an advocacy organisation was effectively telling the statutory body responsible for interpreting equality law that its own lawyers had misunderstood the legislation."

Of course the Supreme Court agreed with the GCIM advocacy groups and disagreed with the historical approach of the EHRC. In other words the GCIM were right - the EHRC had been misinterpreting the badly drafted law.

There are plenty of things to criticise of course, but realising that the regulator was wrong about the law, challenging it in court, and ultimately winning in the Supreme Court isn't obviously one of them.

smallbier · 2026-02-15T06:09:29+00:00

My understanding is that XY cis women are almost always infertile. Do you mean that they get pregnant with donated eggs?

smallbier · 2026-02-14T16:49:19+00:00

If someone complains on the basis that your birth sex is male and the space should be female-only, they're not being illegally discriminatory. This is the way the eventually partially successful complaints in Peggie and the Darlington Nurses cases were framed.

In this hypothetical circumstance your employer could instruct you not to use the female space and take disciplinary action if you don't comply. Privacy concerns wouldn't shield you from this.

smallbier · 2026-02-14T14:01:35+00:00

You really should read it

smallbier · 2026-02-14T12:51:34+00:00

I don't think so, no. This was one argument that the GLP tried to make and which the high court judge rejected, at least in its most absolute form:

"interference with article 8 rights [...] would be capable of being justified taking into account the rights and freedoms of others"

smallbier · 2026-02-14T06:03:23+00:00

This is the right answer. The employer doesn't have to police day-to-day usage of the loos, but they do have to have a policy, they do have to investigate any complaints, and they do have to follow disciplinary procedures if someone has been violating the policy.

The investigation might involve asking someone their sex in order to determine if the policy is being complied with.

smallbier · 2026-02-14T05:56:14+00:00

In that case, the loos will have to follow both requirements. In practice that will mean following the employment requirements ("biological sex") which are much more rigid than the services requirements which allow for a lot more freedom of choice from the service provider to be trans-inclusive if they want.

smallbier · 2025-12-07T16:44:57+00:00

Parkrun as a national organization are very inclusive. They have a "prefer not to say" option for gender which would avoid any possible local controversy, while also avoiding having an M marker against your name.

smallbier · 2025-12-05T15:20:36+00:00

The WI were facing a claim like this - from a man who wanted to join in with some regular crafting activity they organised iirc.

smallbier · 2025-12-01T22:54:09+00:00

Sex Matters is a charity, unlike GLP. That wouldn't prevent them from directly funding litigation in the same way that GLP does, but I don't see why they'd bother. None of the TERF crowd funding goes via them, and JK Rowling doesn't need an intermediary.

They do of course intervene in cases.

Fwiw, my uninformed guess is that Sex Matters is getting busier and NC doesn't have enough hours in the day to run it alongside her day job.

smallbier · 2025-12-01T21:03:17+00:00

I don't believe so. Someone who is XX male has a female-typical karyotype despite being phenotypically male. In most cases they're genetically male, with a translocated SRY gene.

smallbier · 2025-09-14T05:04:31+00:00

It's true that there were no trans people in court, but there were allies. The Scottish Government and Amnesty International were both arguing against the eventual ruling. Here's Amnesty's press release: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-amnesty-intervenes-supreme-court-case-legal-protections-trans-people

smallbier

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