In February, the Women and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch wrote to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to ask them to consider the current definition of “sex” in the Equality Act.
It should not be a surprise that the EHRC replied this week identifying eight areas, ranging from book clubs to sport to access to single sex spaces in which amending the Equality Act so that sex means what they call “biological sex” would bring “greater legal clarity.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that this, if implemented, would have a massive impact on trans people’s ability to live their lives. Not only that, but women who aren’t trans, but who don’t look “feminine enough” could face challenge in single sex spaces. It would essentially make life more miserable and dangerous with no gain for anyone.
Not only that, but part of the requirement for getting a Gender Recognition Certificate is that you do use single sex spaces after you have transitioned. So restricting those to sex on your original birth certificate creates a Catch 22.
The EHRC is led by Kishwer Falkner, who was once a Liberal Democrat Peer but now sits in the Lords as non-affiliated after leaving the Party over our continued opposition to Brexit. She was appointed by the Government to her current role in December 2020 and the organisation has been adding to the anti-trans mood music since.
I have spent my adult life campaigning for women’s rights and I’m far from being done. The Scottish Lib Dem Women constitution cites smashing the patriarchy as an aim and I am here for that.
I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of threatening behaviour from men in a public place and to actually fear for my life.
None of that makes me think it is ok to stop trans women accessing women’s spaces, or fail to do them the most basic courtesy of respecting their identity. Because if you don’t accept them as the women they are, how on earth are they supposed to go about their lives? What facilities are they supposed to use?
Falkner says in her letter to the Government that she wants to see a more informed and constructive debate on these issues. One way to do that would be to target the misinformation and fear being spread by anti trans groups and to recognise that this is part of a global effort to undermine women’s rights and LGBT rights.
Liz Barker pointed this out in her International Women’s Day speech in the Lords:
Women have different life experiences, different economic circumstances and all sorts of differences between us, yet we have common aspirations for safety, health, autonomy and prosperity. It is important to bear that in mind as we have this debate, because it takes place against the background of a campaign originated and orchestrated by Christian nationalists in the United States, Europe and across Russia, which is very definitely about curbing the aspirations and autonomy of all women.
In the United States and places like Poland and Hungary the focus is on anti-abortion activities. In Africa, the focus is against equality and LGBT rights. In the US and UK, the key focus of this campaign is anti-gender.
The constant drip feed of anti trans stories in the media brings to mind the constant drip feed of anti EU stories over many years. And we know that didn’t end well.
It is therefore hardly surprising that trans people are worried and fearful about their safety in this sort of environment as hate crimes against them soar.
Women are equally understandably worried and fearful about their safety as violence against women and girls increases. The threat to women’s safety is not trans women though – it is predatory men in a society structured in such a way that those men are rarely held to account for their behaviour.
If we turned our attention to dismantling the power structures and the culture that enables that to happen rather than picking on trans women, the world would be a lot safer for all women.
EHRC officials met LGBT representatives the day after the letter was released. And it is fair assessment, from Jane Fae’s account, that they do not fully understand what they are talking about. I am in awe of our own Helen Belcher for keeping her cool through that meeting and calmly and forensically questioning them on their assertions:
Well, I can understand that might be an aspiration but when your letter talks about reasons for, erm, excluding trans women from women’s spaces, how, how do you expect me to live my life? How do you expect me to be a councillor and represent my constituents? How do you expect me to do my work in Parliament if I cannot use women’s facilities? …
That’s a really basic element of human rights and the proposal seems to me to demand that I am openly identifiable as trans in any interaction with public services. So how does that square with my right to privacy?
She said that she and her wife had cried themselves to sleep the night before and were “trying to process at what point do we flee the country.”
Former EHRC Legal Director Grey Collier took to Twitter to destroy the arguments in the EHRC letter:
It’s unutterably cruel. No trans person, however long since they transitioned, whatever their anatomy, would be assured of being treated as the correct gender. There are trans people in their 80s who have been accessing correctly gendered services for decades. Leave them be. 8/
— Grey Collier (@GreyCollier) April 6, 2023
It’s worth reading his whole thread.
LGBT+ Lib Dems issued a statement yesterday condemning the EHRC letter:
LGBT+ Lib Dems strongly oppose this politically motivated, homophobic, and transphobic assault on British social norms and values.
On Tuesday 4th of April 2023, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a government body responsible for examining and advising on rights and equalities in the UK, released a short government-commissioned letter on amending the Equality Act 2010 (EA) to append the word “biological” to the protected category of “sex” [1].LGBT+ Lib Dems strongly oppose this politically motivated, homophobic, and transphobic assault on British social norms and values.
There are three main objections to the letter, and to the underlying government proposal:
– This proposal, as defined by the EHRC, is likely to be highly privacy-invasive, homophobic, and transphobic if employed in UK legislation, with potential negative outcomes for a variety of LGBT+ people and society at large.
– It threatens to remove transgender people from participation in a substantial portion of public life, as well as potentially rendering the Gender Recognition Act impractical as a legal instrument for recognising the sex/gender status of transgender and intersex people.
– It reflects misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic attitudes inherent to the UK Government, which have been instilled in the EHRC via political appointees designed to undermine the EHRC’s own core values.We urge people in positions of responsibility, public officials, and community leaders to join us in condemning this ill-considered proposal.
There is a more detailed version here on the Plus website.
There’s a long way to go before the Equality Act could be amended.
The EHRC letter itself says that there should be consultations to understand the full impact before legislation is brought. So it’s unlikely that this could happen before the General Election.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t be used as a weapon in the escalating culture wars.
As I’ve said before, we need to get involved in the culture wars and win them. It’s one of these areas where good people cannot afford to stand by. The target on trans people’s backs grows daily. Labour seems to have abandoned their principles for political expediency so it’s down to us to lead.
It is not difficult to make the humane, reasonable, rational argument. We can be the grown-ups in the room. Munira Wilson made a really good comment on Nicky Campbell’s 5 Live show the other day (about 1:53 in), talking about this issue being deployed as a distraction from Tory failures. We have to keep going, because it’s the right thing to do and if the forces of regression win on trans rights, they’ll be targeting someone else next.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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27 Comments
Yes. It’s incoming from all directions. Long “briefing” article in the Economist this week criticising gender medecine practice particularly in the USA, opinion piece by Sonia Sodha in the guardian praising the guidance/letter/ whatever. If the EHRC can do this to trans people, probably because they think there is political advantage in it, they can do it to any minority.
I could not agree more with Caron. No need tosay any mpre than that.
Absolutely agreed. The other parties are being disgraceful when it comes to trans issues. We’re better, but we need to be better *louder*
I would only at that there are some people have valid concerns or questions, not yet transphobic, that are at risk of being led into more extreme viewpoints by transphobic groups, high profile pundits with transphobic views or individuals trying to speak positively about trans people but distorting the wants of the community.
I recall the Brexit debate and that after hours of trying to speak patiently while folks with opposing views repeatedly went low that it was difficult not to be drawn into that, and therefore losing those with valid concerns/questions who were looking for answers.
I think the way that you’ve written this is an excellent way of talking about the matter.
Well said!
Disappointingly, a group of peers, including several Lib Dems, have signed a letter supporting Baroness Falkner’s position.
We’ve only been waiting 112 years for the Lords reform we enacted to actually happen, Paul…
Great article, Caron.
Yes, absolutely. I agree with every word.
Well said Caron.
I would echo what George says. The loudest, ‘my way or no way’ angry/intolerant voices on both sides serve only to polarise/antagonise people. Brexit is a fine example: calling Leave voters stupid isn’t the way to persuade them to change their views.
If you want to win hearts and minds on any topic, do it politely or you give ammunition to your opponents. And listen to those who have doubts, rather than shout them down or ridicule them, if you want to win them over.
If the aim of one side of the debate is to eliminate trans people, unsurprisingly those at risk of elimination will feel fearful and angry.
The anti-trans culture wars are being set up by extreme right wing movements, and given oxygen by both major UK political parties which appear to have no answers to the things that are worrying people. Like the cost of food, fuel, sewage in rivers, the breakdown of the NHS and the rest of the public realm, poor pay, insecure work.
It’s a well known ploy for politicians with no answers to encourage those suffering to direct their anger at scapegoats rather than those creating the suffering.
Refugees and trans people are the scapegoats of the day.
And the results can be seen – an increase in hate crimes against both groups.
‘The anti-trans culture wars are being set up by extreme right wing movements,’
So don’t give them ammunition, and don’t push ‘neutrals’ into their arms.
There are neutrals and undecideds, you know.
Try to persuade, not lecture. Listen to people’s concerns and fears and assuage them, don’t dismiss them out of hand or ridicule them, or shut them down, or accuse them of being this or that.
If you want an example: think of the environmental activists who blocked roads and motorways. All that achieved was to turn a LOT of people against them and in doing so, did massive damage to their cause.
Liz Barker was quite right to call out the global culture war as a Christian nationalist one – as early as 2017 we started noticing large donations to fringe groups like Get The L Out (who crashed London Pride with a transphobia banner) in strange amounts tracking the USD exchange rate.
We need to be more prepared to call a spade a spade on this – it’s an artificially generated culture war which runs against the trend of popular opinion (for instance, studies repeatedly show that support for trans rights is high, and higher among women than among men).
An excellent article and I would echo what Cassie and George Thomas say. This is very persuadable. Sadly one of the only reasons this legislation is being put forward is to spike an extreme reaction. We can be firm without being shouty. It’s more effective.
So some of the comments here seem to be, in essence, “The victims of transphobia need to listen to the genuine concerns of people about how they are subhuman monsters again and again and again, and if they don’t agree to be every random pearl clutcher’s unpaid emotional support transsexual forever, then they deserve everything that’s coming to them”
Here’s the thing: No. Go away. Stop blaming people for hate and bigotry directed at them when we have literally no power or resources to end it. Stop telling us it’s our fault that things are like this because we haven’t taken enough daily emotional, and physical, beatings. Stop using us as scapegoats for your own ineffectual fence sitting producing no results. Stop telling us that if we don’t live up to your smug armchair thoughts, then we deserve what’s happening to us.
Just stop. It’s embarrassing.
Cassie’s comments seem to me to be victim-blaming. When one group is trying to eliminate another — and that is, to be very clear, what the so-called “gender critical” people are doing — finger-wagging at those being attacked for not replying politely helps no-one.
We don’t tell the people in Ukraine that fighting back against the Russians makes them just as bad and puts off neutral third parties. The same applies here.
“If you want an example: think of the environmental activists who blocked roads and motorways. All that achieved was to turn a LOT of people against them and in doing so, did massive damage to their cause.”
Did it actually damage their cause? I’m not aware of polling that says concern for environmental issues has reduced over the last few years, or of a plausible mechanism by which them doing anything else would have led to UK government policy being noticeably more environmentally friendly instead. At worst I’d say it failed to improve the situation.
And there have certainly been many times when illegal (and sometimes violently illegal) actions have been needed to win change (and, if happening in other countries like Iran or apartheid South Africa, praised rather than condemned).
Perhaps the counter-point needed is not a case where a disruptive protest failed to achieve its aims – almost all political movements fail, after all! – but positive examples of non-disruptive actions succeeding?
George Thomas and Cassie just don’t get it. This isn’t a debate in which there are two sides who have valid things to say and in which it is reasonable to be polite and persuasive.
This a a fight between trans people who just want to get on with their lives and bigots who want to eliminate them. There is no possibility of reasoned debates with people whose raison d’être is to pour bile and hatred onto trans people and to push them out of the public sphere and refuse to recognise them as ordinary decent human beings.
There are areas of policy where it’s fully acceptable for party members to hold different views and argue for different policies. This is not one of them.
This debate touches on the very nature of Liberalism and is is simply not Liberal to attack and threaten people in our party (or outside it) who happen to be transgender.
Believe me George and Cassie that is what so-called ‘gender critical’ people do and use their wealth and position to threaten the party too.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is in some way all about freedom of speech.
>Cassie’s comments seem to me to be victim-blaming.
I have absolutely no idea what led you to come to that (wrong, and actually offensive) conclusion.
Think it of more like trying to get floating voters to vote for you, if that helps you get what I’m advising.
Are you likely to win them over by a) trying to persuade them, listening to their concerns? Or b) lecturing them and accusing them of all being fascists and all out to destroy you?
Which of those would play right into the hands of rival candidates and the right-wing media?
@Cim. ‘Did it actually damage their cause?
I am a committed environmentalist, have been for years. I have taken part in assorted protests. But when a bunch of people blocked a motorway, leaving an elderly relative waiting hours for an ‘emergency’ ambulance, I did not think ‘bravo’. They antagonised a LOT of people, AND gave the government an excuse to bring in laws to reduce the right to protest. That is damage.
Mick, sadly, it is you who don’t ‘get it’. My final words on this: All I have tried to point out is that on this, as many topics, there are millions of ‘don’t knows’ and ‘never thought about its’. If you want to win their hearts and minds, you won’t do so with angry language and outrage, or dismissing their concerns out of hand as stupid. That just plays into the hands of your opponents.
Cassie. As the grandfather of a trans man, I get it. You clearly think there is something to be gained by reasoning with bigots. I don’t. It’s not people who don’t know that are the problem. The issues can be discussed with people with open minds.
The GC people are the problem and can’t be reasoned with and are not Liberals. You clearly have no knowledge of the struggles behind the scenes and how GC people have threatened and bullied the party and who say vile and unacceptable things about trans people almost always using discredited information and downright lies.
Please inform yourself, before telling people like me that we don’t get it. You have no idea of how trans people are being pilloried in the party and the press.
“They antagonised a LOT of people, AND gave the government an excuse to bring in laws to reduce the right to protest.”
The protests that Martin Luther King took part in in Birmingham and was arrested for match that description too, and were criticised by his contemporaries as “unwise and untimely”. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” states his reasons for doing so very well.
The modern Iranian protestors have burned down police stations. The ANC in South Africa held bombing campaigns. Some suffragettes likewise committed acts of terrorism.
We’re not even talking about anything so distasteful to the modern liberal sensibility here – just trans people and their supporters refusing to moderate their language to the point of nothingness to satisfy their opponents, or environmental protestors blocking some roads for a while – and yet this is still too much?
‘You clearly think there is something to be gained by reasoning with bigots.’
Is it really so hard to understand that I am not talking about those whose views are already entrenched? How many times do I have to say that I am talking about those who have no particular views? The floating voters. The people who might come round. The people who are being wooed by the right-wing media with soft words, and ‘reasonableness’ and ‘we are on your side against they angry woke brigade’.
While all your angry rhetoric achieves is to provide the said media with fuel for their bonfire. Look how well Gordon Brown did when he was caught calling a woman with concerns about immigration a bigot.
And Cim: the roads protests were not ‘too much’ – they were totally ineffectual and counter-productive. There are far cleverer ways to protest.
Btw, it wasn’t suffragette violence that led to votes for women, it was the women taking ‘men’s jobs’ during WWI. It wasn’t ANC violence that ended apartheid: it after Mandela renounced violence. It wasn’t IRA bombs that got peace in Northern Ireland, it was peace talks. All violence achieves is counter-violence and hatred.
And that really is my last word. Take my advice or don’t.
“I have absolutely no idea what led you to come to that (wrong, and actually offensive) conclusion.”
It’s not wrong. You have since gone on to more explicitly blame victims. “all your angry rhetoric achieves is to provide the said media with fuel for their bonfire”
That is *literally* saying that when the right-wing attacks trans people, it’s the trans people’s fault for being “angry” — angry at attempts to legislate away their right to exist! That is explicitly blaming the victims for the actions of their attackers.
“There are far cleverer ways to protest.”
And the moment someone points to an *effective* environmental protest which has led to changes of the scale necessary to end global warming I’ll concede that point.
“All violence achieves is counter-violence and hatred.”
The ANC only resorted to violence after both petitions and non-violent direct action failed – for years – to end the (extremely violent and entirely based in hatred) apartheid system. Violence does indeed only achieve counter-violence, but the counter-violence is sometimes then the only remaining option. And when more peaceful approaches reliably receive the same “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods” criticisms, it is perhaps not the counter-violence that’s actually the problem here.
But since these thoughts come from a honest place of wanting Lib Dems to be elected, and there are many in the party who think similarly, let me make this perfectly clear: I will not now, not ever in future, vote for a party or candidate who is not openly and uncompromisingly in support of trans people having the same rights to peacefully live their lives as I have. You can have my vote, or you can have the vote of people who think (at best) equivocation on trans rights is the right approach, but you can never get both.
The EHRC “advice” doesn’t even make sense in its own terms. It starts from the transphobic position that trans women are really men, and therefore a threat to women (ie cis women) in women only spaces like toilets and changing rooms (and book clubs!!)
Even if there was some evidence that trans women were such a threat to cis women, there is nothing to stop men just walking in to these spaces. So if the idea is to keep all Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) people out of women only spaces, there would need to be some kind of policing of entry. Good luck with getting resources for that, in a time of austerity. And how would such policing work? Genital inspections? Look at someone’s birth certificate? Remember that trans women with a GRC will also have a birth certificate in their acquired gender. What people look like? That would probably exclude more cis women than trans women as there aren’t many trans women. It’s just a transphobic nonsense.
Any real concern with the safety of women would probably start with the low rate of rape prosecutions and entitlement to safe abortion services.
And how about trans men? As they are assigned female at birth they would presumably be forced to use women only space. So we could expect to see muscly geezers with beards in the Ladies?
@Jenny Barnes
“It starts from the transphobic position that trans women are really men, and therefore a threat to women…”
Sorry, if you are referring to the letter from Baroness Falkner of 3rd April this year, I don’t see where you get this view. The letter states “should the government wish to pursue work in this area, we recommend detailed policy and legal analysis.” It then goes on to outline areas that could benefit from greater clarity and areas where further ambiguity or disadvantage would be created. In summary, I didn’t think the letter was transphobic in either tone or content – all it did was answer a question raised by the government.
Strange how few people seem to have actually read the correspondence, given it is publicly available: Clarifying the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act. Despite many of the comments above the advice touches on trans men as well as trans women.
To me it is clear that we are loading the words: “sex”, “men/man” and “woman/women” with many meanings; meaning than many simple statements of fact become open to (mis)interpretation. Not sure of the way forward, but terms like “ people who menstruate”, whilst specific come across as clumbersome and possibly diminishing the group they refer to…
It is also clear how much of the trans debate has been skewed to be dominated by the transwomen agenda, which when put into the historical context about the way (cis) women’ roles and achievements been diminished and omitted from the history books, doesn’t bode well. (Recommend reading Kate Mosse OBE – Warrior Queens And Quiet Revolutionaries).
It is thus right that the EHRC was asked to consider the matter (raised by a petition) and for them to recommend proceed with eyes wide open.
The Tories are likely to come up with a number of cynical populist measures such as this one between now and the general election. Then you have Labour’s awful and bizarre attack ads on Rishi Sunak that no-one has mentioned. So politics is becoming ever nastier and yet I suspect most voters at the moment just want to focus on the state of public services and the cost of living.