You Are Suggesting The Impossible

Thirteen months after the UK supreme court delivered its landmark ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, and 10 days after an updated draft “code of practice” from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was laid before parliament, the UK is once again rowing about single-sex spaces, and particularly toilets.

Once again, the purpose and value of those spaces for women are at risk of being eclipsed by complaints from people who would prefer that they didn’t exist in a way that complies with the current law.

The code confirms that there is no legal way to open a single-sex service to people of the other sex, even if they are trans.

Why the 'even if...' there?  They are still the sex they were born into, no matter what cosmetic surgery thay have had!

Trans campaigners see the guidance as a mandate to exclude them from ordinary life.

Well, they are mentally ill, by definition, so why should we care what they see it as?  

But for entry to single-sex spaces, the criteria must be sex, and the code is clear that any checks – for example, if a trans man were to be mistaken for a biological man in a women’s health setting – must be made “sensitively” to avoid discrimination or harassment.

Cue the TRAs shrieking about 'genital inspections' when no such thing is likely to be needed, just eyes and ears.

The vast majority of public spaces and activities are already mixed-sex – which is why the Equality Act refers to single-sex ones as “exceptions”. What is not OK is the removal of this option on grounds that it is bigoted to seek a female-only space; or the claim that a service is single-sex when it is not. 

The threat posed by men to women is not the only reason why single-spaces matter. Fairness in sport and the right of women, including lesbians, to have their own groups, are also important.

Men can too, then. will we see no more campaigns to get women into men's groups? Fair's fair,,

But with 739,000 female victims of sexual offences in England and Wales last year, and grim trends including the huge rise in camera-enabled crimes (indecent exposure, voyeurism, filming of abuse, image-sharing), many women see the case for single-sex spaces getting stronger rather than weaker, both as a tool of prevention and as a resource for survivors.

The trans population faces its own challenges. The code is emphatically not a reason to disregard these. But it should not have taken the supreme court, or the EHRC, to make it clear that sacrificing single-sex spaces is not the answer.

The challengres it faces are not for women to solve. They are for better psychiatric treatmemt to solve.