4 Responses to “On doing the right thing”

• #1

  twiliter

  August 1, 2025 at 11:14 am

  Rhys McKinnon’s twin brother? Uncanny.
• #2

  Your Name's not Bruce?

  August 1, 2025 at 1:20 pm

  If this photo is anything to go by, I’m guessing he lost because of insufficient head tilt.
• #3

  Dave Ricks

  August 3, 2025 at 10:04 am

  I love this part:

  This is the first case to apply FWS and to consider the sport exception under s. 195 EqA. We will be publishing the judgment on our website shortly.

  JR Levins posted their press release on winning the case here. In three paragraphs, they explain how they used the UK Equality Act 2010 (“EqA” above), including section 195 Sport for the first time (“s. 195” above), and they used the UK Supreme Court decision in For Women Scotland (“FWS” above). Excellent synopsis.

  The press release also links to the judgment here (as a PDF file). The judgment is long (38 pages), but easy to read (e.g. as the judge wrote many paragraphs in the first person). I am still reading it (printed out, and highlighting parts). I am enjoying it as a story, including the FWS decision coming out in the middle of the case, and both sides amending their submissions in light of it. I can also skip to the last page, where the judge wrote simply and clearly:

  CONCLUSION

  267 Having come to the end of what is essentially a long footnote to this judgment, I reiterate that in my view the effect of the decision in FWS is that the claim fails at the first hurdle because there has been no gender reassignment discrimination. The claim must therefore be dismissed.

  HHJ Parker

  1 August 2025
• #4

  Dave Ricks

  August 4, 2025 at 7:31 pm

  I wrote “simply and clearly” to mean this:

  (1) Harriet Hayes has a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and his legal team argued that the club discriminated against him on the basis of gender reassignment discrimination. But the club did not do that.

  (2) The club discriminated against Hayes on the basis of his sex, which the EqA allows when there are good reasons, and their legal team provided reasons.

  (1) and (2) played out like this — Even if the club had provided weak reasons to justify sex discrimination, the club was practicing sex discrimination. This is how Judge Parker concluded above that claim (1) “fails at the first hurdle because there has been no gender reassignment discrimination. The claim must therefore be dismissed.”

  So I meant this by “simply and clearly” — Claim (2) won by arguing in terms of sex (not gender). This is similar to the US case of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) putting the male swimmer William Lia Thomas on their women’s swim team. The US found that UPenn violated Title IX in terms of sex (not gender). And as I concluded in a guest post, “this legal strategy is strong, it is working, and I look forward to seeing more of it.”