Delay, deny, befuddle, make up problems, catastrophize, wring hands over hypotheticals, look under the sofa, have a headache, ask the police for advice, say maybe next year.
Long-awaited equality guidance has warned that transgender people should not routinely be challenged over which lavatories they use, despite setting out how gyms, leisure centres and hospitals can lawfully restrict services on the basis of biological sex.
Well now wait a minute. How are we using “routinely”? And what does that mean anyway? If a man is in a women’s lavatory, then women get to tell him to get out. If he goes into the women’s lavatory routinely then they get to tell him to get out routinely – and more. They get to make a complaint about his doing it routinely. The burden should be on the men, not the women. Women are not at fault for telling men to get out.
The final version [of the guidance] includes stronger references to protecting the dignity and safety of trans people, new sections on discrimination protections, and more limited circumstances in which trans people could be excluded than the original document put forward.
In other words the guidance has been weakened. Those bitchy women don’t get to have things all to themselves just because they need them. Bitches.
Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, said that the guidance ensures the protection of “people’s rights across our country”.
Well it sounds as if it doesn’t.
A government source insisted that any changes from the original submission were not designed to water down the guidance, but to ensure that it could withstand legal scrutiny and work in practice.
They said that ministers had pushed the EHRC to carry out a full consultation rather than attempt to “fast-track” the guidance after the judgment and criticised Baroness Falkner, the EHRC’s previous chair.
They said that the “grandstanding of the previous EHRC leadership made this process harder than it needed to be: if time had been taken in the preparation, this could have been delivered sooner” and added: “The government had to battle to get the EHRC to run a proper consultation rather than a fast-tracked version — a shorter consultation could have made successful legal challenge more likely.
…
Falkner disputed the characterisation and said that “consultation processes are frequently extended when there is considerable interest as we discovered there was”. She said that Phillipson had thanked her for providing the draft code of practice when she left the EHRC, and added that she appreciated Falkner’s dedication. Falkner said: “To now have me, and my entire board, discredited in this manner is shameful.”
It just never ends. How dare women try to defend our rights?
Among the changes from the previous version is new wording which warned that requiring transgender people to use facilities that match their biological sex “may cause safety risks and distress for trans users”.
Letting men barge into women’s facilities may cause safety risks and distress for women, but apparently that’s just so much dandelion fluff.
Another section, included in both versions, said that it was “unlikely to be either practical or appropriate” for providers of ordinary facilities such as bathrooms to ask people to prove their sex.
Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, described the section as “absurd”. She said: “On the contrary, if a man walks into a women’s space, it will be not just appropriate to challenge him, but essential. Otherwise women’s rights to single-sex spaces cannot be enforced.”
That’s clearly the goal of all these tutters and hang-wringers.
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