Why the Supreme Court ruling isn't such a victory for TERFS
I want all transgender people to read and re-read this post - and share it. Despite what happened yesterday, and despite what the Corporate Media are saying, it's actually not a straightforward matter of transgender rights having been abolished by a Supreme Court ruling. Far from clarifying the Equality Act and Gender Recognition Act, it has actually made transgender rights more of a legal minefield for employers and service providers. It's a minefield that I think we can navigate.
Basically, to summarise the ~88 pages of TERF-inspired drivel, the Supreme Court has declared that the definition of 'woman' in law is biological. Many people believe this abolishes basic rights of transgender people - in particular the rights to access public spaces.
Is this actually the case, though? Well, sort of. Transgender people still have the same rights as before, but those rights are now dependent on certain other rights, which means we need to be smarter about how we assert them.
Here's what I mean: In most cases, it's unlawful, under the Equality Act, the Gender Recognition Act and the Human Rights Act, to demand or disclose evidence of a person's biological sex or former identity without that person's consent. Discriminating against someone, or harassing that person, on the belief s/he is transgender, is also unlawful.
The implication of this appears to be that an employer or service provider could only lawfully discriminate if they have strong enough evidence, or a reasonable enough belief, that a woman was born male. In doing so, the employer or service provider still runs a considerable risk of being prosecuted for sexual harassment, or of losing an expensive tribunal case for discriminating against someone who consistently presents as female, 'passes' convincingly enough, has a GRC and hadn't disclosed her birth sex.
This is the main reason transgender women should be very careful about disclosing their transgender status or medical history. Anything on record, even on social media, can be used as evidence against them in a tribunal.
A more basic point, which might also be used as a central argument in a legal challenge, is there's no absolute binary definition of 'biological woman' that doesn't exclude countless women born female. A lot of transgender women can also be considered 'biological women', according to many biological criteria, because the changes induced by gender-affirming medical care are non-trivial.
Lastly, there are are the problems with trying to enforce access to 'bathroom laws', which have been pointed out by countless others. Are there going to be people standing outside bathrooms and other public spaces demanding birth certificates and DNA test results, or demanding people submit to physical examinations? How could that be achieved without harassing a lot of women who aren't transgender? Again, is that even possible without the risk of being sued or prosecuted?
Now for the not-so-good news. What I can see happening is the risk increasing of women - transgender and non-transgender - being accosted in bathrooms and potentially harassed or assaulted. Quite ironically, I do think the TERFs cheering outside the Supreme Court yesterday are more likely to be accosted than I am, but such is their stupidity.
A friend of mine often says that if America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. That the 'culture war' is being imported from the United States into Britain, via a network of far-right lobby groups, is an instance of that. The 'gender critical' movement and the LGB Alliance are fronts for organisations such as the Heritage Foundation - at least that's where a lot of the money is coming from. The far-right want, among other things, the legal pretext to harass women who aren't deemed feminine enough in their Christian Nationalist Utopia. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they want legal immunity from sexual assault charges either.