Update from Maya
Last Saturday already feels like a long time ago! Fiona McAnena, Emma Moore and I went to the 199 Days Later rally in London. It was a national day of action with demos at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and the Senedd in Cardiff as well as Westminster.
Organised by a grassroots group of women (the picture above is theirs), it was a great set of events, bringing women (and some men) together around the country to tell the government to get a move on with implementing the Supreme Court judgment. Despite our frustration at government inaction, it was a joyful day. It was great to meet so many people and the speeches were inspiring. Venice Allan gave a barnstorming speech about the Hampstead Ladies Pond including our legal action.
Each event also attracted a rival counter-protest. Observer Police Oracle in London wrote that the activists there were intending to march too, but the Met Police ruled that “the pro-trans group had to stay within the grassed area”. They hurled abuse as usual, but the march continued and “rather resembled that of a good-natured women’s institute outing”.
And Emma Moore met Róisín Murphy!
The marches were a clear sign that women are not giving up or going away in the face of the government’s foot-dragging and inaction. Government departments and public bodies are saying they cannot take action because they are waiting for EHRC guidance, and now the Minister for Women and Equalities is saying she won’t lay the guidance before Parliament until an impact assessment has been done.
Meanwhile the law is the law.
Next week we will be in court to make this point. We are intervening in the Good Law Project v EHRC case, which is a challenge to the EHRC’s clear interim update about toilets. We have provided evidence all about toilets and why they matter, including evidence from physiotherapist Elaine Miller and Professor Michelle Shipworth as well as a selection from the many women who took part in our single-sex services survey in 2022.
Maya Forstater
Email your MP!
As well as making noise on the street and in the media it is important that MPs hear that we want clear guidance and urgent government action to implement the Supreme Court’s judgment
It only takes a minute or two to send an email – more than 2,000 people already have.
Read about our three asks:
What is the real cost to business of ignoring equality law?
Backbench MPs arguing that the government cannot possibly follow the Supreme Court judgment by just saying No to transactivist demands wrote to Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, claiming widespread business concern about the draft guidance. We took a closer look at the “650 businesses” that signed the Stonewall-style letter and found it had gone from Disney to Mickey Mouse. Almost no big businesses had signed the letter. Instead it was a long list of freelance consultants, tattoo artists, LGBTQ+ trainers and Etsy store owners.
How to respond to your employer’s excuses
Don’t take no for an answer! Employers are still coming up with feeble excuses for ignoring the Supreme Court judgment. We demolish the most common ones, and have some robust text you can copy when you write to complain.
In the news
Geraldine Scott for The Times reported concerns from Sex Matters that by delaying the implementation of updated EHRC guidance, ministers have fallen for transactivist pressure. Trans Solidarity Alliance’s recent letter signed by 650 “businesses”, mostly tiny operations, was compared with a Stonewall letter in 2020 that was backed by dozens of international companies. Maya Forstater said that rather than falling for this smoke and mirrors trick or yielding to pressure from activist civil servants, the government should notice that business support for the radical transgender agenda has fallen off a cliff in a few short years.
The news that a complaint against BBC newsreader Martine Croxall was upheld coincided with The Telegraph’s major exposé of editorial bias at the BBC this week, with coverage of sex and gender stories a major feature of the leak. Fiona McAnena was quoted by Grant Tucker for the Daily Mail and Alex Farber for The Times as saying that the activist term “pregnant people” should never have been in the news bulletin to begin with, so the BBC’s punishment of Croxall looks like more chilling proof of its willingness to put ideology before independent reporting. Maya was interviewed by GB News and Talk TV on the story, and Fiona appeared on LBC.
In an exclusive for the Mail on Sunday, Luke Alsford revealed that Newnham College, Cambridge University’s oldest women-only college, is continuing to admit men who identify as women. Maya said that following the Supreme Court ruling, the college should have been urgently reconsidering its policy to bring it back into line with the law, but has instead been looking around for loopholes, which is fruitless and foolish.
Tim Sigsworth for the Sunday Telegraph reported that England Rugby is promoting the use of gender-neutral terminology and preferred pronouns in a 2023 language guide which is still in use. Fiona said that there are only two sexes, as reflected in the rules of rugby, and that trying to force players to pretend otherwise is a fool’s errand.
GB News was on the ground to cover the 199 Days rally for sex-based rights in London last weekend, and reported on parallel rallies in Scotland and Wales. Reporter Sam Francis interviewed Maya and Fiona on the significance of the rallies, as reported by Susanna Siddell for the GB News website. Fiona said that the law is the law, and Maya said that everyone needs to get on with it.
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