Thanks to all of you who have stood firm. We will always be grateful.
The extraordinary howls of protest, the lies, the hyperbole, in a way, nothing new. The lobbyists have relied on deliberate misinterpretation of law and mickey mouse research all along. Along with threats of suicide and violence. We've faced howling mobs just to hold a meeting and to speak. As Naomi Cunningham said I think, let us hold our meetings, and let them bring the cases. I think the ruling is pretty clear for our purposes.
But if we can make sure that the campaign for a new law or to change the EA that will surely follow doesn't get to be policy by the back door as the GRA reforms did, that would help to give the time necessary to consolidate and build on what we have achieved.
Love this piece, and especially the contribution to calling out the incoherence and hypocrisy of the GI lobby. The one I'm getting the most fed up with is the 'Why do you care so much?' - coming from people who clearly care a great deal themselves and have a whole trove of panicky, hyperbolic language to prove it
I was given the line: "As a woman you should be more obsessed with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US thank what bathroom my Trans friend uses." Wait.... abortion is legal in all the provinces and territories of Canada. But I should worry about the states more than my own rights as a Canadian woman? About the spaces and opportunities of my daughters? Crazy excuses.
Let them campaign for allowing men to use womens spaces and vice versa. Let them bring in Judith Butler's word salads as evidence. Let them explain how empirical reality is nothing more than a construct. That reality is determined by peoples feelings.
Thank you for your efforts. My gran was a suffragette type in Wales in the early 1900s. I thank you for her.
I thank you for myself and my safe spaces and rights. I thank you for all the girls and women who need safe spaces and their rights protected from delusional males.
I'm a Clinical Nutritionist. Fight and flight responses play havoc on the biological female hormonal cycle. Hopefully this ruling will eventually help reduce societal stress on biological women and girls.
I am very proud to be a Scottish Lesbian and especially proud to be a member of an organisation that contributed to this historic judgment which is so important for the daily lives of all women and girls in the UK and especially lesbians.
I am so, so, so thrilled you won. Well done and congratulations.
I have also seen the appalling placards displayed by the trans mobs gatheref across the UK to protest women having rights. The incitement to violence and hatred of women is incredible.
I hope the law stands as is and people begin to ignore the trans clamour now they know they can legally say no to men making ridiculous demands.
I once spoke to you from Australia (my dad was born in Glasgow) and I have been awaiting the trial outcome ever since. I'm so glad you won!
Thank you. I hope rationality returns to, and homophobia leaves, Australia. Really hoping Sall Grover is victorious in our High Court (same as your Supreme Court).
I wrote you a longish message thanking you for your hard work inputting into the For Women Scotland case and explaining why women like you are so important and need to keep persevering. However, due to the problem I have with my eyesight I touched the wrong bit of the screen and deleted the whole thing! LOL Anyway, thanks for your writing and please do keep persevering 💚🤍💜
I don’t mean to be rude but seeing as they can piss on statues, on the steps of institutions, and threaten to shite on JKR, what exactly do transwomen need toilets for to engage in public life?
Conversely I don’t see transmen getting in as much of a tizzy about it, probably because they are already using the ladies *for their own safety*.
I think you know the answer: they need to be *affirmed* by others. Simply being free to believe whatever they want about themselves isn't enough (and don't get me started on attempts to 'breastfeed')
The first step towards challenging the Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act, and how it's being understood by the government, is being taken by the Good Law Project.
We believe that the Supreme Court – which disgracefully refused to hear from trans people before handing down a decision with the profoundest possible consequences for trans lives – has placed or revealed the United Kingdom in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act.
The advocacy group has announced plans to take the Equalities Minister to the High Court to seek a declaration of incompatibility. They say, after consulting several KCs, that the UK is now in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights.
Writing on Bluesky, Good Law Project CEO Jolyon Maugham said: "Labour's new policy - of humiliating trans people by requiring them constantly to self-identify - we believe puts the UK (again) in breach of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and will seek a declaration of incompatibility."
To use single sex services, trans people and “non-conforming” cis men and women will be required to “prove” their “biological sex”: goodness knows how. Trans women, and cis women who don’t abide by gender norms, will be “frisked” by men. Trans men will be forced to identify themselves to everyone as trans by using female services. Younger trans people will be humiliated at school and at university.
The Nazis forced the LGBT+ community to identity themselves as “degenerates” by wearing pink triangles. Labour’s policy means that for trans people to move through the public sphere they will need, similarly, to identify themselves as trans in an increasingly violent and transphobic world.
The Crab Museum Stood Up For Trans Rights - Leaning on its expertise in biology, the museum said that “there are no binaries in nature” and called the recent anti-trans ruling “an abuse of science.”
The museum stated that:-
"There are no binaries in nature, and biology, like all sciences, should never be taken for granted or assumed to be "self-explanatory". Even worse, it should never be used to justify weaponised culture war issues. This ruling is an abuse of science.
We have spoken many times before about this - there is immense variation between individuals within a biological sex. Biological sex itself (not just gender) is a spectrum - and it really shouldn't be a big deal.
If you don't like trans people then just be honest about your prejudices. But don't use biology to support your views in the same way that racists do.
Our trans siblings must be defended at all costs. If we allow the limitation of their rights then other minorities won't be far behind.
Thanks for this comment - we need to make much more of the right to *feel* secure in our environments, even if not every man is a predator, and even if actual attacks are rare. The knowledge that one could happen any time is what we need to be free from, even just sometimes
Lots of organisations applied to be heard by the Supreme Court. And it agreed to hear from them – Sex Matters, which shares For Women Scotland’s views. Scottish Lesbians – it does too. The Lesbian Project – ditto. LGB Alliance – the same.
All were permitted to make written or oral arguments before the Supreme Court. So was the Equality and Human Rights Commission – also hostile to trans rights in the UK. And Amnesty – which is like the Scottish government, not trans.
No trans organisations applied to intervene. There’s a reason for that. It’s because they know from bitter experience what legal proceedings mean for them. They mean punishment beatings in the press, that the Charity Commission is likely to investigate, that their staff will face threats of violence and that it may well kill the organisation.
We know this because the, Good Law Project, has funded and supported their legal actions in the past and they have seen the consequences. They asked again all of those they knew in Scotland – and they refused. But the Good Law Project did persuade the two architects of the Gender Recognition Act that created that certificate to intervene: an academic, Stephen Whittle, and until she resigned because of what she experienced as a judge, our only “out” trans High Court judge, Victoria McCloud. Both trans, both with a gender recognition certificate.
Three barristers worked on their intervention – two are now KCs – and they spent hundreds of hours and many tens of thousands of pounds working on it. The Good Law Project funded them. But without even giving reasons, the Supreme Court flatly refused. And they were left with not even one trans person before them.
And then it got worse. They didn’t just listen to the legal arguments of those organisations. They also accepted fresh evidence from them, evidence that was never tested, evidence that would have been vigorously tested. Except the Supreme Court refused to allow anyone trans to test it.
This was monumentally unfair to trans people, the community most closely affected by the decision, but it’s not just the unfairness. The decision to shut out from the hearing the people most closely affected made the decision weaker.
Emma Farley. In these comments over the last week or so, I've given over half a dozen or so links to scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed, that dispute your "sex in humans is always binary" ideology. You've not given us any scientific references that dispute this view whatsoever. This is the “mysterious evidence” that I am “claiming is unforthcoming”.
It is NOT GOOD ENOUGH to simply claim that you have “set out the clear case for women's rights and the TRAs desire to vaporise those rights”, because your “clear case” has NOT been supported by scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed.
For example, I've tried to help you acknowledge, over and over again here that so called "TRAs" do NOT claim that "men turn into women" nor that “TRAs […] want men in women's spaces” and “Therefore, TRAs want to end women's rights”.
Rather, so called "TRAs" are simply claiming that science, such as the DSDs literature published in journals that are peer reviewed I've linked to here in these comments suggesting that sex in humans is not ALWAYS binary, and the “biological sex” categorisation process is multi faceted, leading to philosophical, social, political, and legal complexity.
Why do you so staunchly and deliberately avoid this scientific logic? Frankly such denials and your failure to support your case with scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed, diminishes your credibility and exposes your unwillingness to exchange ideas, to cooperate and compromise.
Instead why not simply allow us to help each other to process this reality?
Sadly, you still remain beyond debate, and still unwilling to share, compromise, or cooperate. Hopefully I have at least helped and encouraged you to relax and think a little bit more calmly about the issue of a scientifically valid definition of “biological sex” that applies to ALL human beings. Indeed the forthcoming ECHR legal process will find that the UK government must create new UK law that reflects such a non binary definition of "biological sex" in human beings.
I've said on multiple occasions that DSDs have nothing to do with TRA claims. So, it doesn't matter how much information you set out about them it is irrelevant to the problem of protecting women's rights against the men who want our rights so they can access our spaces. DSDs are as irrelevant as the caves of Dun Huang or the life cycle of a cicada ie utterly irrelevant. It achieves nothing for you to continue to provide irrelevant information.
Who frankly is going to listen to you making such claims as: "DSDs have nothing to do with TRA claims"?
Do you think you can simply stand in front of the ECHR and make such a statement?
Or at any law court as evidence?
No. You will be laughed at and politely told to go away before you are even admitted to talk and instead be invited to present some scientifically validated research not your ignorant opinion that pretends that people with DSDs NEVER experience any confusion over what "biological sex" they belong to and that ALL doctors ALWAYS know precisely into which "male" or "female" category they should be FORCED by people like you to fit into.
Frankly these are the ugly views of the political far right that supports all the other discriminatory -isms and othering and reducing sections of the human race to Untermensch a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', which was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior.
Thanks to all of you who have stood firm. We will always be grateful.
The extraordinary howls of protest, the lies, the hyperbole, in a way, nothing new. The lobbyists have relied on deliberate misinterpretation of law and mickey mouse research all along. Along with threats of suicide and violence. We've faced howling mobs just to hold a meeting and to speak. As Naomi Cunningham said I think, let us hold our meetings, and let them bring the cases. I think the ruling is pretty clear for our purposes.
But if we can make sure that the campaign for a new law or to change the EA that will surely follow doesn't get to be policy by the back door as the GRA reforms did, that would help to give the time necessary to consolidate and build on what we have achieved.
Respect and solidarity from the lesbians of Australia! The women of the UK are an inspiration to us all!
Love this piece, and especially the contribution to calling out the incoherence and hypocrisy of the GI lobby. The one I'm getting the most fed up with is the 'Why do you care so much?' - coming from people who clearly care a great deal themselves and have a whole trove of panicky, hyperbolic language to prove it
I was given the line: "As a woman you should be more obsessed with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US thank what bathroom my Trans friend uses." Wait.... abortion is legal in all the provinces and territories of Canada. But I should worry about the states more than my own rights as a Canadian woman? About the spaces and opportunities of my daughters? Crazy excuses.
I’m tickled pink at the ruling. The supreme court ruled that men imitating women are not women.
I hope there’s a huge lesbian holiday in the works.
The problem with men imitating women is that once the ruse is exposed you can’t unsee it.
It’s a house of cards. It’s not going to be pretty.
Let them campaign for allowing men to use womens spaces and vice versa. Let them bring in Judith Butler's word salads as evidence. Let them explain how empirical reality is nothing more than a construct. That reality is determined by peoples feelings.
Good luck with that.
Thank you for your efforts. My gran was a suffragette type in Wales in the early 1900s. I thank you for her.
I thank you for myself and my safe spaces and rights. I thank you for all the girls and women who need safe spaces and their rights protected from delusional males.
I'm a Clinical Nutritionist. Fight and flight responses play havoc on the biological female hormonal cycle. Hopefully this ruling will eventually help reduce societal stress on biological women and girls.
I am very proud to be a Scottish Lesbian and especially proud to be a member of an organisation that contributed to this historic judgment which is so important for the daily lives of all women and girls in the UK and especially lesbians.
Huge congratulations to Scottish Lesbians!
I am so, so, so thrilled you won. Well done and congratulations.
I have also seen the appalling placards displayed by the trans mobs gatheref across the UK to protest women having rights. The incitement to violence and hatred of women is incredible.
I hope the law stands as is and people begin to ignore the trans clamour now they know they can legally say no to men making ridiculous demands.
I once spoke to you from Australia (my dad was born in Glasgow) and I have been awaiting the trial outcome ever since. I'm so glad you won!
It's lovely to hear from you! We have everything crossed that things might improve for Australian women and especially lesbians x
Thank you. I hope rationality returns to, and homophobia leaves, Australia. Really hoping Sall Grover is victorious in our High Court (same as your Supreme Court).
I wrote you a longish message thanking you for your hard work inputting into the For Women Scotland case and explaining why women like you are so important and need to keep persevering. However, due to the problem I have with my eyesight I touched the wrong bit of the screen and deleted the whole thing! LOL Anyway, thanks for your writing and please do keep persevering 💚🤍💜
Sending solidarity ✊🏼♀️♀️
I'm sorry to hear that Flis, but thank you so much for your kind thoughts.
I don’t mean to be rude but seeing as they can piss on statues, on the steps of institutions, and threaten to shite on JKR, what exactly do transwomen need toilets for to engage in public life?
Conversely I don’t see transmen getting in as much of a tizzy about it, probably because they are already using the ladies *for their own safety*.
I think you know the answer: they need to be *affirmed* by others. Simply being free to believe whatever they want about themselves isn't enough (and don't get me started on attempts to 'breastfeed')
The first step towards challenging the Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act, and how it's being understood by the government, is being taken by the Good Law Project.
We believe that the Supreme Court – which disgracefully refused to hear from trans people before handing down a decision with the profoundest possible consequences for trans lives – has placed or revealed the United Kingdom in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act.
The advocacy group has announced plans to take the Equalities Minister to the High Court to seek a declaration of incompatibility. They say, after consulting several KCs, that the UK is now in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights.
Writing on Bluesky, Good Law Project CEO Jolyon Maugham said: "Labour's new policy - of humiliating trans people by requiring them constantly to self-identify - we believe puts the UK (again) in breach of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and will seek a declaration of incompatibility."
To use single sex services, trans people and “non-conforming” cis men and women will be required to “prove” their “biological sex”: goodness knows how. Trans women, and cis women who don’t abide by gender norms, will be “frisked” by men. Trans men will be forced to identify themselves to everyone as trans by using female services. Younger trans people will be humiliated at school and at university.
The Nazis forced the LGBT+ community to identity themselves as “degenerates” by wearing pink triangles. Labour’s policy means that for trans people to move through the public sphere they will need, similarly, to identify themselves as trans in an increasingly violent and transphobic world.
https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/supreme-court-human-rights-for-trans-people/?ref=wearequeeraf.com
The Crab Museum Stood Up For Trans Rights - Leaning on its expertise in biology, the museum said that “there are no binaries in nature” and called the recent anti-trans ruling “an abuse of science.”
The museum stated that:-
"There are no binaries in nature, and biology, like all sciences, should never be taken for granted or assumed to be "self-explanatory". Even worse, it should never be used to justify weaponised culture war issues. This ruling is an abuse of science.
We have spoken many times before about this - there is immense variation between individuals within a biological sex. Biological sex itself (not just gender) is a spectrum - and it really shouldn't be a big deal.
If you don't like trans people then just be honest about your prejudices. But don't use biology to support your views in the same way that racists do.
Our trans siblings must be defended at all costs. If we allow the limitation of their rights then other minorities won't be far behind.
Maybe you'll be next?"
https://hyperallergic.com/1006645/how-a-tiny-crab-museum-in-the-uk-stood-up-for-trans-rights/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgw8XdoXoM/?hl=en&img_index=1
Thanks for this comment - we need to make much more of the right to *feel* secure in our environments, even if not every man is a predator, and even if actual attacks are rare. The knowledge that one could happen any time is what we need to be free from, even just sometimes
Lots of organisations applied to be heard by the Supreme Court. And it agreed to hear from them – Sex Matters, which shares For Women Scotland’s views. Scottish Lesbians – it does too. The Lesbian Project – ditto. LGB Alliance – the same.
All were permitted to make written or oral arguments before the Supreme Court. So was the Equality and Human Rights Commission – also hostile to trans rights in the UK. And Amnesty – which is like the Scottish government, not trans.
No trans organisations applied to intervene. There’s a reason for that. It’s because they know from bitter experience what legal proceedings mean for them. They mean punishment beatings in the press, that the Charity Commission is likely to investigate, that their staff will face threats of violence and that it may well kill the organisation.
We know this because the, Good Law Project, has funded and supported their legal actions in the past and they have seen the consequences. They asked again all of those they knew in Scotland – and they refused. But the Good Law Project did persuade the two architects of the Gender Recognition Act that created that certificate to intervene: an academic, Stephen Whittle, and until she resigned because of what she experienced as a judge, our only “out” trans High Court judge, Victoria McCloud. Both trans, both with a gender recognition certificate.
Three barristers worked on their intervention – two are now KCs – and they spent hundreds of hours and many tens of thousands of pounds working on it. The Good Law Project funded them. But without even giving reasons, the Supreme Court flatly refused. And they were left with not even one trans person before them.
And then it got worse. They didn’t just listen to the legal arguments of those organisations. They also accepted fresh evidence from them, evidence that was never tested, evidence that would have been vigorously tested. Except the Supreme Court refused to allow anyone trans to test it.
This was monumentally unfair to trans people, the community most closely affected by the decision, but it’s not just the unfairness. The decision to shut out from the hearing the people most closely affected made the decision weaker.
https://goodlawproject.org/the-supreme-court-ignored-trans-voices-im-ashamed-of-what-our-law-has-become/
Emma Farley. In these comments over the last week or so, I've given over half a dozen or so links to scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed, that dispute your "sex in humans is always binary" ideology. You've not given us any scientific references that dispute this view whatsoever. This is the “mysterious evidence” that I am “claiming is unforthcoming”.
It is NOT GOOD ENOUGH to simply claim that you have “set out the clear case for women's rights and the TRAs desire to vaporise those rights”, because your “clear case” has NOT been supported by scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed.
For example, I've tried to help you acknowledge, over and over again here that so called "TRAs" do NOT claim that "men turn into women" nor that “TRAs […] want men in women's spaces” and “Therefore, TRAs want to end women's rights”.
Rather, so called "TRAs" are simply claiming that science, such as the DSDs literature published in journals that are peer reviewed I've linked to here in these comments suggesting that sex in humans is not ALWAYS binary, and the “biological sex” categorisation process is multi faceted, leading to philosophical, social, political, and legal complexity.
Why do you so staunchly and deliberately avoid this scientific logic? Frankly such denials and your failure to support your case with scientific studies published in journals that are peer reviewed, diminishes your credibility and exposes your unwillingness to exchange ideas, to cooperate and compromise.
Instead why not simply allow us to help each other to process this reality?
Sadly, you still remain beyond debate, and still unwilling to share, compromise, or cooperate. Hopefully I have at least helped and encouraged you to relax and think a little bit more calmly about the issue of a scientifically valid definition of “biological sex” that applies to ALL human beings. Indeed the forthcoming ECHR legal process will find that the UK government must create new UK law that reflects such a non binary definition of "biological sex" in human beings.
I've said on multiple occasions that DSDs have nothing to do with TRA claims. So, it doesn't matter how much information you set out about them it is irrelevant to the problem of protecting women's rights against the men who want our rights so they can access our spaces. DSDs are as irrelevant as the caves of Dun Huang or the life cycle of a cicada ie utterly irrelevant. It achieves nothing for you to continue to provide irrelevant information.
Who frankly is going to listen to you making such claims as: "DSDs have nothing to do with TRA claims"?
Do you think you can simply stand in front of the ECHR and make such a statement?
Or at any law court as evidence?
No. You will be laughed at and politely told to go away before you are even admitted to talk and instead be invited to present some scientifically validated research not your ignorant opinion that pretends that people with DSDs NEVER experience any confusion over what "biological sex" they belong to and that ALL doctors ALWAYS know precisely into which "male" or "female" category they should be FORCED by people like you to fit into.
Frankly these are the ugly views of the political far right that supports all the other discriminatory -isms and othering and reducing sections of the human race to Untermensch a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', which was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior.
GOOD BYE.
Are you presenting your collection of internet links in a court of law? I don't think Substack is usually a forum that the legal profession uses.