I eventually finished my response to the consultation yesterday afternoon. I found out, only by exceeding it, that they imposed a 1000-word limit on each response - I had to edit down my response to the particularly egregious section 13.3, part of which you quote above, because there was just so much wrong with it.
The crux of it is that the EHRC don't explicitly say to service providers that they must not allow trans people in their single-sex services, they just try to frighten them into excluding us by hinting at some absurd kind of potential legal action against them if they don't. When they say "A service like this is very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination against the people of the opposite sex who are not allowed to use it" they are suggesting that a cis woman, for instance, might bring a case against a provider of public toilets for not allowing her to use the men's toilet while allowing a trans man to use it. Quite apart from the implausibility of anyone bothering to bring such a case, the service provider almost certainly would not have prevented this hypothetical cis woman from entering the men's toilet anyway. Women (cis or trans) occasionally enter men's toilets if their own are out of order, or there's a long queue and they're desperate, or they're more convenient and the woman in question doesn't care either way etc. And vice versa; prior to transition, I sometimes encountered (apparently cis) men in women's toilets in nightclubs or cons or WGW or similar relaxed environments, chatting to their female friends or using the mirrors to touch up their makeup. The world doesn't end; nobody tries to stop them going in.
Also, this imaginary legal action would have been possible at any point prior to the Supreme Court's ruling. In 2015, for instance, the hypothetical cis woman could have complained that she wasn't allowed into the men's toilet while trans men who didn't hold GRCs (and therefore were legally female even then) were allowed. In 1995, she could have complained under older sex discrimination laws that (legally unrecognised) trans men were being allowed into the men's toilet while she wasn't. The same goes for the claim in 13.3.20 that it would plausibly be illegal sex discrimination against women not to offer trans-exclusive single-sex toilets at all: if a women's toilet *ever* admitted individuals with an M on their birth certificates, for whatever reason, a woman could have made a legal complaint at any time prior to the ruling that it was no longer a women-only space and therefore she was being discriminated against by being forced into a mixed-sex public toilet.
I have never heard of any such legal action ever being brought against a provider of public toilets in the UK, nor have service providers ever previously appeared to worry about the possibility. The only reason I can see that the EHRC want to issue such guidance is because they actually want service providers to exclude trans people, but realise that the Supreme Court's ruling doesn't require that.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 08:23 am (UTC)I eventually finished my response to the consultation yesterday afternoon. I found out, only by exceeding it, that they imposed a 1000-word limit on each response - I had to edit down my response to the particularly egregious section 13.3, part of which you quote above, because there was just so much wrong with it.
The crux of it is that the EHRC don't explicitly say to service providers that they must not allow trans people in their single-sex services, they just try to frighten them into excluding us by hinting at some absurd kind of potential legal action against them if they don't. When they say "A service like this is very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination against the people of the opposite sex who are not allowed to use it" they are suggesting that a cis woman, for instance, might bring a case against a provider of public toilets for not allowing her to use the men's toilet while allowing a trans man to use it. Quite apart from the implausibility of anyone bothering to bring such a case, the service provider almost certainly would not have prevented this hypothetical cis woman from entering the men's toilet anyway. Women (cis or trans) occasionally enter men's toilets if their own are out of order, or there's a long queue and they're desperate, or they're more convenient and the woman in question doesn't care either way etc. And vice versa; prior to transition, I sometimes encountered (apparently cis) men in women's toilets in nightclubs or cons or WGW or similar relaxed environments, chatting to their female friends or using the mirrors to touch up their makeup. The world doesn't end; nobody tries to stop them going in.
Also, this imaginary legal action would have been possible at any point prior to the Supreme Court's ruling. In 2015, for instance, the hypothetical cis woman could have complained that she wasn't allowed into the men's toilet while trans men who didn't hold GRCs (and therefore were legally female even then) were allowed. In 1995, she could have complained under older sex discrimination laws that (legally unrecognised) trans men were being allowed into the men's toilet while she wasn't. The same goes for the claim in 13.3.20 that it would plausibly be illegal sex discrimination against women not to offer trans-exclusive single-sex toilets at all: if a women's toilet *ever* admitted individuals with an M on their birth certificates, for whatever reason, a woman could have made a legal complaint at any time prior to the ruling that it was no longer a women-only space and therefore she was being discriminated against by being forced into a mixed-sex public toilet.
I have never heard of any such legal action ever being brought against a provider of public toilets in the UK, nor have service providers ever previously appeared to worry about the possibility. The only reason I can see that the EHRC want to issue such guidance is because they actually want service providers to exclude trans people, but realise that the Supreme Court's ruling doesn't require that.