All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
Bridget Phillipson is blocking the publication of trans guidance that would force business and public bodies to protect women-only spaces.
The Women and Equalities Secretary has given a statement to the High Court describing the proposed rules as “trans-exclusive” and has failed to sign them off more than three months after receiving them.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance was drawn up following a landmark Supreme Court ruling that only biological women are women under equality law.
In her High Court submission, Ms Phillipson says that banning transgender women – biological males – from women’s lavatories would also mean women could not take their “infant sons” into changing rooms at swimming pools.
She argues that the EHRC guidelines are discriminatory; that the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex mainly concerned maternity rights, and that there are already “many entirely plausible exceptions” to a single-sex rule.
Ms Phillipson’s active opposition to the EHRC guidelines was made clear in her High Court submission as an interested party in a case being brought by the Good Law Project, a non-profit organisation, which is challenging an interim version of the EHRC guidelines published earlier this year.
The EHRC is the body responsible for interpreting the Supreme Court ruling, and on Sep 4 it submitted a 300-page draft code of practice to Ms Phillipson which would force public bodies and businesses to protect single sex spaces, urging her to “act at speed” to implement it.
A ruling on the High Court case is imminent, and one Whitehall source told The Telegraph there is a growing belief that if the Good Law Project wins its case, Ms Phillipson will tell the EHRC to reconsider its guidance. “She is using every excuse in the book to make this not happen,” the source said.
Source: Phillipson blocks trans guidance after landmark Supreme Court ruling
“Ms Phillipson says that banning transgender women – biological males – from women’s lavatories would also mean women could not take their “infant sons” into changing rooms at swimming pools.”
What a fallacious argument! I would take my infant daughter into the mens toilets to change her if I couldn’t find a woman to escort me into the then women’s only change tables for babies.