Women who transitioned decades ago feel their safety and security has suddenly been removed
Last week’s supreme court ruling sent shock waves through the UK’s trans community.
The unanimous judgment said the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs).
That feeling was compounded when Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is preparing new statutory guidance, said the judgment meant only biological women could use single-sex changing rooms and toilets.
Ideally, maybe. In a future perfect society. But let’s remember that the court case that triggered this was about whether trans women count as women for the purposes of meeting laws that require gender quotas. Quotas that most of us should support because of their importance in combatting existing gender inequalities.
I would say the contradiction you’re showing in that hint at how you cannot genuinelly fight Discrimination by keeping on discriminating people on some characteristic they were born with but changing which “group” gets benefited and it should be instead done via fighting against any Discrimination (i.e. fighting explicitly for Equality for all).
It’s funny that the only place in the UK I worked in which had gender quotas was the most sexist of them all and women working there were assumed and treated as implicitly less competent than men and even, in some cases, as de facto little more than eye-candy for management (something which was fair for some but unfair for others). Meanwhile my experience in The Netherlands which is way more equalitarian than the UK was very different when it comes to gender discrimination (or discrimination of trans people or of people with minority sexual orientations).