A friend of mine runs a residential writing retreat attended by women with experience of trauma and abuse. It is vital to those who take part that it is female only: past attenders have told her it enables them to talk about their experiences in a way they couldn’t if men were present. But she has begun to worry whether excluding all men – regardless of how they identify – might put her at risk of legal action.
I put her in touch with an expert to explain the law in this area. The upshot: it isn’t clear exactly when it is lawful to operate female-only services, and that ambiguity means she is right to consider the risk of being sued. For a freelancer it could ultimately be catastrophic. She has been agonising about this since and may stop running the retreat.
It’s the women who would lose out that I thought of when trying to make sense of the unhinged reaction to Kemi Badenoch last week saying the Conservatives would clarify the law. Lefty men with apparently zero understanding of the implications of this legal ambiguity jumped on the bandwagon to variously label as “ghastly” and a “transphobic crusade” the moderate proposal to clarify that the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act refers to someone’s biological sex.
The clarification is sorely needed because of the way the Equality Act 2010 interacts with the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Equality Act protects people against discrimination based on nine “protected characteristics” that include sex and gender reassignment. The Gender Recognition Act allows someone with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria to apply for a gender recognition........