Health minister Karen Smyth says ‘it’s good we have clarity for women’ as Tories call for ruling to be ‘reinforced with legislation’
The chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has described yesterday’s ruling by the supreme court over gender recognition and biological sex as “enormously consequential.”
She told listeners of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme “The ruling is enormously consequential, and it does bring clarity, that is undoubtedly the case. It’s a very readable judgment, and organisations should be taking care to read it and to understand that it does bring clarity, helps them decide what they should do.”
Single-sex services like changing rooms must be based on biological sex. If a male person is allowed to use a women-only service or facility, it isn’t any longer single-sex, then it becomes a mixed-sex space.
But I have to say, there’s no law that forces organisations, service providers, to provide a single-sex space, and there is no law against them providing a third space, an additional space, such as unisex toilets, for example, or changing rooms.
The government is treating human beings like pawns on a chess board, indifferent to the human suffering caused by this inhumane system. Keeping someone apart from their family, who they’re entitled to join in the UK, as a negotiation tactic, is heartbreaking.
Government needs to instead step up and offer safe and legal routes to pull the rug from the illegal people smugglers. As it stands, many of those with legitimate asylum claims have no legitimate way of reaching the UK – this intolerable situation cannot be allowed to continue.
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