London (AP) – Transgender women will be excluded from women’s toilets, hospital rooms and sports teams after a British Supreme Court divisionsaid the head of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights on Thursday as Digured a judgment This could have a broad and harmful impact on daily life.
While the highest court in Britain said there was no clear winner in his govern define a woman For anti-discrimination purposes as a person born biologically female, noting that transgender persons remain protected against discrimination, trans groups have declared that the decision would undermine their rights.
The president of the Equality Commission, Kishwer Falkner, said that the “extremely consecutive” decision had brought clarity and encouraged her organization to update public codes after summer to comply.
“Unique services and changing rooms must be based on organic sex,” she told the BBC. “If a man is authorized to use a service or installation reserved for women, he is no longer a single sex, then he becomes a mixed space.”
The challenge of the court was born from the public council quota
The decision on Wednesday came in a case that had nothing to do with these spaces, but came from a 2018 law adopted by the Scottish Parliament which required at least 50% of women in the boards of directors of Scottish public organizations. Transgender women with gender recognition certificates were to be included in the quota meeting.
But the court declared that the use of a certificate to interpret someone’s sex would come up against definitions of man and woman and, consequently, the anti-discrimination provisions of the 2010 equality law could “be interpreted only as referring to biological sex”.
Out of some 66 million people in England, Scotland and Wales, around 116,000 identified as trans in the last census. About 8,500 gender recognition certificates were issued.
The feminist group which brought the judicial case said that the result had provided common sense, protected from homosexual spaces for women and brought the clarity of the thorny question. But the trans groups said it caused fear and uncertainty.
Trans support services submerged
Trans activist, Jane Fae, director of the Transactual group, said that she feared that the decision would mean “total exclusion and segregation” of trans women.
“No trans women in women’s changing rooms, no trans women in women for women, no trans women in female sports,” said Fae.
“The number of people I met on social platforms, for forums, etc., saying” How can I continue? ” I’m in tears, I’m in pieces. I am broken. I’m broken, ”said Fae. “It seems to be roughly a unanimous reaction.”
Sexospecific intelligence, a charitable organization dedicated to understanding the diversity of sexes and improving Trans Lives, said that his support services had been overwhelmed by calls for disturbing people of their power to return to their football team next week, to receive medical care or obtain support for domestic violence.
“Fear and despair are very, very real,” said spokesperson Cleo Madeleine. “And in all these speeches, to know if people will be excluded, whether or not people will be prohibited, there has been no real sense of what we are supposed to do if we are.”
Falkner noted that there was no law requiring unique spaces and it encouraged trans groups to defend neutral spaces such as unisex toilets or changing rooms.
Division problem in cultural wars
Gender identity has not been as a source of division in the United Kingdom as the United States, where it has Creation of political fire storms in some States, But the subject facilitates the own cultural wars of Great Britain.
The newspapers reported a group of nurses who continued their employer after having had to share a locker room with a male colleague who identifies himself as a woman and a suspended nurse for having called a transgenre pedophile “sir”.
Chris Evans, editor -in -chief of The Telegraph, a politically conservative London newspaper, said in his morning newsletter on Thursday that the court had “declared that transgender women are not legally women”, and said that it was examining what the decision meant “public bodies that sacrificed women on the altar of inclusion”.
British transport police have announced that they were examining its policies in the light of the decision and would temporarily modify the way in which he conducts searches of transgender bands in detention by affecting an officer of the same biological sexual relations at birth.
Uncertainty about what then comes for trans people
Falkner said his group would continue to defend the rights of trans persons.
“They have rights and their rights must be respected,” she said. “This is not a victory for an unpleasant actions against trans people. We will not tolerate this. ”
But Madeleine said that Falkner had no idea what the future reserves for vulnerable people who could be excluded from sports, consulting services and health care.
“I am concerned that if the Minister of Equalities pushes the closure of the transgender people of these spaces, as they say, there will be nowhere else so that they go,” said Madeleine. “The message that we receive, frankly, from the highest office of equality in the country is that they want to get rid of us, and they don’t really care about where we are going.”
