their right to female-only changing rooms at work.
It’s not just Unison: the National Education Union has called on employers — presumably including schools — to support the rights of people to “use gendered facilities which match gender identities”, which would be unlawful. A train company, Southeastern, has wrongly told employees the ruling does not stop them using facilities designated for those of the opposite sex. Police forces still have policies allowing male officers who identify as female to carry out strip searches on female detainees. Even leading law firms have sent out analysis that badly misrepresents the law.
Moreover, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has been vilified for simply setting out some of the consequences of the ruling in an interim update. It has just published a revised draft of its statutory code on equalities law that will attract similarly unfair cries of bogeyman. What’s obvious from this soup of legal misinformation is that women are going to have to continue crowdfunding for expensive legal action to enforce their rights in the face of institutions hostile to the judgment. At least the more legal wins they clock up, the more likely it is that insurers will insist on organisations following the law or invalidating their liability policies.
Other organisations are recognising the ruling, but running scared of its consequences. Labour’s national executive committee this week discussed a paper which made clear that to comply with the law, the party’s all-women shortlists and women’s conference must be female-only. So far, so good. But it also proposed indefinitely “postponing” this September’s women’s conference. The gathering would undoubtedly be a flashpoint for unhappy activists were it to go ahead, but surely the answer is not to deny female delegates their annual opportunity to meet and submit motions to the main conference?
This is the less obvious risk: that some leaders and employers respond not by disregarding the law but by taking away provision for women because they feel unable to deal with its practicalities. Unable, for example, to have conversations with employees that firmly but kindly set out why the women’s changing rooms are female-only, and that there is a separate gender-neutral space for male employees who don’t want to get changed in the men’s. Or that you are of course free to hold your own personal belief that people can identify into the opposite sex, but you can’t impose it on others.
This requires leadership, the missing piece of the puzzle. Many bosses seem to be hoping they can contract it out, or blame what they’re mandated to do on the nasty judges or the horrible EHRC….
That of course includes Keir Starmer, yet to properly engage with the consequences of the judgment, and for whom the women’s conference row is but a taste of what’s to come. That EHRC draft statutory code will be laid before parliament in the coming months and some recalcitrant Labour MPs will be gunning for it. At that point, he will have no choice but to come out from behind the cover of the courts and speak up for a law that was, after all, passed by a Labour government.
Ah yes. Leadership. From Starmer. Hmm. We shall see.