Judge throws out ludicrous TERF court case

In yesterday's What Fresh Hell Is This News, an attempt in court by a range of TERFs to try and get a Judicial Review into the Statutory Code that accompanies the Equality Act (issued by The Equality and Human Rights Commission) has failed. The aim was to try and legally allow businesses and other services to exclude transgender people on a blanket basis from single-sex facilities like changing rooms. 

This was a preliminary hearing, and they needed to win it (ie establish that there was a case in law) to go forward to a full Judicial Review. The legal team behind the TERF campaign on this was the same one who worked so hard to remove puberty blocker treatments for trans kids in the Keira Bell vs. Tavistock Clinic case. Clearly, the Barrister in question hasn't just been Thinking Of The Children recently - he has it in for all trans people. How surprising, said no-one.

The case got nowhere, thank God. The TERFs were told that their argument was "an obvious absurdity" by the Judge. Any kind of look at the arguments they were trying to make supports that view. They were idiotic and, for them, very expensive. 

But let's just take a moment to reflect on what they were trying to do. Because though it might all sound like arcane legal stuff, once you break it down, it's literally fucking terrifying. Further, an analysis of the EHRC defence of their position reveals that it was absolutely piss poor. Luckily for them, and the trans community, the issue was ultimately open and shut - had it not been, the increasingly flaky EHRC might have folded just as the ONS recently did. And of course, we all know that these bigots will be back in court again soon, with some other vindictive case. Stay with me here. 

The Code that sits alongside the EA is the road map for interpreting it. Whilst not the law itself, it has great legal weight and if you want to ignore it, you do so at your peril. Most courts will just go with what's in it, with respect to the meaning of the law, and if you want to fight the Code's interpretations, you'll probably need to go to The Supreme Court to do so. 

The TERF campaigners wanted to amend the Code to create a blanket exclusion of trans women from single-sex spaces legal (a shrewd way, they thought, of achieving their aims of eliminating trans people from public spaces without needing to actually get The Equality Act itself revised, via Parliament). They approached this in two ways, claiming first that any trans woman without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) could be kept out of any 'women's space', and second that even trans women with a GRC could be excluded from any space where it might currently be legal to exclude a man because of course, *all* trans women "are men" (according to the claimant's solicitor - even the trans women who are 100% legally female and have a reissued birth certificate to prove it.) 

Had they won, and then won the Judicial Review, it would have resulted in the following:

• Businesses would have been pressurised to actively keep trans women out of changing rooms, toilets, and so on. 

• In the case of any visible gender ambiguity, businesses would likely have had to ASK a person using the facility "Are you transgender?" Cisgender women who looked 'a bit male' could expect to be asked this too. (Note, many TERFs believe that 'you can always tell' - something to do with hands or height apparently (there are even online 'guides' out there). Obviously, apart from being deeply demeaning, this is demonstrable horseshit). 

• If the answer to the question was "Yes I am transgender" (actually my answer would simply be "Go and fuck yourself"), then the next question would be "Do you have a Gender Recognition Certificate?". Remember that this is going on outside the toilet door (which would have to be policed), or after the individual has been dragged into the security office following a 'complaint' that someone in the toilet looked a bit suspicious. Don't roll your eyes. This kind of stuff has actually been happening in parts of the US btw. 

• You might say no this question. Bad luck. You lost. Try the Gents or go home. If it's yes, then you would then be expected, no doubt, to produce your GRC (aka "Papers please"). It's currently actually illegal to ask someone like me to do that, but hey, so what?!. And of course, as above, you could *still* be excluded.  

• Of course, woe the cis woman who looks a bit butch and doesn't have a GRC (because, er, she isn't trans and doesn't need one). What if the Gender Police don't believe that she is cisgender? Claim that she's a lying trans woman? Maybe she'd need to have her Birth Certificate on her? Well, no, actually that wouldn't be enough. I have a female birth certificate yet I am also, says TERF logic, a delusional trans psychopath, so that won't do. Ultimately there would be no way a 'trans-looking' (what even is that?) cis woman could 'prove' that she is cis, and so she could be excluded too. Unless we are talking a hand up the skirt for a genital check perhaps? Forgive the image and the connotation. How else are these morons going to approach it? And I should add that if they try that with me (a) I wouldn't be responsible for what happens next and (b) Just for the record, they'd find a vagina.  Not that it's any of their business, ever, and fyi this one-time disclosure is here simply to make the point.  

Of course, the whole system would much better if trans women could be told to sew a big pink star on our coats. Then others would know, and we could be easily spotted as we entered toilets in order to do whatever it is these fucking clowns think we want to do in there. 

The claimants raised almost £100,000 to bring this case. They care that much. I read some time ago that the game plan was to get this change in place then picket and campaign against companies that continued to allow trans women into changing rooms or toilets in order to force them to exercise their right to keep us out. Then the next legal move was doubtless to make the blanket exclusion not just available but required. 

They failed this time, but of course, they will be back. That their bigoted arguments are incoherent at every level makes no difference to these people - they are all so far down the rabbit hole now that they are lost. 

If you are cisgender, you may be either asleep by now, or perhaps frustrated that I have done another *misery* post. Well, sorry about that (not). This is our lives, my life, every week. The only power I have is to write about it in the hope that someone might read these words and want to actively fight for us against this endless vilification, this insanity. 

I leave you with a photo I took a couple of weeks ago outside a ladies' loo at a service station. It illustrates one tiny little aspect of the vast ludicrousness of all this. Better start making some arrests, geniuses...